Melbourne, Australia

Hello from Australia! My first stop here was in Melbourne, after a long flight from Bangkok with a stopover in Kuala Lumpur. Staying with family here was great and such a nice break from hostels!

During my time here I got to experience the beaches, both near Albert Park and St. Kilda. They really reminded me of the beaches back in Dorset, with very similar colours of water and sand!

There was a great free tram ride around Melbourne on the City Circle line that I did early on in my visit – it was nice to see by the docks, and then also explore the Queen Victoria Market.


Queen Victoria Market

Flinders Street Station

City Circle Tram

Melbourne was a great city to explore in the day, and I spent a lot of time walking around the roads and lanes. Fortunately it’s in a grid type system which stopped me from getting lost! I visited the Melbourne Museum which was really interesting and a very modern museum, as well as Federation Square and some of the museums and exhibitions there.

I decided to visit the Melbourne Zoo which is located just a short ride away from the centre of Melbourne, as I thought I should see some of the animals that are associated with Australia! Melbourne was having quite a heat wave the first few days I was there, so a lot of the animals seemed to be hiding. It was a beautiful zoo though, and very quiet with a lot of areas to walk around and explore.

I was also lucky enough to go to an apartment high up in the Eureka Tower and got amazing views over Melbourne as the sun set!

I had a great few days in Melbourne and enjoyed meeting up with friends and spending time with family. There are a lot of great cafes and bars in Melbourne, although the high prices here are taking a lot of getting used to after how cheap it was in Thailand!

My last day was spent on a lovely day out to Heathsville Sanctuary, where we saw more animals and a great bird show! They have some beautiful birds here!

Next stop was Sydney! I’m currently in Cairns and looking forward to diving and snorkeling in the Great Barrier Reef at the weekend and visiting the Daintree Rainforest on Friday.

Chiang Mai, Thailand - Part 2

The next day in Chiang Mai we went to Tiger Kingdom, where we were able to get up close with tigers! We chose to visit the medium sized ones, although they seemed pretty big to me!

Later on in the day we got a taxi up to Wat Phrathat Doi Suthep, a temple at the top of the hillside. I really enjoy visiting temples, and this one was great to see. As it’s so high up it affords really nice views over Chiang Mai, although unfortunately it was pretty cloudy and rainy when we visited so we weren’t in luck there!

Our next day was spent doing a full day cookery course, which was one of my favourite activities here in Chiang Mai. Chiang Mai although not the most attractive city is a great base for lots of activities and adventures nearby.

This cookery course featured 5 different items, of which you got to select each one out of a choice of 3. There were 3 groups that day, and you rotated to different stations depending on your choice of meal for that course. I chose Thai Green Curry (probably my new favourite meal from this trip!), spring rolls, coconut chicken soup, pad thai and fried bananas for dessert. These were all pretty simple to make, and if I was able to source the ingredients I think they would be easy to recreate at home! The spring rolls were particularly interesting to see how they are made! The day involved a lot of food naturally, but it was nicely spaced out throughout the day so I never felt too full!

Spring Rolls

Pad Thai

Fried Bananas and Ice Cream

I had a couple of nights on my own in Chiang Mai after the guys I was travelling with left, and I even ended up with my own room for the whole sum of £2 a night! I got to explore more of the city and the night market, although this was a pretty typical market with lots of knock off goods.

The final day I decided to go ziplining in the jungle! I’ve never been ziplining before but decided it was time to give it a try and I’m very glad I did. It was a really fun course with a few bridges and a scary abseil at the very end as well as about 14 ziplines.

This was the end of my time in Chiang Mai, and after flying back to Bangkok the next day it was time to catch my flight to Australia! I absolutely loved visiting Thailand and Malaysia, and there are so many more places in Thailand I would love to go back and explore!

Chiang Mai, Thailand - Part 1

Our first few days in Chiang Mai were spent on a 3 day, 2 night jungle trek, one of the most popular activities to do from Chiang Mai. Our first day started off meeting our group then driving to a butterfly and orchid garden for a short stop, followed by a local market so our guide could get ingredients for our trip. The food on this trip was excellent and very plentiful – definitely some of the best I experienced in Thailand.

The next part of the day was our elephant ride! This was really fun, with some people choosing to ride on the elephants neck, although I opted for the chair! Our elephant was pretty hungry for his bananas and sugarcane and was very receptive if vehicles would come past as he would reverse and then carry on once they had passed.

We had a lovely lunch of fried rice (served in bamboo leaf) after our ride down by the river – we got a bit of preview of the white water rafting we would be doing on the third day of our trip whilst enjoying our lunch.

This was when we properly started our walking, and on the first day we walked for about 3 hours with a nice stop early on at a waterfall slide! This was so much fun, and very refreshing after walking in the heat.

