Bangkok and the Islands

We spent a very hot few days in a stuffy but cheap room in Bangkok. We spent a day looking around the city and the royal palace. We had to pay for trousers to wear though as shorts weren't acceptable, they didn't make for a particularly good look but we certainly weren't the only ones wearing them! We spent a couple of hours walking around the different temples and then went to little India to have lunch. That night we went to watch Mai Thai boxing, ended up paying about £35 to sit ringside. We had a really good evening and it was worth paying the extra to see all the action up close, although it is a brutal sport. We met an american girl there and the 4 of us went out on Kho San Road that night. Took us a while to get going the next day after our night out so we didn't get a huge amount done. We did take a boat ride around in the evening though to see the city at night. We paid about £20 on it between us and none of us were too impressed with it, but it was quite relaxing for an hour. From Bangkok we got a bus to Katchanaburi which is where the bridge over the river Kwai is. We only spent a fwe hours in the town but it was a very imformative time. The Japanese forced thousands of prisoners of war and immigrant labourers to build a railway from Burma down to Singapore. 16'000 prisoners of war died building the railway along with 100'000 labourers. We had a walk across the bridge and back which was a little odd in itself, walking along a railway line that still has trains using it! We also went to the cemetry for the POW's that died building the railway, they were buried in the jungle but the bodies were moved and identified after the war. From there we got an overnight train down to Surat Thani to get a boat over to Koh Samui. We only spent the one night on Koh Samui, none of us were too impressed with it though so we got the boat across to Koh Phangan. This is the Island where they have the full moon parties on the beach but unfortunately we weren't there at full moon. Its a really nice island though, with a very nice beach. We stayed for 2 days. All these Islands were on the Eastern side of thailand, it took us a full day to travel from Koh Phangan to Koh Phi Phi on the Western side. We didn't stay too long on Phi Phi because we were all running low on cash and didn't really want to go to the cash machine and incur the charges just for a small amount. We had a cheap night out because people were handing out flyers for free drinks in the evening. The next day we hiked up to the view point to look back down on the beaches. The viewpoint wasn't very high but it was a very hot and sweaty climb to get there, definately worth it though, we had spectacular views. The morning after that we got a boat back to the mainland and then a minibus to Panang on the West coast of Malaysia, breezed through the border with no problems and got a 90 day stamp for free, although were only there for about 10 days!