the daddy of all travel days

so i realised last night that i only have 10 days left, 2 of which will be taken up travelling between kolkata and mumbai so i hurriedly bought a boat and bus ticket from koh tao to bangkok and booked a flight to kolkata for tomorrow morning! aaaah! i've had a cracking week chilling on the beach with jaclyn and karen, eating lush food and getting tipsy but the holiday is over now... it's time for grime, filth, squalor and hassle again before i come home.

i bumped into becky again on the khao san road last week before i went back to koh tao which was nice, exchanging more tales before we jumped on our overnight bus. yay, we were sat next to loud drunk germans who'd just landed and were over-tired and over-excited.... great. when we got there i chilled out a LOT and met some incredibly cool people - for the first 2 nights it was new york, manchester, 2x canada and a guy from los angeles called leaf (i shit you not....) and it was great, drinking cocktails with the sea lapping our calves and dancing and talking and having fun. i saw some thai boxing which was great, the first couple of fights were weird as i'm not really that big a fan of 2 blokes twatting hell out of each other so i looked on in sick fascination for a while until i saw the technique and concentration these guys needed to just stay conscious and i slowly got into the swing - by the end i was yelling and screaming with everyone else. it was like something out of a movie, the thais were all hanging around the canvas screaming and waving their betting slips and at the end one guy who had obviously lost a wodge of cash leapt on the canvas and started kicking off at the referee and the judges, it was all very surreal (and i managed to capture it on video which was a bonus!)

so yeah, i'm back in bangkok now, slap bang in the middle of the daddy of all travel days. took a boat from koh tao at 10:15 this morning, bus from chumphon at 13:00 with no ac and more loud germans which arrived at 21:00 in bangkok. now i need to traipse across town (stopping for street pad thai - yum) to get my mini-backpack that's in storage and try to somehow consolidate my thailand gear and my india gear and then get a taxi at 6am to the airport tomorrow for a flight to kolkata. travelling's hard work i tells ya!