Sa-wa-dii

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Hello everyone

Hope your all doing well, we're in Chiang Mai right now just waiting to head off and get our overnight train. It'll be a fun 12 hours to Bangkok then a quick flight to Phuket and hopefully some good beaches and sun at last!

After we left Bangkok we headed up to Kanchanaburi, it was really interesting and we stayed right on the river. Its really near the famous bridge over the river kwai which we visited. The area is well known as the railway from Thailand to Burma built by prisoners of war runs very near. We took a day trip and went to hellfire pass which was apparently the toughest part to complete as the men had to dig through solid sheer cliffs of rock in the middle of the jungle. We also travelled on part of the railway and visited the allied cemetry in the town. As part of the same trip we also managed to fit in an elephant ride, which was odd to say the least and river rafting which was great apart from the bit where we both nearly fell in, personally I blame Davids steering skills!
From there we headed to Ayuttaya where we saw the historic ruins of the temples or wats of the ancient capital and saw more elephants at the kraal. After that we went to Lopburi and had our first experience of the trains, with the 10 or so people who get on and off at every stop and go up and down selling food.
Lopburi is famous for its monkeys, which are everywhere! They live in the temples and and from the telegraph poles. One of them tried to attack a french guy we were talking to and seemed very interested in opening his bag!

After our close encounter we were pleased to leave the next day and headed by bus and train up to Sukhothai. Here there were again more wats and we hired bicycles to go around the historic park, after getting a bit lost and realising we had actually cycled out of the park we found our way back and were both quite impressed.

We arrived in Chiang Mai on wednesday and have both really liked it despite our room slightly resembling a prison cell, we have found the home comforts of Tesco, Boots and Starbucks! There are plenty more wats to see here and we went up into the hills to Doi Suthep which has fantastic views of the city and where David found a thai Ann from little britain lookalike to take our picture!
We took a cookery course which was great so hopefully we will now both be expert thai cooks! There is a huge night market here so we took the opportunity to do a bit of shopping, davids new favourite past time. From here we took a day trip to Chaing Rai and the Golden triangle, we saw the borders with Burma and Laos and went to Loas for about half an hour. The border with burma was very odd, especially seeing it from the hills as the Burmese side looked so different and run down compared to Thailand. We also fitted in a thai boxing match, and despite a rather disturbing start with fights between kids who couldn't have been more than 8 or 9 the others were quite good, it didn't work out so well when we tried a re-enactment!

Were both really looking forward to relaxing on the beaches now so hopefully we'll get some sun and can loose our pasty english colour!

Lots of Love Vicky and David xxx

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