Yva and Peter heading east

Here we are back online again, island hopping the last weeks has once again proven to be a very time consuming activity!
After finally visiting the Angkor Wat itself on our third day in Siam Reap we were notably impressed and started a long and very painful journey to Bangkok. The bus made the first 190 km in a little bit more than five hours on the muddiest road I have ever seen in my life (if you ever need to go from Siam Reap to Thailand: Take the plane!) and then we crossed one of the most bizarre border crossings in SEA and here we were again back in good old Bangkok (I feel we have not been giving Cambodia the space it deserves and promise to get back to it any time soon!). We had a night of luxury at the Sheraton (the usual backpacker standard ;) courtesy of my dearest brother Alek and headed of to Phuket. That was a bit of a disappointment as the island is rather big and you don't really get the island fever and everything is overpriced. So we headed off to the island paradise of Phi Phi (where The Beach was shot) for a couple of days of tropical rainstorms and a couple of days of gorgeous sunshine. We enjoyed enormously the fantastic beaches, the wild monkey attacks, the Bacardi colas at Philip's (a couple of bungalows and a bar at a small unknown beach on Phi Phi), the white sand and clearest blue water and not so enormously the boat trip which turned into a survival exercise, the blood-thirsty mosquitoes and sadly the rubbish almost everywhere on the island. We them moved to Phi Phi town to get a bit of a reality shock of all the vacationers with trolleys that had populated the area. Gladly we went diving (Divers do it deeper!) among the most beautiful marine life we have ever seen (again there is a movie which some lucky few will have the pleasure to see ;)).
conversations about the After this we decided to go a bit more off beat, again, and hopped on to Koh Yao Noi. This is a very serene, calm, green and extremely friendly island, which has managed to escape the hoards of mass tourism, we enjoyed the company of Laura and Antonio and rented a beautiful house together on the shores of the splashing sea in the midst of a beautiful garden at Sabai Corner. The days went by biking around the idyllic island life, snorkeling around the islands of the National Park and lazing on the lonely beaches. Of course we also had long and enlighteningmeaning of life, the universe and everything ;) (Colin if you ever read this, it was great fun). A flight booked in a weak moment however was going to put and end to this bliss, once again we were off to Bangkok (feels almost like home now), enjoyed a buzzing night life on Koh San Road and took the train to the old capital Ayuthaya. Its unbelievable how many places there are still to see after more than two months in Thailand...