Bangkok, Chaing Mai

Location: Chaing Rai
Weather: Warm

The Burma daytrip meant I now had a new 30 day Thai visa and another stamp in my passport, hooray! so we took a night train to Bangkok. The train was surprisingly pleasant, slept in bunk beds on it, much better than any bus journey I've been on. Spent a day in the city looking around the markets, a few other sights and Ko Saon Road. It wasn't anywhere near as busy, polluted or dirty as I'd been told, far better than Kuala Lumpur I can tell ya.
We then took another night train to Chaing Mai in the north. The reason for going to Chaing Mai was to go on a 3 day trek in the hills. To do this we met up with Troy again and he brought some friends - Will from Reading, Heidi from Holland and Woody from Canada. Woody decided to do some motorbiking instead of the trek, but the other five of us went. It turned out to be most excellent, trekked the mountains on foot, stayed in hill villages with a glorious outside fire and no electricity, saw the villagers dancing, got woken up at 4am by the hundreds of yodelling cockerells (once one started all the others did, so that they echoed round the hillside), rode on elephants and sailed down a river on bamboo rafts - this was great fun - me, Will and Dom had one raft and Troy & Heidi the other and we had a bit of war so that the rafts were almost destroyed by the end of the trip. And I wouldn't be surprised if we've all got Hepatitus A now because the river was so filthy. I really enjoyed this trip. Chaing Mai is a cool place.

After this Dom and I hired a car, because we wanted to go to Pai, a town 150km's west of Chaing Mai and said to be wonderful by many people. Troy and Will were going to join us, but Troy had a plane to catch, so it was just me and Dom again. After driving up some of the most windy roads I've ever seen, we got to Pai. I found this place very relaxing and peaceful, a bit like Ko Lanta, but without the beach and surrounded by mountains and hills + with a few more shops. They have a hot springs there, but it is so hot you can't bathe in them, which is a bit annoying. What else, oh yeah, we saw Pai Canyon -which is a rather small canyon in some rocks up a mountain, not too impressive, but the best was probably the river. You get a tuk-tuk or motorbike taxi up the hill and then float down it on a rubber tyre innertube - takes about 1 hour and was great fun. The bars and food in Pai is probably the best I've known in Thailand - I had a great shepards pie one night - you've also got many very nice friendly travelling girls around, probably because it's such a relaxed place. The guesthouse was also very laid back - I think I'd like to hang out there for a few weeks and just play the guitar they had in reception all day long, if I didn't have other places to go/see.

By JamesReed on 11.03.05 @ 03:52 PM GMT