Last adventure in Thailand

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BKK to Chiang Mai (Dave)
Well it has now been quite a while since we got chance to blog. Am writing this on 12 February at a bus station in Huai Xai which is a border town in Laos.
. Prior to leaving Bkk we had a couple of hours on Kao San Rd where I restocked with tobacco (Golden Virginia under 5 quid for 50 grams) and enjoyed a couple of pints. The taxi driver we hired to take us to the station refused to put his meter on but agreed to take us for just over 3 quid and proved to be quite an astute and helpful young fellow. He suggested we booked digs for Chiang Mai at the TAT (Tourist Authority Thailand) office near the station. Suspicious as always, we reluctantly agreed but were later pleased with our decision. The overnight train from Bkk to Chiang Mai was pleasant as we have come to expect and actually a good way to travel. It costs under 20 quid and of course accounts for a nights digs as well as transport
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On arrival at Chiang Mai (only 1 hour later than planned) our free transport failed to materialise but we took a tuk tuk to the digs and this was paid for by the staff...all good so far:
The BMP, yes BMP not BNP (Backpackers Meeting Place) is an impressive set up. Immaculate in its setting, although mid town, its is pretty tranquil, very clean, has a good pool, English speaking staff and good sized rooms with AC, fridge, en suite bla bla bla for about 13 quid. (Double). They also offer the whole range of trek, tour, travel options including visa service for Burma, Laos and China. This costs about 6 quid more than doing it yourself so we took the cheaper option.
Chiang Mai itself impressed me from the start as it is quite a pretty looking city based around the Old Town which is surrounded by a canal, roughly square in shape making navigation a piece of cake...........unless you are Anna who, bless her heart has the directional awareness of a labotomised goldfish!
Our first days stroll which as always commenced as soon as our backpacks hit the floor, was good fun as the mid afternoon temperature seemed much cooler than the southern islands where we melted constantly. The Old town is as easy grid to walk and there are Wats (Temples) every few hundred yards or so. I suppose you could easily hire a bicycle and temple yourself to death in half a day or so. Apart from the temples which vary in age, there seems very little “old” architecture with the exception of small segments of the original city wall which remain in a few places. I've noticed this in many places here but really haven't investigated enough to explain why!
Cafe's and restaurants are dotted about at random apart from Moon Nuang (running nth to sth on the eastern side) and Loh Croh Rd (running east from 3 o'clock) where the bars and cafes are pretty much wall to wall. Our first evening was spent wandering around the Night Bizarre - NB there is nothing remotely bizarre about this, it is a market much the same as every other market you encounter in Asia and it bored my mossie bitten T*TS off!
After I managed to pry Anna away from the vast array of overpriced junk I managed to usher her in the direction of a bar I'd noticed earlier (I'd clocked what looked like the best ones as we tuk tuk'd from the station when we arrived! This dubious talent of mine always amazes Anna and it still amazes me that she actually thinks I could be anywhere for more than a few minutes without sniffing out a decent watering hole!!) I digress...............oh yes; a couple of pretty good rocks bands were giving it rather big Thai licks and impressed us all with their “Highway to How” and suchlike. It was in this bar that Anna broke the trip record for the dearest drink yet: 1 Bacardi breezer- 2.50 yep 2 and a half quid...........I laughed til I almost sharted!!

