Me in our villa in Cairns. i'm so messy!!

We decided to go to Thailand for a few weeks as Cheesy’s brothers were going to be there too, so the plan was to sell the van and book our flights.
So we put up our ‘For Sale’ signs all over Cairns, and on checking the next day how many people had taken our number, found they had been ripped down.
Having been warned about this due to the competition on selling vehicles in cairns and the abundance of them in this area, we were kind of expecting it. Tip to anyone travelling there, its great to pick a van up, but not to sell. Our van was in a higher class than many others, making us a big competition and target for having our poster pulled down

My cuddly toy Chad. I got bored one day and cut my jeans into shorts, then made Chad an outfit!! Great innit!!

After a week and no phone calls, we put the price down from $5, 500 to $5000. We got over $2000 off the price when we bought it and assumed other people would know they could knock us a bit. We set our target at $3000 minimum. When we still didn’t get much interest we lowered it to $4500. Interest rose and a few people looked at the van. We had unofficially sold it to two Irish girls when a group of 5 people came to see it and loved it and pretty much wanted to give us the cash straight away.
Cheesy being a nice guy told them he’d kind of sold it but would keep them posted.
The two girls took it to the RAC and ordered a full check. Silly billys. Anyway, the RAC said it was a heap of rust and not worth the risk. We wanted to kill them, but luckily we had our fall back!
The group of 5 came to take it for a test drive, loved it some more, gave us the cash and off we went home to our villa happy and sad. Goodbye Ellie Urvan for the last time.
The next day we went to STA to see what flights we could get to Thailand. As we already had flights to Hong Kong from Sydney we decided to try that route first.
“There are never any flights at this short notice” he said when we asked about flights for the following day. He quickly bit back his words when there showed 6 seats available. “amazing” he exclaimed.
SO we quickly booked them up, then booked a flight from Cairns to Sydney for that day. This was all moving a little fast!!
We rushed home to pack all our stuff back into our backpacks. Having lived out of the van for the past 6 months it was hard to get everything back in. I had to part with all my books boo hoo, and we both left some clothes behind too.

Our pool in Cairns

So, 4 pm flight to Sydney, then a 7 am flight from Sydney to Hong Kong, then a 9pm flight from Hong Kong to Thailand.
We arrived in Thailand at 1am and got to our hotel in Pattaya at 3 am.
Some of you may have heard of this place before and its usually related to the prevalent sex industry. But I can tell you, although there are no white girls there (except me) you can still have a nice time without having to adhere to the norm. To be honest I wasn’t looking forward to seeing prostitutes and had a bad view of them. But having met some, they are nice, they just have a job I don’t agree with. And its nothing like you see in the American films of skanks on the street corner, its more like you’d expect an escort agency to be like, or even a pub! No, I’m not condoning prostitution. Its just they don’t seem like that’s what they do.
All that said, there are areas you can go to where people walk around naked and do gross stuff in the street, but we didn’t go there.
Anyway, Thailand is a beautiful country and so cheap too. We went to an island called Ko Samet for three days and had BBQ dinners on the beach. Fabulous!

Then we went back to our air con hotel room which was massive and had a big balcony, all for 550baht a night (about 7-8 quid). You can get cheaper, but this was good.
We hired motorbikes and whizzed up and down the busy streets to restaurants and bars. I didn’t drive one, Cheesy’s brother Neil was my chauffeur, Cheesy was on the back of his older brother Dan, who wasn’t as good on the bikes as Cheesy would have hoped. Hee hee
After two weeks in Thailand his brothers went home and we explored the area for a few days on our own.
After extensive checking of flights on the internet we settled for a flight to Siem Reap for ten days then 7 days in Phnom Penh.
That’s all for now!! More on Cambodia soon x xx

Ps. a special thank you to Peter Breivik who apparantly always reads my blog and not jeremiahs!!