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Apologies for the late update....
So we got the night train from Bangkok to Chiang Mai and arrived in Chiang Mai on the 14th May. The night train wasn't as bad as we thought - Joe and I watched films on our ipod and the thais slept the whole way. We even got dinner and breakfast - the coffee was still crap though! We arrived at our hostel which was a little bit out of Chiang Mai centre but was nice and 'Peter' the owner was friendly. We even had a lizard friend in our room and TV channels that played sex and the city.
We managed to find our first and only good cup of tea in Chiang Mai...I'm sure those that have been to Thailand also discovered the tea/coffee is not nice and they use coffee mate instead of milk even in tea!! We found a cafe called Bon Cafe which was a proper coffee shop. We also had a good breakfast there ... Joe had an American (still with a weird sausage) and I had a fitness - Cornflakes, a yoghurt, 3 toast, juice and tea, BON! We said before we left we wouldn't talk about food too much in our blog but in Thailand it is funny because you never quite know what your going to get.
Apart from finding a good cuppa we also found a cool night market which had food, clothes, thaiii masssaage which we went to a couple of times. We stocked up on some real designer goods. To Joe's delight we also found a big screen (covered in a few lizards) in the middle of the market which played the football so we watched Spurs beat Liverpool 2-0 much to the Thai's disgrace.
We spent a day going to Tiger Kingdom and 'Monkey School' too. We went in a pen with 'Small' tigers about 6 months old, which weren't really that small at all!!! It was a bit odd - not sure if they were drugged a little but they were pretty big for small tigers and i'm sure they could do some damage if they wanted to. Monkey school was funny and odd too - they put on a show for us but we were the only ones at the show. The monkeys rode bikes, pushed trolleys and did all sorts of tricks. We then looked round and fed some of the monkeys. I felt a bit sorry for some of them as they looked a bit bored and sad. Some of them just ate each others nits, ran around in circles or played with their willys!
On the Monday we left for our 2 day 1 night trek. We met some nice people in our group. an Aussie couple, German couple, polish girl and a guy from cornwall who must have been about 50-60 and had been travelling on his own all over the world, oh and our guide 'R'. We walked for the first day and it pissed it down the whole way. Everyone was soaked by the time we arrived at the camp which was a hill tribe village with lots of animals running about and people living in the middle of nowhere. We braved the cold shower and the toilet Luke Gilson told us about. R' cooked us some food which was good whilst we all just sat around and chatted. I think everyone crashed out about 9 o'clock much to 'R's' disapointment as he'd just got his guitar out. We did get a rendition of Wonderwall though before bed. We slept in one big wooden hut, each with our own mosquito nets. it was pretty cosy and stayed relatively bug free. neither of us slept that much. Boy Joe was awake in the middle of the night and said someone did a huge fart which practically shook the hut. The roosters were up before it was light and woke everyone up, i think their clocks were wrong.
The next day we got up and "R' cooked us a big breakfast of scrambled eggs and toast. we then set off leaving behind those who were doing 2 days and 3 nightst. We joined up with another group and trekked for about 3-4 hours in the rain again. it was good fun though very slippy, girl Jo fell over and got a wet bum, although even our guide fell over so there was no shame in that! after many 'just 10 more minutes' we reached the bottom and were taken by our truck to a restaurant to have lunch.
In the afternoon we went Elephant riding, they were huge!! and one of them was making noises like a Dinosaur when we arrived. they took us through a bit of jungle and up some really steep, wet and muddy slopes. it was amazing how they just walked straight up with three people (2 Jo(e)'s and 1 guide) on it's back. We gave himn lots of bananas to keep him/her going though.
We then got back in the truck and moved on to do some Bamboo rafting, which was an adventure. Initially it was going to be for 1 hour, although the river was swollen due to all the rain we had and it looked more like white water rafting. we had to move further down as it was too dangerous even with tha'is levels of health and safety. When we did get on thge water was still pretty rough but it was good fun. About halfway our guide started shouting to his mate behind and desperately tried to stop our raft. There was a tree in the middle of the river and we were making a bee line for it. We all had to grab a branch at the side and hold on whilst one of the guides checked it out. We then all got off the rafts and climb along the bank, through lots of trees and bushes with water rushing through our legs. Girl Jo almost went off on her own down the river but she was fine. once the other side of the tree we got back on and made it safely to the bottom. I think our guide was a bit worried as we had been much longer than expected and he was relieved to see us all in one piece. Very wet we then got back in the truck to go back to Chiang Mai.
After another day in Chian Mai we made for the Airport for our flight to Phuket.......
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