Blogs from Chiang Mai, North-West Thailand, Thailand, Asia - page 354

It's Wednesday, it must be cooking lessons. Today we venture into the country with TV Chef Sompon, but first a trip to the market to buy the raw ingredients. Everyone is given a shopping list and sent off to buy stuff, luckily we get birds eye chilli and onion, Team America who are also with us get stuff we've never heard of, let alone would know what it looked like. After a successful half hour we are transported to a very exclusive gated estate and the huge sprawling house of Sompon. Lessons are taken in an outdoor kitchen. We each have a work station with huge gas burner, watch out eyebrows! Kev has lots of fun with his gas burner as it's the only one that doesn't light automatically, he stops having fun as the first ... read more

Firstly, as I can't get to a phone that gives me instructions to dial internationally in any other language than Thai, Happy Birthday Fishy! We suffered our first set back this morning, I'm sure it was caused by last night's Chang overload. We surfaced, finally at 10.30 with banging heads to be greeted by bright sunshine and extreme heat. We realised that we'd missed breakfast and wandered out to find some. This isn't as easy as it sounds, we're looking for coffee and pastries and all there is to be had is unidentifiable meat based stuff and floating green things. We finally stumble across the Thai version of a cafe, it's serving crispy fried pork or chicken with rice, or satay. You'd be surprised how nice satay and soup is for breakfast, especially when accompanied by ... read more

It's been a long week. I've gone on 5 dives, met a lot of people, obtained roughly 4 new injuries, spent 24 hours on trains, seen 5 sharks, read another book (East of Eden), drank countless coconut milkshakes (they are amazing), and sat on the beach for many hours. (Don't worry, Bo, I put on sunscreen.) In a less condensed version: I went to Ko Tao, a very small island in the Gulf of Thailand, on Sunday. When I got there, the people in my taxi told me to go to the Buddha View Dive Resort, so I went. (I sold my guidebook to a used bookshop in Bangkok, so I basically just go where other people suggest now. It's an interesting way to travel, if a bit nerve-wracking at times.) It was a decent place ... read more

Well it has been a long time since my last entry and so much has happened since then. I shall begin where i left off which was our venturing to the Bed Superclub. It was very cool and the entrance fee included two free drinks. The music was good and the night we were there was the k - swiss spraypainting championships so there were lots of spray painted art hanging around the club. As you may have guessed from the name this club has beds! What a great idea, you're tired from the dancing, you can sit back and watch the world go by! Unfortunately none of us had a camera with us so we have no pictures but there is a website which I think is www.bedsuperclub.com in case anyone is interested. We didn't ... read more

Chiang Mai has totally restored my faith in Thailand. Bangkok, in all its frenetic glory, had left us exhausted and shell-shocked... as evidenced by how we spent our last day, a movie and Pizza Hut. Chiang Mai, on the other hand, despite being Thailand's second-largest city, felt infinitely more manageable. It's still a very "Thai" city, as evidenced by the ubiquitous food stalls, and tuk-tuks, but it's also much more peaceful. Maybe it's the fact that the air is a little fresher, or that the mountains feature prominently, that the greenery and lushness of the countryside creep into the city streets, or that wats are only outnumbered by uniformed school children, but Chiang Mai enchanted us. However, we still did leave the very next day. Didn't head far though, but rather took off on a trek ... read more