Saturday 6 Feb - Watched the Chiang Mai Flower Parade and had a pleasant leisurely walk thru the Flower festival and which although might sound pretty girlie and dull, kept me amused for a couple of hours. The Chiang Mai Orchid and Bonsai Clubs put on particularly impressive displays. (see pics) Needless to say we munched on a few of the “delicacies” on sale along the way: a pork sausage on a stick (20p) which was actually full of rice, and of course some noodles. I must point out that although we first enjoyed the noodle soups in the south which were like a consume with thin noodles , we are now both noodled out by the thick gloopy pad thai noodles which are more common. The same applies to the local beer; we are Chang'd out and now resort to paying more for Heineken which in Chiang Mai is anywhere from 1.50 to 1.70 Gbp per pint bottle. Anna has resorted to Thai whiskey and coke!
Feeling the need for something solid, western and meaty we went to the highly recommended Chiang Mai Saloon where I paid a record breaking 400 baht (8 Gbp) for a 400g t bone: very tasty, very tender but could have eaten 3 of them! A better choice was the 400g of pork chop which I also tried for half the price. Don't bother with the mashed potato, its lumpy and tastes of garlic.
So far we have found the North a refreshing change from the mega tourism overkill of the southern Islands
Sunday 7 February
Hired a very poxy motor scooter for the day for 200 baht and explored the Doi Sutep Mountain and temple. I found the temple itself to be a very grand construction in a beautiful location but thought it ruined by us ie tourists in their hundreds. What could have been a very impressive view over Chiang Mai was unfortunately shrouded by mist so we carried on and upwards to about 1500m to a local village the name of which seemed to change with each road sign. Anyway regardless of it's name, it took about 17 years to find it on our horrible underpowered hair dryer and consisted of very little apart from a few surly locals, some tin shacks, solar panels, scrawny chickens and a host of the ubiquitous scabby dogs. Back down we went and headed for the next “attraction”; a Mong village ie belonging to the hill tribe of that name................mmmmmmmmh...well........maybe it was or maybe was not but what it definitely is, is a market, a very neat and may I say overpriced market with very little of any interest apart from a small stall which sold some delicious fermented pork which was unfortunately, the highlight of our day so far. Saturation tourism has had a decidedly crass effect here.
Having already signed up for a 3 day trek from Chiang Mai we were gutted to discover that there are 6 camp sites on Doi Sutep which you can easily hike between without a guide, will provide tents for reasonable price and are actually very eco and interesting. Coffee is also grown here as a government program introduced some years back to provide local farmers with an alternative to growing opium. The coffee is excellent! This area of the National park looked very untouched and inviting. None of this info is provided by local travel agents for obvious reasons so if you fancy an alternative to designer packages find tourist information and consider a DIY trek.

Feeling a little hacked off with ourselves for doing insufficient research we eventually head for home and despite a couple of harrowingly close calls where our hair dryer nearly ran out of juice, we hit the outskirts of CM and emerge ourselves in the rush hour traffic hoping to make our 1730 hr meeting with our trekking group. Apart from the utter horror of being surrounded by buses and trucks bellowing out vile fumes and threatening to squash us at every junction, the blasted contraption we were perched so precariously on, refused to go in straight lines largely due to the fact that its pathetically thin poxy wheels would struggle to support a perambulator containing a healthy 6 month old. It stood no chance whatsoever of behaving itself with 2 large “long-pigs” on board especially when the pilot could think of nothing other than throwing it in a ditch and going for beer! A premature turn to the south almost had us on our way back to Bangkok, before I realised that it was impossible to head southwards for 30 minutes as the ring road is only about 2km long in any given direction. After a death defying U turn and some horrifically irresponsible manouvres back through town, weeving in and out with feet scraping on the floor, we got to our meeting at 1729!! A victory for Indianna Wallace! (I'll let Anna explain) .

Anna: Well as tourists we have to wear, and rightly so, these ridiculous helmets which are exactly the same as worn by Wallace and Grommit, see picture 'we are Wallace and grommit!! I thought this rush hour traffic chaos was hilarious..a, because I wasn't driving and b. because all I could hear from the back seat was Dave continuously uttering ' Oh my giddy aunt', …..'oh my giddy aunt', hilarious. So we made it back for our trekking meeting by the skin of our teeth and met our group and trek guide. Very basic information, 'Jungle Jo' as he had named himself didn't know how many km we would be walking or what altitude we would reach...hmmmmmm.

Anyway we packed our gear, had an early night and met our group for breakfast.....all well so far... until we were removed from our group ( that we had spent time getting to know!) and told to go in the other minivan!!!!! As it turned out we ended up with a great group, 1 swede, 4 polish living in London, 2 french, and 2 Aussies (mother and daughter). We were to spend 3 days and 2 nights in the jungle and were not convinced it would be exactly what we hoped for but had an open mind. Ie we wouldn't normally take 2 bottles of whiskey with us on a trek but it seemed somehow appropriate. After 30 mins in the minibus they dropped us off at a rubbish market for 40 mins....to buy our things...like toilet roll...we had all bought our...things!!!! Then another hour in the minivan (this minivan is a jeep with seats in the back along the edges). On arrival we walked for about 30 mins then were stopped for lunch!!!! Jesus were we ever gonna get going????? This was pretty much how the 3 days were, we walked rather than trekked (except for a few steep hills) at a very slow pace through jungle covered in fallen leaves so we sounded like a herd of elephants! We visited a waterfall which had more water than fall. It was rather like a nature ramble at school with very little nature! Our digs the first night were rustic and made of bamboo, however alcohol, great people and whiskey made the nights sleep rather comfortable. We were fed, by candlelight, on ...rice...fried pumpkin, stir fry beansprouts and green curry, very nice and enough for 20 people! Our guide Mr O, showed us some impressive card tricks, we played several drinking games (including Bunnies which they call Buffalo) and Dave managed to sell the young Ozzie girl to a local drunk pensioner for 16 cows much to her mothers horror when he tried to follow her to bed!!! A slight misunderstanding we think!

