Signs of activity spotted on Ashy Macbean's blog...

A quick look at Ashy's vegetarian cookbook reveals a handful of new recipes , among them the yummy-scrummy saffron cauliflower with green olives and raisins , quick and tasty Thai-style tofu burgers and a fair-to-middling vegetarian version of Thai green curry .

But are they any good? Well, you'll have to see for yourself....

It has been a long time. I've been traveling all over the place and had my wee computer with me all the time, but never got it together to blog. Just couldny be bothered. I'm obviously not a natural blogger. I find that while I'm doing stuff, I don't want to take time out to write about it - I'd rather just soak up the experience. Maybe I'll drop the blog this year when my payment runs out in September. We'll see.

But, anyway. Here's a half-assed entry to break the run of inactivity. Who knows, maybe I'll get the bug to write more.

Here's a brief run down of what I've been up to since the last post.

Last I wrote, we were on the way back from Laos to Thailand. It didn't take long to get visas in Ventianne - much easier now with the new Thai consulate. It's is not far from the old one but now they have a nice shaded area to sit in and there's a numbering system, so no queue jumping. We submitted applications one day, collected the visas the next and headed straight to the border.As soon as we got into Thailand we walked towards the train station, planning to get tickets for the next day. We rememebred it wasn't far from the bridge as we got stung on the way there - 20 Bhat each for a two minute journey - but somehow we took a wrong turning and ended up walking miles in the wrong direction. We eventually flagged down a guy in a tuk-tuk who took us to the station... for 20 Bhat each.... but it least we had walked far enough to get our money's worth.

We got the tickets and after a pleasant evening in Nong Khai (which is much nicer than Ventianne) we headed south to Bangkok. A couple of days on Koh San Road sorting things out and we were on the road south to Ko Samui and Ko Pa Ngang, then on to Krabi again, where we explored the surrounding countryside more thoroughly.

We returned to Bangkok from Krabi and then flew out to Hong Kong to visit the kids. That was good. Went to some cool places, like the 10 000 Bhuddas monastery .

On the return journey to Thailand from Laos we agreed to ttry to do the rest of our traveling as cheaply as we could and as a result we were able to spend another couple of weeks in Malaysia on the way back to Kazakhstan. We've never been there in March so we decided to take the opportunity do visit the Perhentian Islands, somewhere we've always wanted to go. It rained a lot while we were there but that didn't stop us enjoying ourselves. You can still go swimming in the rain. I did some snorkelling for the first time in years and really enjoyed it. There's coral just a couple of metres off-shore in some places and I felt like I was in an aquarium with the fish. The water was shallow and calm and there were so many different brightly coloured fish swimming about. I found that if I just stayed still, the fish got curious and swam up close to see what was going on. I think we'll go back there...

We're in Almaty at the moment. No plans to leave the area for a while, though summer should see a wee jaunt down to Kyrgyzstan - maybe a chance to go to Lake Issyk-Kul - and we're planning to go up to the north east of Kazakhstan to the Altai Mountains. Another place I've always wanted to visit but never had the time.

I've got more recipes to try out and write up from our winter trip, so I'll get them up and that will give me reason to do at least one more blog entry  shortly.