Chiang Mai

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Arrived into Chiang Mai on a slightly less uncomfortable train journey. This is the great place to do lots of thai stuff & really get your teeth in to stuff so...

did the general wat seeing that needs to be done anyway, some also quite impressive wats, although not as amazing as some others we have seen so far, so won't elaborate too much...thoguh the lanna architecture & murals were quite cool.

cooking...great day spent learning the tricks of the delicious thai cuisine with a very amusing thai chef. i can now make great coconut milk soup, tom yam, padthai, green, red & penang curry, spring rolls, papaya salad, sticky rice with mango & other stuff that i may wish to attempt without having seen it previously with the wonderful recipe book he gave us at the end! (this is all providing i can find the weird & wondeful secret ingredients in england!!)

traditional thai dancing - went to see some of this on an evening out, dinner dance thing. many different types of thai dancing & some tribal groups showing their traditional dancing with sticks & things - also interesting. we also got fed LOADS of amazing food, platefuls of loads of stuff that kept being topped up whenver we tried eating any! so once again...we ate far too much!!

trekking - decided it was time for some more...the girls didn't want to join, so went alone again, but lovely people as always met along the way. started off visiting a a refugee camp including many differnt tribes:
the Padaung (the karen - long necks), where the girls are still forced to wear (extremely heavy) metal rings around their necks, making any kind of movement really difficult. even young gils have to go through this torture & they get more rings put on every year. not the nicest. also the palong, & some others, each with very different traditional clothes, (some women forced to wear big metal rings in their ears, others rings around their waists, & other strange things, some just for tradition/fashion/ others os the the men can keep track of them & so they can't get away fast).
also all have different ways of building houses, lifestyle, fascinating rituals, & cultures, but some of which are which are still quite shocking, even today. all very poor tho, and the different tribes all living together in this refugee camp,
but good the government is trying to do something to help them.
nice to know that some money spent on the trek would actually go to the refugees...i checked it out before, the money really does get there!!

then a short elephant trek (i was uneasy about this at first, but thought it would be nice to do...now know i will not do it again...not happy with the way the elephants are treated, seems cruel, unnecessary & unnatural for them. beautiful creatures, i love them to bits, but want them in their own environments doing what they should be doing. felt quite guilty at the end of it. some of the guides really do mistreat them!)

Next we trekked for a good few hours through wonderful jungles, over streams, rocks, precarious logs, through rain, etc, etc, (as all the treks seem to go) until we reached the top of a hill with a small Lahu village - These people are best known for being great hunters, this is where we spent the rest of the evening & stayed overnight in the hut of a very lovely family. spent most of the night 'chatting' to the kids in our own respective languages, playing, enjoying a wonderful typical lahu dinner & getting taught funny little tricks with bits of string by the family. a wondeful day ina all. Then breakfast & off for more hard trekkeing to a beautiful waterfall in the middle of the jungle for a brief swim then onto to some white water rafting (aazing fun, apart from getting stuck on some rocks for a good few minutes alomost having to be rescued!), then some relaxing bamboo rafting (relaxing for the rest on my raft...all men & I was the one driving the thing...how does that work?? men hey!!! but i admit i loved the the power i held over ther their lives!! : )

all in all, chiang mai was pretty jam-packed with activities& thoroughly enjoyable!

next...headed up on the long bus journey to Chaing Khong to head over LAOS. the end of thauiland, but the journey continues...

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