Cooking, Trekking and animal adventures in Chiang Mai

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We came into Chiang Mai with a shopping list of 'experiences' to tick off. They were all great fun and we fitted the most we possibly could have done with the time we had. However, it's difficult to say we actually know the city, in fact this is almost impossible in to do in a week. So we made the most of it.

First day in Chiang Mai

I woke up mid-morning and stumbled out of bed wearing only pyjama bottoms to greet the weirdos and a glorious complimentary breakfast consisting of toast, cereals and tea or coffee. Whenever there is a free breakfast I always eat as much as I can fit in my stomachs.



We woke up late and pottered around the walled city. We chatted about sex over some cheap noodle soup. We got a bit acquainted with the city. As in, we went to a bar to play free pool, chatting to a guy from Oldham with a glass eye (I didn't know which one to look in), an american from Pennsylvania travelling with his eight year old son and later a Swedish feminist outside McDonalds. Travelling, it would seem educates you, but not usually about the country you're actually travelling in. We arrived back to the hostel a bit drunker that we'd intended to be and made too much noise for the wealthy suburban area surrounding the hostel.

Cooking School

Whenever I've been travelling before (Venezuela and Europe) I've been clutching at straws to find differences in food culture. However, Thailand certainly has a distinct cuisine so I was looking forward to our day long cooking course at a local farm. Plus, in dawned on us that we've been here for three weeks and we hadn't actually done anything cultural.

We definitely reduced the average age of the group and definitely raised the average banter levels. This exchange Kimpton had with middle age woman travelling with her husband summed up the whole day for me:

Lady: "If you ever get a massage you should certainly get one in the square on Sunday evening. There's hundreds of people out there getting a Thai massage together."

Kimpton: "Oh, I don't think I could get it up infront of that many people."

Along with this, there was constant flirting with a Swiss teenage girl on holiday with her mother and Constant Aussie accent imitation despite the presence of a middle aged man from Perth.

We woke up tired and with minor hangovers from staying out longer that we'd intended with our Swedish feminist/hippie/vegan friend we'd met outside McDonalds. We went for a tour around the mental local market which featured amongst other things: dead chickens with head and feet still intact, live fish and lots of livers, kidneys and intestine. Kimpton and John delayed the group by ordering coffees and going for ringsting poos.

I love cooking so I found the day awesome. I won't shut up about it but my Tom Yam Soup was definitely the best I'd tasted since I'd been here. My red curry though, was rubbish after I accidentily dropped half the salt pot in it.

We got back in the minivan back, Kimpton told the Swiss girl he'd be seeing her at dinner, got back into the hostel and watched 'Layer Cake' on the on-demand Entertainment television and headed into town with Tony, a Californian who also needed some food in his belly.

After a TukTuk ride in which Tony revealed that he'd received a happy ending blowjob of a 'masseuse' despite having a girlfriend back home (we were the first people he'd told,) we headed into the night markets which was a great opportunity to clean up on Christmas presents for the family. We ate cheap food with other tourists and Thais in the sort of town square that might have drunk chavs scoffing Kebabs or heading for a night at a town in England.

We bumped into the Brighton girls from the full moon party (Paige and Kitty). We've only known them a week but it feels like a lot longer. I usually like it when they are around as it means I get lots of sympathy whenever John and Kimpton send banter in my direction.

We arrived back at the hostel more drunk than we had intended, made way too much noise than the middle class suburban community would have liked and had a our first encounter with a really irritating girl who had an English/Australian accent (she still claimed to be Irish) and her friend from Worcester.

Tigers.

I'd only heard about Tigers after I'd arrived here. There are rumours that they are drugged up but there's an advert in the hostel telling me they are just conditioned heavily to the appropriate environment to allow western tourists to come in and give them a stroke. Either way we thought we'd check it out, so we got a TukTuk to Tiger Kingdom with Tony and yet another person from British Columbia.

Tigers, for me, are the Sharks of the land, so this experience was a bit like going scuba diving in a tank filled with Sharks only to realise that they lay docile on the bottom and then role over when you start ticking them. It was good to get so close to one of the most dangerous animals in the world, but they seemed so heavily conditioned to live in this environment that they didn't feel like real tigers at all.

They shouldn't really call it 'Tiger Kingdom' because it is nothing for a Tiger to be proud of. If other Tigers from the wild came in and saw their fellow tigers enjoying being tickled in the belly by potential food, I think they'd be disappointed and shocked at their behaviour.

They were basically a massive version of my cat, only with ginger fur. Seeing as my cat doesn't really like me unless I've got some sort of food, I didn't imagine I had a way with cats of any size. Even though they were apparently full I didn't really want to risk them thinking that could have seconds, so I always stayed behind them.

