This is for my mother, who is currently at my step sisters place, waiting for me to upload this video, so Hello Mum!

This video of Leon was taken when he was a couple of months old, just after bath time, at our old place on Koh Phangan.

I just found these pictures on my mobile phone, I had forgotten I had taken them, they are from our Thailand tour earlier this year. The picture of Leon on the left, was taken somewhere in the mountains on the way to Khon Khaen, we had just driven through a hill tribe village, and stopped to buy him that rather colourful hat he is wearing! The big orange thing behind him is Nuth’s head, ok Nuth’s scarf, not here head.

This part of the journey was just crazy, steep hills and our little sarleng having to tackle them in first gear, we started a short 50km run across the mountains with a full tank of gasoline, when we got to the other side, we were running on fumes, and it had taken us something like four hours to do this one small stretch. I guess once we got to the other side you could  say we had finally reached Isaan, things definitely changed once we had driven down the far side of the mountain, the language for one, they don’t speak Thai in Isaan, they speak a mixture of local dialects.

I also found this picture, it’s a view of the infamous Bridge Over the River Kwai, which was the site of the death railway prisoner camps, back in the war. This is in Kanchanaburi, which is a strange place really, a lot of the visitors are here to see the war cemeteries, where thousands of allied troops are buried, a lot of older people, possibly coming to visit the last resting place of their fathers or grandfathers. The war museum is quite shocking at times, especially some of the photographs and models of the slave camps, really terrible things were done to the prisoners, it’s no wonder not many of them survived. We actually took a trip on a train along the death railway, it’s all very peaceful now, certainly no indication that tens of thousands of people died building it.

I was going through some of the old movies I took with my mobile phone and found this short clip I took of Leon when he was only a few hours old. This video was taken in the hospital in Surin, and I have to say, the service from this hospital was superb, ok it was a private hospital so you expect a decent level of service, but it was far from the most expensive private hospital.

I can’t believe how small he looks in that video, it makes him look like a giant now!

I just worked out how to insert a cool map, so here is a map with the location of the town I now live in. The marker sits right on top of my apartment block, you can zoom in to take a look.

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We are about 400km east of Bangkok, right in the middle of one of the largest rice farming areas in South East Asia, very poor though, people starve here every year.