The next day we were up relatively early to have a look around Chinatown, which was quite near to our hotel - all pretty hot and hectic. We also decided that our hotel was a bit quiet, and so headed to a livelier street geared up for the unwashed backpackers, the Khao San Road, where after the usual half and hour wandering around some real flea-pits, we managed to find something not too terrible at a reasonable price.
You can’t beat a bit of culture.
As well as taking the water taxi, our main method of transport was the ‘tuk-tuk’ - great fun once you’re in the thing, but trying to haggle the driver down from some ridiculous price every time you want to get somewhere ended up proving quite tiresome.
Another favourite pastime was playing ‘spot the ladyboy’ - worryingly, I wasn’t that great at it, but Lauren could spot them a mile off! On our last night in Bangkok, we met up with my cousin Justin and his wife, Christine, who currently live in Bangkok - great to see them again after about ten years! The next morning with a bit of a cloudy head, we were on a bus down to Koh Chang, an island about a seven hour journey from Bangkok - luckily the ferry across to the island was only about forty minutes! Anyway, we piled into the back of a truck-taxi and headed off to Lonely Beach, where we’d heard about a good place to stay. The driver was a bit of a maniac, which lead to someone’s rucksack falling of the roof whilst he was screaming up a hill and round a corner! Luckily it wasn’t one of our bags.
We arrived at Lonely Beach in the early evening and found our place pretty easily. Being low-season, the prices of accommodation weren’t too intimidating, and we managed to get our own private bungalow for 200 baht a night - a little under four pounds. The place was quite ‘in the sticks’ however, and we did have to contend with all sorts of creepy crawlies throughout the night! Indeed in the morning, we found a mouse poo where our toothbrushes had been.
On the first day, having brushed our teeth, we headed down to the beach - the water was like bath water and the weather great - low season was pretty good as far as I could tell!
After a few hours, we headed up to a local bar called Ting Tong, and discovered something on the menu called ‘vodka buckets’. I ordered one, just to see what it was, and then promptly ordered another. 
About an hour later, I was trying to persuade one of the bar’s resident hounds to eat my red curry - the hottest curry I have had since an ill-fated chicken phal at the Dhaka Curry house in Southampton in 1997. Even the dog turned its nose up at it. 
before getting a puncture and having to wait to get picked up by the bike-hire guys before getting it fixed. We then scootered to an elephant place, where we booked an elephant trek for the following day. We made our way to the elephant place the next morning and got onto the beast, which was called Banyen. All was going great until about ten minutes into our trek, low-season really kicked in. It started hammering in down, but we carried on regardless, looking a bit gay with an umbrella that the bloke gave us!
After about an hour, we got to a small lake where we got in with the elephant and gave it a scrub. I had a quick swim, but got out relatively sharpish when I found myself swimming amongst lumps of elephant doo-doo. We then trekked back to base for about another hour, had a coffee and carried on with our plan to scooter around the island.
The map of island we had, suggested that there was a road which went all the way around the island. This was not, however, the case! We had completed about 359 degrees of the circle, before finding out that the final bit of road still hadn’t been completed (work having started some seven years ago), so we had to turn around and go all the way back around the other way, meaning it took twice as long as we’d anticipated, meaning twice as many fuel stops, and getting twice as wet in the torrential rain. We did stop for a great lunch along the way though in a tiny fishing village, and also, seeing the weather clear, hired a kayak to explore some mangroves in the south of the island. Needless to say, the weather only cleared for ten minutes or so and we remained soaked to the skin!
The following day, which proved to be our last on the Island, it hammered it down again, meaning not much exploring, other than to a bar reasonably close to our bungalow which had free pool! The following morning, we were back on the bus to Bangkok, where we planned to stop for a night, before heading slowly into central Thailand, and then up to the north.
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