Kitty and Paige raved about the snakes, crocodiles and monkeys they'd seen the previous day. So we thought we'd give snakes a try. We gave the monkeys a miss as we got told they're put in chains and we'd already seen plenty of the things. Incidentally, it occurred to us at dinner with the girls that monkey balls are incredible, these monkeys are about the size of my torso but their bollocks are ginormous. Disappointingly, monkey tits are nothing to write home about. Imagine a double A cup then imagine human nipples about four times as long; you've got monkey tits. I can't ever see a monkey version of FHM taking off, it would just be rubbish.

I don't know if a snake knows it is the most sinister animal in the world and I don't know if it enjoys that reputation, but that's what they are. The snake place felt a bit more 'back alley' than tiger kingdom where you could get yourself a three course meal and purchase 'Tiger' Merchandise. At the snake place there was a lady outside selling dodgy rotisserie chicken, all different kinds of offal and another lady selling tickets behind a toll booth. It added to the authenticness of the experience and also helped me shit myself a little bit.

I don't think a snake enjoys being swung around, dancing involuntarily to music or being teased like it was. However, it was definitely entertaining and the snake charmers knew how to make the audience scared. The King Cobra in particular, was a beast. Ten foot long and able to raise its head of the ground, it got my heart racing as I was only about four meters away from it. The design is impressive as well, they have a pattern on top of their head, which John tells me is supposed to look like an eye to fool birds. I don't know if its aware that it's there but it seems like good defense tactic if you have to crane your neck everytime you want to look up like a snake does.

We got back to the hostel and went out with a Swiss guy, an English guy and the annoying Australian/English girl and her friend from Worcester we'd met the previous night. We went to a semi-fashionable night club. The sort of which I didn't think I'd find in Thailand. Ironically, John spent the whole night articulating to me how annoying he found the Australian/English girl only to get with her when we got back to the hostel. On paper she was pretty fit, but I couldn't work out why she was unattractive. Maybe if she was a little bit less annoying or maybe if she just got a tan.

Mopeds.

I woke up and felt fat. So I went for a run. It wasn't a great run, but at least I got out. John and Kimpton spent the morning getting John some shoes after his had been nicked at full moon.

My most recent experience on a motorbike was at Weston-Super-Mare peer with my Dad, but that was an arcade. I've always been against riding a motorised bike with the logic that car on car is a lot safer in a crash than car on skin. So it is strange that in an unfamiliar country in which I've barely got used to crossing the road, I should try something I'm pretty strongly against.

From leaving the hostel to the moment we got on the mopeds it's fair to say we were all shitting it. We left the hostel after speaking to a girl who had grazed her knee from falling off one, after being told that 90%!o(MISSING)f all tourist deaths occur on mopeds and with the hostel owner telling us to be careful as he joked that he was a "hostel and not hospital". I wondered whether it was worth risking our lives in order to see a temple and a hill tribe that we'd planned to moped to outside the town.

Thailand doesn't really do health and safety. If it ever decides to then maybe they could start by asking us if we've ever driven a car let alone a moped or they could have asked us for our driving licenses. We gave them our passports, signed a piece of paper and after practicing in a car park we went onto in the busy, no rules requires streets of Chiang Mai.



I love cycling and I love driving on my own. I always sing to myself, talk to myself, day dream so I found a tremendous sense of freedom with a moped. When we returned I found myself thinking that I'd like to get one if ever I move to big city.

We got to the temple but it was closed and instead of finding a hill tribe we found a campsite. So in the end we achieved nothing more than purchasing a water and a couple of cans of fizzy drinks with a feeling of relief that we hadn't died by the end of it. But thousands of people ride mopeds and drink fizzy drinks all over the world so the fact that we combined the two is really not that impressive.

Our night was filled with bumping into Paige and Kitty again. They bought me a bracelet which was a sweet as they didn't have to it. I was pleased to get it as my brother is always telling me to accessorize, and women seem to love him. They came back to our hostel for a bit, Kimpton had an awkward exchange with a Irish girl who responded to him joking with her that she had great reputation for giving blowjobs,by telling him his are"far from impeccable". Perhaps she got so upset because she really did have a great reputation for giving blow jobs. We packed our bags for trekking the next day and got to sleep on the sofas at the hostel after there was no room for us in any of the dorms.

Trekking.

Trekking is the thing to do in Chiang Mai and I like walking anywhere, it's prime day dreaming time. So I was looking forward to the first trekking I'd done since I was in Venezuela four years ago.

Elephants are strange animals. The last time I saw one would have been about fourteen years ago at wipsnade zoo, and I can't even remember that. An elephants trunk is the equivalent to me having on octopus tentical twice as long as face instead of a nose. Out of all the animals I've come into contact with this, this one was the one I was most fascinated with.

