Chiang Mai - happy birthday to me!! :)

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After 5 months of living and working in North-East Thailand I was finally ready to set off on my travelling adventure, starting with Chiang Mai, but first I had to get there..

After waiting for about an hour for a taxi to make the 30 second trip from the taxi rank to the bus station and piling all my worldly belongings in we had a race against time to get to the bus in time.

After a five hour bus ride to khon kaen we tried to find ourselves tickets for the night bus to chiang mai, which was interrupted by loads of thai people running in every direction and telling us ‘boom’, ‘bomb’ and ‘dynamite’. we had to run away and follow everyone to prevent us from being blown up but after about 10 minutes everyone seemed to go back to normal so we went back to cautiously get our tickets. We just about had time for a 7-11 toastie before boarding the 12 hour bus to Chiang Mai which was horrific - a windy trip through the thai mountains, I was a nervous wreck but grateful to get there in one piece.

We had to wait 6 hours to check into our dorm and spent the day looking around and getting used to our new surroundings, we went to the night market on the night and had an early night, we all needed it!

The next day was St Patricks day which was celebrated in proper fashion; drinking magners and Guinness and singing solo’s to fields of athenry in an irish bar - the thai’s didn’t know what had hit them! We then moved on to another bar for buckets galore and I decided that I would pretend it was my birthday so I got a whole load of free shots and the band sung happy birthday! What a night… stumbled home at around 5am and then spent all of the next day rotting in bed before going to see the tigers and having dinner. As much as we were tempted to go out the next night, we decided against it as we had a jungle trek booked for the next day…

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