Ok. So by now I'm sure most of you are wondering what's up with the "Chico" thing when none of you have ever heard me call myself that before. It is one of those stories that "you had to have been there" to get....

Hi everyone, Kate here. I'll try to explain where Chico comes from.......
When JP and I first met in Chiang Mai, I convinced him to go to a yoga class with me. It was being taught by this weird English guy that couldn't remember JP's name. He referred to him as 'Enrique' and something else too, (at least he figured out that JP is hispanic) but eventually gave up and just called him 'Chico'. We thought it was too funny to correct him, so we didn't.
There you go-bye!

So, JP here again. I had a pretty nice birthday back in Kon Kaen, Thailand. Nothing too exciting but I sure milked it as much as I could. I also had about a weeks worth of sugar, candy and cake. :) Now that my sugar binge is over we are on our way up to Laos soon which I heard is very beautiful.

Since most of you have no idea where all these towns I keep talking about are, here is a map that should help. The solid red lines are the parts of the trip that I have already done. The dotted red line is the tentative plan for the next month.

Please be patient. This is a pretty big map to load!

View Map

Also, my "tiny scratch" (according to Tracey) is healing very nicely. I took the stitches out myself and all that is left is a little scab. I know it didn't look very impressive in the picture. I guess I didn't think to take a picture while it was covered in blood. Next time I will try to be more considerate to my blog readers. :)

Anyway, I just wanted to write a quick entry to thank you guys for remembering my birthday and provide a map which should be more useful to you then random names of Asian towns.
JP