The elephant riding itself was a bit like going on a roller-coaster in slow motion. When it walked down the bank of the river, it was like that moment on oblivion at Alton Towers when you pause to go down the vertical drop.

An elephant could never get a carpet burn, its skin is super resistant. To quote Kimpton on rubbing the elephant: 'it feels like an untrimmed minge.' It's ears, just like your grandad's ear lobes just get bigger and bigger and flappier and flappier with age. Kimpton again summed them up well: 'There what I imagine a Grandma's beefcurtain to look like.' If you are a grandma and you have big beef curtains and you've happened to stumble upon this blog, then please don't be offended, we really don't take ourselves that seriously.

I got thinking. Seeing as we're the human form of monkeys, I wondered whether you'd ever see the human form of other animals in the future. An human elephant would take ages to do anything. There'd be no table manners as it doesn't even bother pealing its food and watching it walk from behind just reminded of one those big fatties waddling their into McDonalds for BigMac.

There you have it. One nature's greatest animals: obese with minge-like skin and beef curtains for ears.

We left the Elephants and trekked up the mountain to the hamong village we were staying in for the night. On the way we drank fresh water from the stream and ate papaya, chilli and bananas from the tree. Our guide, Maxi, was a wizard with his machete carving us kitchen tools out of bamboo. It was though he'd just been given a toy for christmas. I can imagine myself in a job like his. Leading people up a mountain all day and cook for them in the evening, then wake up and do it all again - simple.

The Hamong village was really just a village, there wasn't anything tribally about it. There were farm houses with chickens and dogs running about and surpisingly to me, a Christian Church. I might be naive but I didn't expect christianity to make its way all the to remote village with a different dialect in Thailand. If it's been here for ages that's almost like globalisation for an older age.

There wasn't a night club in the village so the only option was to stick around the table drinking cans of beer from the fridge whilst playing some frustratingly monotonous card games which developed into a game of 'never have a ever.' In a way I enjoy a night out like this. We were all in our pyjamas by six and went to bed at eleven, and everyone was laughing the whole night. That seems to make a bit more sense to me than getting fucked and going to bed at five in the morning then waking up at mid afternoon felling shit. Plus, people had to get on with each other. If there was a homophobe and a gay they'd have to get along - and I sort of like that. The most interesting fact that arose from the evening was that one of the girls once uses her boyfriends semen as a moistoriser - travel really does broaden the mind. We went to bed after what can only be described as a massive sleepover with strangers.

If theres one thing I'm great at, its sleeping. I never get woken up by loud noises and I can sleep on pretty much any flat surface. Exept today when I was rudely awoken. Fucking roosters. And I used to think my mum was annoying when she woke me up for school. I didn't know what it was at first, but it seemed to be in a rythmic pattern as they were going off about every thirty seconds. John told me that's the rooster singing; but then whenever human sings terribly you don't tell it to carry on. You tell it calmly to stop as they are doing your eardrums in. In this case I really felt like walking out my bed and going round to strange the bird. I saw people playing FIFA on a TV here. How have they not yet discovered the alarm clock?

Breakfast was tasty. The walk to the waterfall was day dreamy. IThe waterfall itself was awe inspiringly powerful. And it made me think I'd be more awake each morning if I had this instead of my shower at home. We moved onto some fried rice.

After fried rice we were whisked to our rafting boats. Dissapointing experiencing had we paid for it independently mediocre and acceptable as part of a well priced packaged tour. Highlights include splashing each other and John and Kimpton throwing floating Elephant poo in my direction. We boarded a TukTuk with more Kiwi Birds.



As a group, we're not a fan of small talk. We assessed the situation and brought out our standard ice breaker. "Who here would perform oral sex on someone of the same gender for a million pounds?" The taxi errupted into a verbal ruckus with everyone wanting to express their opinion. The Kiwis were a 50/50 split, three wanted to go down in an another female, three wouldn't. The two Canadians would. John and Kimpton would suck a dick and I wouldn't. We got off the TukTuk, the Kiwis and Canadians laughing, we were full of beans and found out we could travel to Vang Viang that night instead of fannying around in Chiang Mai for another day.

It makes no sense for me to go to Vang Viang, logically. I'm flying home in five days, I haven't looked into how to get back to Bangkok yet and I'm taking a twenty-four hour overnight bus in the wrong direction to a brand new country.

Backpacks loaded into the boot, bums on seats, I ready myself for a potentiall uncomfortable journey. As we're leaving, Noom, the owner is educating the guests on Chiang Mai's history followed with a free tour around Chiang Mai's Sunday night market. In Thailand I've felt like a walking a ATM, but the service in this place has been refershingly personable.

I look in my 7/11 bag filled with two bottles of water, crisps and wasabi peas hoping they'll last me for the journey into Loas. The adventure continues.

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