I know, it is long overdue, but I’ve either been too exhausted or too remote to even contemplate interblogging. Here I am in Bangkok, with a bit of catching up to do.

After a nightmare of a 16 hour journey from Siem Riep to Ko Chang I found myself poised to celebrate both Thai New Year and my birthday in the beautiful, if commercial, Ko Chang. Initially I felt a bit down on my birthday, being so far from friends and family, but mainly this was down to tiredness after three days of physical exercise and then the aforementioned journey.

My mood soon turned around when we wandered into the village to join the locals celebrating the new year. Instead of running around drunk in the freezing cold or eating grapes, the Thais celebrate with one huge water fight. For three days they line the streets and throw water at anything that passes with water pistols, hoses, buckets or in the extreme, water tanker trucks (pumping out litres a second). Truly a bizarre spectacle, and quite probably the worlds biggest wet t-shirt competition. Not a bad way to spend one’s birthday. The day was completed BBQ’d king prawns and red snapper followed by a huge party / water fight at the Treehouse resort.

The only negative, was that of the camera incident. I took my camera out with the underwater casing and captured some truly amazing pictures of the water fighting. Unfortunately the chair that it was hanging on while I was busy throwing buckets of water over people, got knocked over. The camera survived, as did the underwater casing (still to be tested at depth), but the memory card didn’t… Gone are all those wonderful pictures of the Thai New Year, along with all my pictures (from that camera) of Angkor Wat and the surrounding area. I’m a little gutted… I was, however, able to get some more pics the following day, but the festivities weren’t a touch on those of the first day of Songkrang.

The rest of the time on Koh Chang was spent relaxing in our resort or on the beach. A real highlight for me was meeting Tom, Charlie and Ben. Both friendly, interesting and opinionated (is that a word?) it was a real pleasure getting to know Tom and Charlie. As for Ben, I gave him a good soaking during the first day’s water fighting, but he got me back the following morning at breakfast, walking up to me with a water pistol in each hand and a further four tucked into his shorts while muttering something about “payback time”. As an eight year old he was having the time of his life, but he did end up with a badly blistered trigger finger at the end of the three days.

P.S. Thanks Mum, Dad, Cathy, Nina, Jon, Nathalie, Bozena, Niki, Pete and Viv. Appriciated. Apologies for when I forget yours.