Week 3: Chiang mai cont..

Welcome back to the city whose restaurants have names only containing adjectives, like "so good", "nice kitchen", or "best taste kitchen". Well at least you know what you are getting (so they say anyway). It has been another great week with the highlights being the trek through the jungle and cooking school. We now have many haunts we frequently visit and now have the owners waving to us as we walk past. This may be that they like us and are sweet, or they are just clever business people.

Food:

Apart from a really nice river side restaurant we went to last night for a girls 21st it has been a week of mainly repeats of food, so I will take this chance to talk about the food of the cooking course. We started (after a small breakfast, thankfully) at 9:00 where a cook took us on a tour of the local market and explained all the things we have been scared of and avoided. There were all kinds of foods there, from year old shrimp paste to many vegetables I have never even seen before let alone tasted. Then we made our way to the cookery school and knew we were in for a treat when we walked under the "Our food is guaranteed to make you look pregnant!" sign. It was a great set up, they brought out the fresh produce which we cut up then wandered over to our individual wok on gas cooktop and deep fried, pan fried or simmered it. We ended up making spicy fish salad, chicken and ginger stir fry, pad thai, masaman curry, cocunut tom yum soup with prawns, and to top it all off, fried bananas with ice-cream. After eating all that (we all made our own separate dishes) we were pretty much done for eating for the next 16 hours. The masaman curry was the highlight of the savoury dishes, but everyone loved the banana desert, especially as we Australians are so banana poor at the moment. By the way, the goal of averaging the eating of one banana per day for the entire trip is going great, in fact, I think i'm set to about mid autumn.

Drink:

Time around chiang mai is allowing us to continually find cheaper and cheaper drinks, which means we can drink more and more (are you proud mums?). Actually, this is not all that true, we have not been hitting it hard. We have found a great warm up venue, tequila shots less then $2 and cocktails just over $2! To celebrate the 21st we went up to the roof top bar, which was what it said. Although it had great buckets of alcohol, we had to climb 4 flights of the dodgiest staircases to get there, and take off our shoes before the last flight. This turned out to be the night's downfall as Linsey's thongs were stolen (and if it wasn't for lucky timing, Bec's would have been too). We have some more friends coming this weekend and will be having a few big ones (it is the King's bday on the 5th of dec) so we should have some good stories to tell after that.

Activities:

About time I got to this, the trek has been one of the highlights of the trip to date. Started off early on a saturday morning when we were picked up and shuttled to a local market to pick up the food for the weekend. Unfortunately I was outvoted when suggesting we pick up the small intestine and cow tongue which had been sitting out in the open for what looked weeks. Jumped back into the van and headed out to the elephant camp where we had a great lunch before it was time for some good old elephant wrangling. Not sure how much the elephant enjoyed us getting around on him, especially me sitting on his neck, but we had great fun. The trip went for about an hour and included a little walk through a river, and apparently we choose a cheeky elephant but he squirted us with his trunk! After dominating the jockeying of huge animals we headed to the deep dark jungle and started our trek. It was amazing walking through the jungle seeing all the scenary. The only thing we were missing was the machetes to hack our way through, but it was already hard enough work. We trekked for about 3.5 hours before arriving at our amazing local village at the top of the mountain. It wasn't amazing for what it had, but rather for what it didn't have, which was basically everything! This includes individual showers, they all shower at the same few showerheads with no cubicles or anything. Guess this builds up good community morale. The view from our huts balcony was absolutely amazing, just looking out over the hills. The photos we took really don't do it any justice at all. But when it got dark, the view being gone basically took away our only thing to do, so we headed into our hut, had a great dinner cooked by our trusty guide Nong, and then were in bed by 8. Only 1 of us fell asleep at that time though, most of the rest were tanks and lasted to 10 (it was a big day ok). We were woken at 2am, and 4am, and 4:10, and 4:20.. (i think you see were I am going with this) by the lovely cacophony of roosters crowing, dogs fighting and pigs rooting. Just to give us that real tourist experience, it seems that they had gathered the whole towns animals and placed them under our hut (huts are on stilts for the rainy season). Surprisingly the bamboo walls and thin bark thatching were not quite enough to keep that noise out. The second day consisted of a morning downhill hike to a great waterfall which had natural water slides built in. After that we went white water rafting (which actually had decent falls) and finished off with bamboo rafting. Lucky it was very hot because for us it was more like bamboo submarining. We got given a small one and hence spent the whole 20 mins submerged under a foot of water, but it was great fun. We loved the trek and would recommend it to anyone who was coming here. During the week we also had tickets o the international royal flora show which showcased gardens from around the world. Apparently the countries didn't get the memo that this was a flora show, and it served as an architecture meet. Well there has to be something that sucked on our trip i guess. Today we headed to the Chiang Mai zoo which was pretty good actually. We got to see some giant panda, and the best feeding session of tigers i have ever seen. They actually hung the meat off ropes and teased the tigers until they would pounce and attack the food. But the most awesome part was when a tiger climbed up a 10 metre tree to grab a tasty steak at the top.

Misc:

I just have to send out a personal thanks for an anonymous source of anti-constipation material. This black goop (which looks a lot like a stool itself) is a super hyper concentrated mix of prunes which is around 7000% pure fibre!! This material has same serious pull, that rivaling a 747 jet engine I'm sure. But we are all pretty regular now so it is great!

Well, it is our last week this week in Chiang Mai, we will try and make the most of it. It is sad to be finishing here, but also looking forward to the next part of the adventure.

Happy AIDS day (which for us meant waking up to what we thought was a bomb blast and then a walking orchestra outside our hotel window!!)

Lins + Gizl (photos), Daz (Writing) + Bec