Onwards and Downwards

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Hello everyone who's still reading this nonsense,

I'm back in Bangkok, following my final week in Chiang Rai province. It has been fine, fine fun, but it's nice to be moving on to new adventures. I've visited several more Akha villages since I last posted. First, my fellow travellers and I went to a village in the most astonishingly beautiful mountainside location. Don't ask me the name of the place, but it was stunning. I hope the pictures, when I finally put them up, do it at least a modicum of justice. We were there for two days, during which time we helped fireproof a new bamboo building. This means that we were sweeping again - a days sweeping in the sun, removing all trace of leaf and twig from around the building. Actually quite an enjoyable bit of physical work, if a bit knackering in the heat, and quite difficult to do when you're sliding down a slope. Here, fellow volunteer Adam and I slept in a pokey little bamboo hut with the toilet to one side and the pigs to the other. It was not especially pleasant.

Following this, we took an increasingly perilous journey furhter up the mountain range, leaning into the mountain to prevent the pick up from going over the side. (OK, so it surely wouldn't, but it felt like it would.) We stopped for lunch in Doi Chaang, where Thailand's main coffee crop is grown. They call it a village, but it's really a town - it stretches for miles upon miles, and has over 700 families, considerably more than my village. After a bit, we carried on to yet another village whose name escapes me. We stayed with the family of Miti, one of the AFECT staff. This village is Doi Chaang's chief coffee rival (since its opium crop was destroyed by monarchichal edict). We evn got to go to Miti's family coffee farm, eating coffee cherries (which taste like plums) on the mountainside. However, in the village, everyone is bored of coffee and drinks tea.

Since then, I've amused myself by visiting a hot spring, which has a pleasantly warm pool to bathe in but does smell of rotten eggs due to the sulphur content; I've showered in Khun Korn waterfall, where the water falls so hard it hurts your head; and been to Phra Sean, where I rode on the back of an elephant all aorund the village. Sadly, I didn't get a good photo of me on the elephant, but my co-elephantee Jess and I did get a few shaky shots from on top of it. And we won the race back to the start. In all honesty, I'm of mixed feelings about the whole thing; the elephants were far better treated than those we saw in Ayutthaya, but still got chained up when not being used to ferry tourists around. So I feel like a bit of a white imperialist animal-abuser, but it was an amazing experience that I couldn't say no to. Guess I'll have to be extra nice to elephants in the future.

Other than that, I've been enjoying the delights of Chiang Rai's hippy hotspot TeePee Bar, where I get to choose the music most nights (fortunately, Tu the proprietor has an inexhaustable supply of Queen and Bowie), and have had my leaving ceremony. It's a shame to say goodbye to eveyone at AFECT, but it's time to carry on, and there's no reason I can't go back some day...

The trip to Bangkok did not go as smoothly as planned. I intended to go with my firends Jess and Zoja, but Jess couldn't get a ticket. She needed to be back yesterday as she flew out early this morning, so I gave her my ticket, managing to beg the vendors for one of the second-class reserve tickets. This meant that I got to spend thirteen hours in a cramped bus, the only non-Asian aboard, with little food and water, the loudest baby on Earth in the next aisle and far more passangers than was possibly safe squeezed in beneath the seats. However, I got to Bangkok last night and proceeded to meet my friends and drink in an enjoyably naff club until I got bored and wandered back to my hotel.

Next stop: Singapore...

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