What goes on Tour, Stays on tour...

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well.... what a crazy few days....

unfortunately I was a little ill on sunday night, I was lying in bed and just knew I was going to be sick 😞 I think it may have been something dodgy I ate.... or perhaps a stomach bug..... or perhaps heat stroke..... or perhaps that beer I had over lunch, or the one after that or the one after that....... we didnt actually intend to have so much to drink, but we met some Danish people and one thing led to another and before you know it you're watching the Denmark v France Volleyball final at 5am singing the Danish national anthem!! who knew volleyball could be so much fun! so much so that I believe sting and I have promised we'll form a Great Britain team in time for 2012!

We have got into a bit of a bad habit of getting drunk just before we go on long journeys, so typically after the volleyball night we were up at 8am catching a ferry back to bangkok to collect our Vietnam Visas. We were not loving the ferry crossing at all!!! By the time we got back to Bangkok it was 6pm ish, we'd decided that if we could get a train we were going to go to Chiang Mai (about 12 hours north of Bangkok)... the train had left but the woman at the travel office said she could get the bus (which had left 15 mins ago) to come back and get us. We said yes and were promptly on a night bus to Chiang Mai!

We got to Chiang Mai about 7am and found somewhere to stay pretty easily. The rest of the day we spent wandering around Chiang Mai, it's a lot smaller than Bangkok which I actually really like! Stingray (who has to be the vainest traveler ever!!) wanted to get her eyebrows waxed! I prayed the woman would take all her eyebrow off but she didn't! (sting has also been on the look out for some lemon to put in her hair cos apparently it'll make it go blonder! 😊

Then we went to a few temples and then decided to book an elephant trek/tour. The tour we booked involved a bit of trekking then an elephant ride, whitewater rafting then bamboo rafting, pretty cool!...The one we got involved considerably more ......

We got picked up about 9.30am the following day and drove for about an hour out of the city into the hillside. We stopped at the bottom of a hill for some lunch, I jokingly asked sting which of these mountains she thought we'd be climbing, she reassured me we wouldn't be climbing any of them.... oh how wrong she was!! we trekked for 5 hours! up this huge mountain! I was well scared especially when the guide started telling us all about the deadly spiders we might find! After 5 hours we made it to a village at the top, which admittedly was pretty amazing. We had dinner then a camp fire before sleeping in a barn on the thinnest mattress you've ever seen!!

The next day we did an hour or 2 trekking before getting to this waterfall then onto elephant trekking.... WOW elephants are amazing, I was actually in total awe of them! When it came to riding them, they had a seat attached to them which you sat in, but I asked if I could sit actually on the elephant..... WHAT AN IDIOT! actually ridiculously scary! especially when you seem to have the naughtiest elephant (I named him Woody) in all of Thailand who seems intent on going anywhere but the designated route!! at one point he wandered towards a tree and a branch as good as hit me!! then off he went up a hill!... grabbing plants left right and centre then wacking them on his head (where I was sitting)!!!

what added to the trauma was the fact we also had the worst elephant keeper (if that's what u call them!) aswell... who rather than walk infront of the elephant so he cud keep him on the straight and narrow actually decided to sit in the seat with sting..... and touch her.... inappropriately.... so if you can picture, me sitting on woody about to fall off, while sting sits behind in her seat being molested by a strange Thai man you can perhaps understand that elephant trekking wasn't all we hoped it would be!! So Sting decided to come down onto the elephant with me to get away from the scary Thai man.....WHAT AN IDIOT! now I was pushed further forward with even more chance of falling off over Woodys head!...and to make staying on even more hard, we were now going down the hill woody had climbed up when going "off road"! At one point I was pushing on Woodys head so I didn't fall off, sting was falling onto me - but holding onto the seat to keep as much of her weight off me as possible and the Thai pervert was tickling sting under her arm!!

... thankfully we made it to the bottom in tact.... when I nearly fell off again... this time, for laughing! "Ermmm Kat... He's undoing my bikini...." ....... HAHAHAHAHAHA!... "maybe you shud tell him to stop sting"..... and then in her flirtiest possible manner she told him not to do it!!.... so instead he decided to fiddle with her hair - like monkeys do - then hit her head!!! obviously I was pissing myself laughing....which is difficult on an elephant!....

after the trauma of elephant riding we were both quite pleased to go white water rafting, which actually was a pretty calm chilled out drift due to it being the dry season.... then another horror.... Bamboo rafting.... basically you all sit on the raft and 1 person with a large stick pushes you along... fine.... relaxing...calm.... UNTIL you realise there are huge spiders all over the raft, which then makes you stand up and scream.... which then means your raft is sinking....

By the time we were back in Chiang Mai we were ready for a beer or two and so decided to hunt down the gay bar in town... we had a rough idea of where it might be but no luck... so we wandered around for a while, before I suggested to sting that she go and ask 2 ladyboys who were standing on a corner waiting for something.... if they knew where it was.... I think they misunderstood and thought she wanted something else..... so we ran away and soon found ourselves walking behind two girls wearing jeans and check shirts.... so we followed them.....

Today we had another wander (we do like wandering) and decided to go to "monk chat"...... we went to a temple and sat down with a monk - his name was seven - and asked him everything we wanted to know about monks! ... did we have to get off the pavement if a monk was walking towards us - we do....Do all thai men have to be monks at some point in their lives - they do... Does he like being a monk - he does.. Does he want to get married - he does... Are woman allowed to touch him - they're not (by the time we asked this questions sting had already attempted to shake hands and stood on his toe).... Does he have facebook - he doesn't.... also found out that they're not allowed to sing or play sport.... Then he asked to take a picture of us on his Iphone and asked for our email addresses and we were on our way....

The only thing worse than riding on the back of a motorbike with someone who has never ridden a motorbike before in the dark.... Is riding a uncontrollable elephant down a hill while your friend gets molested behind you.....

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