Thailand

ah, Thailand. Damn it's nice to be here. I have such great memories of my first trip here in '98, and it still lives up to my expectations. Right now, I'm sitting in an Internet cafe (obviously!) on Ko Tao - we're both now qualified open water divers, and we've been out on a couple of fun dives together. Althought the visibility is pretty poor, never really reaching double figures, we've really enjoyed what we've seen and just the feeling of being weightless while breathing underwater is excellent. I've still not seen a trigger fish, but I saw a couple of blue-spotted stingrays, puffer fish, crown of thorns starfish and even a small moray eel. We've dipped into the gear shops too - just like climbing, there's a lot of cool gear to be bought! We've got new masks and snorkels each, which we tested yesterday for a couple of hours snorkelling. Prices here are apparently much lower than the retail prices at home (either Oz or UK). but with the backpacks there's a limit to what we'll carry around with us.

We're now into the last month of our trip, and we're both feeling like it would be nice to cook for ourselves, drink water from a tap and sleep on our bed. With plenty of travelling behind us now, the idea of just holidaying for the rest of our trip is pretty attractive - except that a month is just a little too long to spend reading books on the beach and eating out. Weather's a little poor too - it's not cold (it's never cold here....) but it has been changeable, often cloudy, and there's been a fair amount of rain too. Checking on bbc.co.uk just now it seems that most of the south of thailand has this weather for the next 5 days too. The north looks clear, but that would be some real travelling again :)

I shouldn't forget that we were in Sri Lanka for a fortnight since I last posted an entry here. It's beautiful in Sri Lanka, such friendly and honest people, and such abundance of easy to spot wildlife. Amongst all the colourful birds, snakes, mongoose and monkey we even saw a wild elephant at dusk. And amazing ancient ruins there, which neither of us really had any idea about. We did find that after a couple of days we were "ruin'd", but we took solace in tasty cakes and pastries, and then the beach :)

I uploaded a bunch more photos onto fatcat here.

Bhote Kosi!

Just got back from 2 days white water rafting on the Bhote Kosi - incredible rapids, I know very little about the sport but from what I can gather we rafted over rapids up to class 4, which is serious stuff. Incredibly good fun, great guiding from the company we went with (Ultimate Rivers) and a real exciting ride. We only had one person fall out of the raft, but it was right in the middle of a rapid (as you would expect - you'd hardly fall out on calm water!) and she looked in some trouble, just held in place next to a rock by the strength of the current. The guide instructed her to swim to one side, and after some effort she escaped, but she ran the rest of the rapid "solo" until one of the safety kayakkers could pick her up and help her to the shore. Up until that had happened, I was just feeling like the raft was an invincible floating dodgem, and that there was no real danger.

So - I've posted a few more pictures on fatcat here - plenty of shots from the Annapurna trek too. I'm already planning on coming back here for the Everest Base Camp trek... :)