Moving North

We finished up Bangkok with a visit to some of the "must sees": Chatuchak weekend market (which had everything and everything you could ever imagine), the Wat of the Emerald Buddha and the Grand Palace, Pat Pong road, and some river cruising. Sunday night we left on our first overnight train ride (14 hours) to the north of Thailand, Chiang Mai. We got two beds in a sleeper car, and a very bumpy noisy night's sleep. The views were incredible and our neighbor was a Preston Burke, from Grey's Anatomy, look alike.

Chiang Mai is a much quainter town than Bangkok, though still decent sized and very much on the tourist trail. The old part of the city is surrounded by a moat and we have a chill guesthouse down a narrow soi (lane). Everything is even cheaper here than it was in Bangkok (hard to imagine), except that the street vendors are a little less populous. We had another amazing $6 massage (we're going to break our budget if these become regular-considering $6 is about 1/3 of our thus far easily maintained $20/day budget!).

Today we tried to escape the tour groups and rented a motorcycle-a Honda supersonic 125cc 5spd- (sorry moms) to head up into the mountains. It was quite an adventure riding on the left side of the road, but luckily we only had one slip up and it was down an alley way, so no problem, except for the poor old Thai woman we almost hit nearly muay thai'd us! We went to Doi Inthanon national park, which has the highest peak in Thailand. We made it within 9 km of the summit, before a torrential icy downpour forced us to turn around since we were ill-equiped for such temperatures and were shivering uncontrollably in our short sleves. However, the waterfalls on the way up were some of the best we've seen as well as were the views of the rice paddies (still not sure what place agriculture has in a natl. park!).

Guess that's it for now (thank Matt for keeping these blogs brief!-you know if it was up to me they'd be five times longer!)

Miss you all. Thanks for the comments and messages! Next time youl hear from us we should be in Laos...

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Part of trip: SE Asia Adventure

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