Bangkok and Hong Kong

Koh Samui's airport looked like it had been converted from a beach resort. For a start all the airport buildings were bamboo huts. For another thing all the tourists were driven out to the plane on a little wooden train instead of a normal bus. Moments later Koh Samui was a dot in the ocean and we were on our way to Bangkok.

First impressions of Bangkok, were that it was very hot and very polluted. After 20 minutes of walking down a main road I felt like I was going to have an athsma attack and so we dived into the Siam Paragon shopping mall. This is a shopping mall so large that you could fit a small town into it. It even has a Lamborghini show room. As for the food court, with its nearly never ending selection of different types of interesting things to eat it makes Selfridge's food hall look like a poorly stocked seven eleven. It was a bit depressing in some ways though, to think that the out of control air pollution and traffic meant it was actually more fun to spend our time in a spacious but sterile air conditioned glass box than exploring the streets below!

The next day we went to the Grand Palace and the shrines of Wat Phra Kaew and Wat Pho. These shrines were very incricately decorated and the giant reclining golden Buddha at Wat Pho was very impressive. It was actually quite strange to see these culturally interesting buildings which were so at odds with the other parts of Thailand that we had seen.

We arrived in Hong Kong in the pouring rain and got on to a double decker bus that was the spitting image of an English bus. The resemblances stopped there. Despite the sky scrapers, the life at street level in Hong Kong is very vibrant. Streets in the center are overflowing with shops and stalls and cafes and people and shrines. There is also slightly run down look to a lot of the sky scrapers away from the central area. They look like they were built back in the 1960s and haven't perhaps been aging so well.

The cityscape viewed at night from Kowloon across the harbour is pretty amazing. Each sky scraper seems to be competing to put on the best light show. Another great view is from Victoria peak, in the centre of Hong Kong island which we took a tram up to yesterday. We also went to visit Ten Thousand Buddha Monsastery, which as its name suggests has ten thousands buddhas on display, most of them very small.

Tomorrow we are flying to Tokyo and are going to spend the next three weeks looking around Japan.

Koh Samui

After a couple of days in Kuala Lumpur we made for the Perhentian islands off the north east coast of Malaysia. We decided to stay on Perhentian Besar, which is the slightly larger of the two tiny Perhentian islands, and found a room in a bungalow beside the beach.

As we were settling in, I noticed that the towel in the bathroom had a large black ant mashed into the fabric. I presented the towel to the bungalow owner, thinking that he might like to give me another one. Instead he said 'ant no problem' and in one swift move picked the dead ant off the towel with his fingernail put it in his mouth and swallowed it. Then he handed me back the towel with a smile. Needless to say I didn't bother him with any more requests!

There aren't any roads on Perhentian Besar, so without taking a boat we were restricted to two beaches. Unfortunately neither was very good for swimming. The first beach had polluted looking scum floating on the water. The second beach looked just like a tropical paradise from a holiday brochure except that the water was filled with tiny stinging jellyfish. Cabin fever set in after only two days and we decided to go swiftly onwards to Thailand.

After a long and hot journey we arrived on the island of Koh Samui. Eleven years ago Steve spent three months living in a beach hut on Koh Samui. However as we drove from the ferry terminal to the main town Chawang, he failed to recognise almost anything. In the last ten years Koh Samui has changed from a small tropical island where most people worked growing coconuts to a huge holiday resort with plane loads of holiday makers arriving every day. Driving around the island the first impression was pretty unattractive. There is loads of construction work going on and with the heavy traffic and lack of decent pavements, going for pleasant strolls in the countryside was never going to be an option.

The beach at Chawang though is fantastic. A long bay with white sand and clear warm water, it's an ideal place to chill out. My stepdad Ian came out to meet us from the UK and we have been spending our days swimming and sitting on the beach. As I had lost my swimsuit in Kuala Lumpur, I spent the first week on the beach looking very uncool in a pair of men's swimming trunks and a tshirt, until I finally got around to buying some more normal looking swim wear.

We have however managed to drag ourselves away from the beach to do a little bit of site seeing. We went on a day trip to the very pretty Ang Thong National Marine Park which is where Alex Garland set his best selling novel The Beach, a kind of Lord of the Flies style tale with backpackers.

We also went on a visit to see one of Koh Samui's waterfalls. It was far too hot to be walking and none of us made it up to the pool at the top of the waterfall. The most interesting bit of the outing was listening to our taxi driver talk. He pointed out the newly built prison (looks like a hotel with big walls) and told us stories of murdered tourists, revenge killings and the Koh Samui mafia.

While it's obvious that a few dodgy things do go on in Koh Samui, there are lots of girly bars for example, I had most of what out taxi driver said down as the product of a hyperactive imagination. Still after looking at the article Danger in paradise it does seems as though crime is becoming an issue on Koh Samui, even though we haven't experienced any problems ourselves.

Last night we went to the full moon party at the neighbouring island of Koh Phangan. The ride over in a speed boat at night was quite good fun in itself. The whole beach was packed with people dancing, with different sound systems competing to draw in the crowds. There were a few new age style things going on as well, with people throwing flaming brands into the air. All together it felt a bit like being back at a rave in the 1990's.

Steve though, who had really been there in the 1990's, was quite shocked. The full moon party beach, that had previously been in the middle of nowhere along a dirt track was now in the middle of a busy town with at least 15 bars showing the FA Cup final!

We are planning a few more days relaxing on the beach before flying up to Bangkok.