Thailand and CC Hideaways

I was in Thailand for 6 weeks and went to 3 different places during my stay, a yoga retreat in Koh samaui, a 5 star hotel with a private beach courtesy of my friend who is a journalist and the more casual cc Hideaways so i felt like I really saw so many differnt areas and levels of living whislt there. I have so many pictures I will try to seperate them somewhat and start with my stay at CC Hideaway. I was in Thailand as my journalist friend got me invited on a great all expenses trip but only for 5 days so i thought I can't go to Thailand and not make more of the opportunity so I also booked myself into this place which, was a lot more casual than the 5 star I had just left but was awesome all the same. I totally regret not taking more care of the pics before uploading them to instagram low quality but i have since learned my lesson to save the originals! I did take my pro camera but I didn't use it for holiday pics so much just for nature, I did get some great monkey pics though just have to find them on my hardrives and will add!

When I got to my room they had made my towels into little swans, I am such a sucker for thes cute things and I couldn't bare to use or seperate them and just moved them over the sideboard lol

The hotel offered yoga classes out on the roof deck overlooking beautiful scenery, since it was hot they were generally on early or in the early evening and sometimes I was the only one to turn up in the mornings so I got some one on one tuition! We even got to do some acro yoga a couple of times but I didn't get to take any pics.

Although I was with friends for the other parts of the trip, this part I was alone and chose this hotel because it offered a number of day trips, which allowed me to meet people and make new friends. I went on two trips during my stay the first of which was cannoing, hiking and a spa. We drove down to this place with canoes and got a couple of hours out on the water, it was amazing, I love being in water part of being a pisces.

Then came possibly the best part of the whole trip for me....meeting the monke's. As we left the canoes and headed to the car we were blocked off by monkeys, as I was crouching down taking endless pics of the cute monkeys holding their babies I suddenly felt them jumping and climbing on me, I wasn't really sure wether to be scared of them and still can'tbelieve they didn't run off my sunglasses but being petted and climbed on by monkeys and seeing them with their babies was literally one of my favourite life moments.

After escaping the monkeys which, left to my own devices I might possibly never have done, we went on a hike through the humid forest to eat lunch in a restaurant deep in the forest.

and where I got frightened for my life with these wild beasts!!

to end up at a mini waterfall where we all had a little dip to cool down..

As if the day never ended we went for sunset to the Hot Spring Beach hotel (www.thehotspringbeach.com), which was a mini 40 degree c spa pool and then a big swimming pool lit up beautifully at night with a hotel, I got my long awaited coffee and chilled out in the spa for a few hours, I couldn't find my pics of this so have added some from the internet and will try to dig out my own :) I always promised myself to come back and stay at this hotel oneday.

We got a couple of hours to see the grounds of the hotel and take some pics on the private beach before heading home.

I also went on a trip to see the Big buddha at Betong Yala and the surrounding temples nearby including the phuttathiwas temple.

It's bye from Thailand till the next post. I made some great friends on this trip, some just for a few days and some that I still connect to now 2 years later.

In the last few months I have been getting more and more into cryptocurrency. I had always planned on incorporating a financial section for my magazine and some good friends of mine, who are immersed in that world, are working on some articles for me. However, if I am honest, I only envisaged it as playing a minor part of my vision for UltraViolet. However I recently attended an ICO (Initial Coin Offerings) event and got chatting with a lot of start-up founders about their coins and it opened my mind to the potential power that not only crypto, but the blockchain, has to offer. I realised It isn’t just a commodity to trade – it’s also a concept that can be a platform for a lot of beneficial change in the world. I will go into this in more detail in a subsequent article where I will share my experiences of a recent visit to RocketSpace in Angel, London where I chatted in depth with a number of ICO’s. They were surprisingly open to my take on things, recognising that perhaps there were other ways of bringing in new converts thus taking crypto into a wider space and creating a bridge with the outside world. I feel we all gained a lot from sharing our ideas and views. There is so much more to talk about on this which I will develop in my RocketSpace tour when I can get all the pictures and info together.

Crypto has all the possibilities to bring about massive change for society or to create the same old eco-systems of power, abuse and greed. This is why I feel the opportunities that are evolving now are really exciting but that real change in the world has to come from within us. We have to get out of the mind-set of ‘I must get all the money and to hell with everyone else’ and try to create a joy and passion in sharing with the world in the form of exchange for real change to happen. The way I see it is crypto creates the possible platforms but the change within allows it to happen. I see crypto as an open platform that can bring about great change but only if, and it’s a big if’, crypto remains as decentralised as the people who are setting up the coins and the people trading them

What I find exciting about crypto and the blockchain is that it reverses the dynamics of supply and demand. I have noticed the world has become so focused on ‘I need this’ and when creative people have to pay heed to specification and cost, a lot of the soul and the magic is lost from the end product. Blockchain allows us to reverse this attitude and instead create from the soul and then see who wants what we have created. It allows people’s offerings and knowledge to be valued and exchanged in a pure way rather than them having to fit their talents into a box to create something that conforms to more perfunctory requirements. It’s a platform where we can say this is what I have, if you want it we can work on an exchange.

Working as a photographer I have noticed more and more that clients no longer choose me because of the style of my work. Their first questions is ‘what is the cheapest you will work for?’ or ‘can you do something like this for me?’ It has become rarer for a client to say ’I love your style please create something magical for me using your gifts’ and this is a shame because a lot of my best work has been without the pressure of a client. I was initially chosen for my vision but then often not allowed to actually use it. This is where I believe that blockchain offers the ability to be selected for your vision not someone else’s. It allows us to give the power back to the artist to find an exchange for their work and becomes a sharing of talent, skills and wisdom.

I love the possibilities that the blockchain is bringing but we have to also keep focusing on the change within ourselves. If we want to live in a different world we have to have a different energy inside of us first. Change first and foremost comes from within.