After quite a tough uphill walk with not very well trodden paths we made it to the village we would be staying in for the night. We had an excellent large room for everyone, and nice comfortable beds on the ground. Our guide made us a great feast for dinner, and we spent the evening outside before getting some sleep for our day of trekking the next day.

The next day we started walking at about 10am – this day was just a full day of walking with two stops at waterfalls. It was not as strenuous as the previous day and it was nice that the day was broken up with stops. I really enjoyed the first waterfall where we also stopped for a delicious noodle lunch, and we also spent some time sunbathing here.

A little while after the second stop we made it to our camp for the night, situated near a river. We had another great meal tonight and enjoyed sitting around and playing cards.

The next day started with a short walk to the river where we would be white water rafting and bamboo rafting. This was really fun, although pretty tame in comparison to the rapids in Costa Rica I did last year. We were able to float down the river, although it was pretty shallow with a lot of rocks! The bamboo rafting was nice and relaxing and took us to our lunch of Pad Thai!

After lunch we had a drive of about an hour and a half before saying goodbye to the rest of our group. We checked in to a different hostel, where I stayed until I left Chiang Mai.

Will update soon with the second part of my time in Chiang Mai which included cooking, ziplining and meeting tigers! I’m in Sydney now, but I’m struggling to update often as internet is not as readily available here as elsewhere!

Koh Phangan and back to Koh Tao

So I originally left Koh Tao to visit Koh Phangan and go to the full moon party, but my plans changed pretty quickly! I spent one night in Koh Phangan, and had a pretty fun night here with lots of fluorescent body paint, but I decided I wasn't too keen on the island (the main area for the Full Moon Party is pretty trashy) and so decided to return to Koh Tao and meet my friends there, before going up north to Chiang Mai.

The next couple of days were spent enjoying the beaches of Koh Tao more, and visit Koh Nang Yuan by water taxi which I had really wanted to do. We hiked up to the view point - it is such a beautiful island!

The next couple of days I traveled up north with a couple of Matt's friends. It was a pretty long two day journey - night boat to Chumpon, Train to Bangkok then a night train to Chiang Mai. The night train was great and I got a great night's sleep! I spent the next 8 days in Chiang Mai, so will update soon as we got up to a lot there! I'm flying to Melbourne, Australia in the morning! :)

Koh Tao, Thailand

After a few days relaxing on Koh Samui I got the ferry over to Koh Tao, which is a great place to learn to scuba dive and a beautiful, relaxed island with a good backpacking scene.

My first 4 days on the island were spent doing my Padi Open Water Scuba Diving certification with Crystal Dive, which was a great dive school located near the ferry pier. We had a small group of 4 (which coincidentally one of the guys in our group was from Dorset!), which was a great number to learn and get personal attention whilst learning. There is quite a bit of theory involved in the course, so the first two days involved a lot of time in the classroom and a pool session to test out all the required skills. You don't really do any swimming in the pool session, and it was actually pretty tough - my least favourite skill was definitely clearing your flooded mask underwater! It definitely tested me by having to stay very calm underwater, and that was only at 1 metre or so!

After passing our theory test the next two days involved two dives each on the Crystal boat. The first two were done at Twins, which is near Koh Nang Yuan, a small island just off Koh Tao, and the final two dives were at White Rock and Japanese Gardens. The visibility was not great for some of the dives, although Japanese Gardens was my favourite with some beautiful coral and fish. The first day you dive to 12m then 18m the day after. It wasn't as scary as I thought it might be, although the equalizing of the ears is what takes a bit of getting used to, but once you are at the bottom and swimming around I managed to forget about how deep I was!

Our dive group!

After the course I moved to stay in Sairee beach for a few nights, which is about a 20 minute walk further down the coast. There is a lot more going on here, and some great parties on the beach. We also rented a kayak at the beach one day which was fun! I spent the next couple of days doing yoga, at the beach and just relaxing which was great!

Koh Samui, Thailand

My first stop on returning to Thailand was Koh Samui, one of the islands off the east coast of Thailand. It is quite a popular holiday destination, with a lot of nice hotels and resorts. I stayed in Lamai, which is the second biggest area, although still very busy and westernised. I found a great hostel here called iBed, which was very modern and located just a few minutes away from the beach.

The next few days here were mainly spent at the beach and exploring the local area.

On my final day I did a cookery course in the morning, to learn how to cook some Thai cuisine. It was just me and another girl from China on the course, so we got a lot of attention and help with our cookery! We learnt to cook Thai Red Curry, Pad Thai and a spicy chicken dish. It was a great morning and fun to cook the food I have been eating so much of recently! Hopefully I will be able to recreate some of these dishes back at home!

My next stop was Koh Tao where I got my Padi Open Water Diving certification - I''ll update shortly on my favourite island I visited!