Chiang Mai

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Our first day in Chiang Mai was pretty relaxed after our bus ride and we just wandered around town having a look at a few different wats and things. We had heard that there was a really good market that they have here on Sundays so we went to check this out in the evening and it was pretty impressive, they shut down about 6 roads and they were just covered in stalls, we managed to find a cheap dinner but weren't convinced enough to buy any of the souvenirs and we gave up when most others did when it started to pour with rain!

We booked a 2 day/1 night trek into the jungles north of Chiang Mai for the following two days. The first day we were picked up and driven for a couple of hours before stopping for lunch and then a 3 hour hike through the jungle up to a hill tribe village where we were to spend the night. The weather got quite cool up there in the evening which was really nice for a change - had to wear a long sleeved top it was that cold! There was a young boy in the village who couldn't speak he could only grunt and laugh so Jared was amusing him by playing checkers and cards before we had dinner and were entertained by young children singing and dancing for us. We had an uneasy night's sleep in a room with 12 other people, and constantly woken by animals and other random things.

The next morning we walked for about an hour to a waterfall where we stopped for a refreshing swim, then it was onto the elephant camp where we had lunch and went for a short ride upon an elephant. Our elephant happened to be the troublemaker and would not go where he was supposed to despite being whipped with a cane and we were quite fearful he was going to go off the side of a cliff, thankfully he didn't and we survived. After our elephant ride we went white water rafting, not quite as white water as NZ and the river was quite low and we kept getting stuck on rocks which was rather amusing. From here we were transferred to bamboo rafts for a final ride down the river, I got the impression that bamboo rafts were supposed to float but after riding on one and sitting up to your waist in water with the raft sinking beneath you I'm not so sure. This was our last ride before the bus back to Chiang Mai.

We had heard that Chiang Mai was a good place to learn Thai cooking so we enrolled ourselves in a one day cooking course where we learnt 5 dishes and got a recipe book containing about 30 different things, so we will have a few more dishes for our repertoire by the time we return!

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