The next day was a little harder, more uphill, noodles for lunch then a ramble to our next base camp and another waterfall, this had more fall and was also our shower, freezing cold and no soap!!!! At this point we were only 5 as the 4 polish and the Ozzies had chosen one night only, the french guys who didn't speak english began to speak extremely well and the swede was fluent in english so between us all we managed. Our guide was now Mr L, a lovely young cheeky lad who also produced some lovely grub, spicey green beans, rice....and a chicken massaman curry. He later had us in absolute hysterics when he confided in us that actually the 2 polish guys that had left us earlier were lady boys!!! ..and that he had been ordered by Mr O not to mention lady-boys at all the previous night as they were convinced that these guys were it!How we laffed …..looking back they were slightly camp..but lady-boys they were not! He proudly brought us a few frogs to look at, and after a few beers, at 10pm we hit the sack for what was to be a very cold, uncomfortable night. Morning brought us boiled eggs, toast and mountains of pineapple and watermelon.
(NOTE FROM DAVE: I MAKE NO APOLOGIES FOR THE FACT THAT I AM AN ENGLSHMAN AND WHILE I STRIVE TO BE ADVENTUROUS, STILL ENJOY STANDARD FOOD STUFFS ESPECIALLY AT BREAKFAST TIME, BY THIS I MEAN TEA,CIGARETTES, EGGS BACON, TOAST ETC AND VERY OCCASIONALLY, A CROISSANT. I CAN HARDLY DESCRIBE MY HORROR AT THE BEHAVIOUR OF MR L OUR GUIDE ON THIS OTHERWISE BEAUTIFUL MORNING AND STILL SHUDDER AT THE THOUGHT OF HIM OFFERING ME A WHITE ENAMEL BOWL CONTAINING WHAT HE DESCRIBED AS "TARPOW". THE TARPOW WAS INDEED THE GREEN AND RED EMORPHOUS GLOB THAT REMAINED AFTER MR L HAD SQUASHED A 3 INCH LONG TADPOLE INTO HIS DISH, HACKED IT INTO BITS THEN PROCEEDED TO DRIBBLE THE SLOP INTO HIS MOUTH. HOW HE LAUGHED AND HOW I BARFFED!! REVOLTING INDEED!)
After a leisurely walk down the mountain we were picked up in the van and fed lunch (we were still full) it was unfortunately Pad Thai...agggghhhhhhh!!!!! We then arrived at our elephant camp which was wonderful, we had a 45 min elephant ride where we were covered with snot a few times and sprayed with water. They truly are fantastic animals and we slightly regret not spending a week on an elephant camp learning how to be a 'Mahoot'. Then onto the river where 4 of us embarked on a raft made of bamboo, Dave helped navigate and we got rather wet but all good fun. And that was that, back to Chang Mai, a great 3 days if somewhat drawn out but we met some fantastic people and the whole trip was only 40 quid each. So just to briefly outline the marvellous wildlfe viewed on this trek, I will list the whole sorry list:
1 dead snake
2 "jungle sparrows"
2 frogs
Endless living tadpoles
The squashed tadpole
5 water buffaloes
3 cows
5 million scabby useless mangy dogs
3 small spiders
and an ant!!!!

NIGHTS SLEEP RUINED BY BARKING DOGS ; 6 ON TAO
NUMBER OF SHARTS SO FAR: NIL (BUT ONLY JUST)

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Photos

Postbox
Lets keep it simple!

Original Rickshaw
There aren't many of these left in the world

Mr L and Mr O
Mr O doing his card tricks

The deal is sealed
16 cows it was for the ozzie girl, Jo

Our shower
brrrrrrrrrrrh!

A lovely vista
..over the paddy fields

The white temple
On the way to the Loas border.....really amazing

The Laos Border
Just about to cross the Mekong River into Laos and the chaos of passport control!

Comments

[gaz]

good to hear you're still both going strong. the pics look amazing! keep the blogs coming. makes my whole week (or should I say hole weak) when i read them!