A summary of the last 5 months!

So needless to say I haven't exactly kept on top of my blogging but I'll do a little summary of the last 5 months to make up for lost blogs.

After my last installment I did indeed make my way to Siem Reap, where I spent a few days shopping at the night market, getting massages, visiting floating villages, getting up at 4.30am to see the sun rise over Angkor Wat, and motorbike taxi-ing to some of the other temples of Angkor. All of which was amazing. After that I hopped on a bus to Bangkok for Thailand round two. The first leg of the journey took hours longer than it should have on account of the numerous food stops, including a two hour lunch stop. We then got transferred to a mini bus where the driver made up for lost time with his insanely reckless driving, which involved a lot of swerving and dangerous overtaking, pulling out in front of lorries and driving the wrong way down a dual carriageway to avoid toll road fees, which turned a 4 hour journey into a 2 and half hour journey. I was quite used to terrifying Asian bus journeys by this point so I wasn't too worried, but I was sat next to a woman who had recently been in a car accident, so her frequent screaming and jumpiness didn't really make for a very relaxing trip. When I arrived in Bangkok I got dropped off at another bus stop headed for the islands in the south of Thailand. At the bus stop I got talking to an English guy called Dan, who was just at the start of a four month trip, and it turned out we were both going to Ko Tao. We got the bus together to Chumphon overnight, and then got dropped off at a ferry point in the middle of the night, where we had to sit in a waiting room for about three hours. I went to sleep with my head on a table for a few hours before boarding the boat which took another couple of hours before finally arriving in Ko Tao where unfortunately it was raining. We checked into a dorm where we met an English girl called Helen and a Dutch girl called Sanne, both of whom were lovely. The four of us ended up spending about 10 days together in Ko Tao, Ko Phangan and Railay island where we spent most of our nights enjoying more whisky buckets and fire shows, and our days sleeping it off, lying on the beach, visiting waterfalls and kayaking, all of which was a lot of fun.

At some point during my trip I had made the decision not to get my flight home at the end of November, but to go to Melbourne instead for an Australian adventure, so I paid for a working holiday visa, bought a flight and flew there on 25th November where I met up again with Alan and some of his friends (refer back to 'amusing group of Irish guys' in the Perhentian islands entry). I got a job after a couple of weeks as an Admin Assistant for an engineering company which was lucky as I had well and truly run out of money by the time I got to Melbourne, and stayed at Alan's for about a month, then with a friend from work for about 2 months, and then rented a room with another friend for the final month. Despite living rent free for the majority of my time in Melbourne I still managed to save very little money, possibly on account of it having recently been listed as 8th most expensive city in the world. After four months of cheap living in Southeast Asia this was particularly painful. Melbourne was a lot of fun, but after a few months (particularly once the weather starting getting dangerously similar to English weather), I decided it was high time for me to leave so I booked a flight to Tasmania to visit Andy, another friend I met back in August whilst in Malaysia, and left at the beginning of April.

Andy picked me up from the airport in Launceston and I stayed with him for a few days, exploring the cute seaside town of Ulverstone and renting a car to visit canyons, white sandy beaches and mountains, all of which was really beautiful. I spent Good Friday having an absolute feast with Andy's family and huge group of family friends from the neighbourhood which was lovely, and then managed to get a free ride with one of Andy's friends to Hobart, the capital which was three hours away. I stayed in a hostel there and wandered around the city, visited Mona, a very cool art gallery, and did a couple of tours to Port Arthur, a former prison site for all the convicts that were shipped over from England, and to Freycinet Peninsular on the east coast which has amazing beaches. After Hobart I got a bus back to Launceston, before flying to Bangkok the next day for Southeast Asian adventure round two....