Okay....where did I leave off? Oh, yes. We'd arrived in Chaing Rai, done the home stay and boarded the farm tractors.... The tractors took us up into the hills as far as they could - then we got out and started walking. The first day was almost all up hill for about 14 km. We went up about 1300 feet to the first village. I was totally exhausted and reaffirmed my belief that I'm not really an outdoors person. I was so glad I hired a porter to carry my bag, I probably would have kissed him at the end. :-) We arrived at a sort of guest house at the first village. It had definitely been built for tourists and over looked the village rather than was inside it. it was almost luxurious - by ... read more

Okay...since last writing, I've been in Chaing mai. Took a nice long, hot shower - yeah!!! Put on the clean clothes that I bought and met the group at the trekking store where we rented sleeping bags, mats, etc. for the hike. I'm renting a porter too to carry my bags. Is renting the right word? Anyway...then we headed to the night market which was a teaming mass of people. Did some shopping for a few gifts, had fresh pad thai and wandered. Athena did all my negotiating for me so I was able to spend a little and get a lot. If my phrasiology is weird - blame the australians. We're starting to pick up things from each other... :-) We went back to the guest house and had a beer. Athena and Rachel ate ... read more

Well, in the last 36 hours, we've been very busy. We took a 3 hour truck ride in our lovely convertedpick up to Ayuthaya yesterday morning. We had lunch at Sherwood house - a guest house run by a British ex-pat. Its a combined guesthouse,restaurant and swimmingpool. Odd. Then we boarded a converted rice barge where we cruised down the river. We stopped along the way and went to an elephant conservatory. We got to feed the elephants - which was cool but messy. They seem to have very runny noses. I skipped the bike rideandlounged on the boat. We ate dinner on the boat and thenplayed board games. I went to bed early - am almost feeling human again. This morning, we got up early and made food offerings to the monks. We then took ... read more

Yesterday, we travelled by long boat, by rickshaw, public bus and did a fair amount of walking and landed at this quaint guest house called Apple's. But I'll get to that in a munite. We took the long tail boat from one side of Bangkok to the other stopping to see Wat Po and the largest reclining Buddha in thailand. If I can post pictures, i will.... :-) Then we took the boat throught his really interesting place - no idea what it was called - but it was all houses along these canals. The differetnce betweent eh shacks along the water in some places and the large western houses was fascinting - but unexplained. :-) Stopped for lunch (i'm already looking forward to pizza and a hamburger) and got on a bus and headed west ... read more

Whew! After yet another uneventful flight (best kind), we met our driver who took us to the hotel. His English was only marginally better than my Thai but he did explain that traffic was very light (it was 2:00 am on Christmas Eve, after all), that it is the cold - hot season (I'm not clear on this one) and that it never snows in Thailand. Nice guy. We over tipped him as we've not figured out the money yet. Our hotel is really quite nice for $30 / night. Has a pool and everything. Even though I once again slept through the entire flight, we figured the best thing to do was head back to sleep for a couple hours. We started out this morning at 7:00 a.m. local time - and have been offered ... read more