Tuesday 3rd July 2007: Here we are in Chiang Mai in the north of Thailand. Since our last blog we travelled north by train to Phitsanulok stayed just a couple of hours then went west to Sukhothai. There wasn't much in Sukhothai except markets & about 8 million guest houses as most travellers base themselves there for easy day trips to the Old City of Sukhothai about 8 miles away, so we did the same.

Old Sukhothai is a National Historical Park, an old walled city with amazing ruins. We again hired some womens bikes & explored the park. I got a puncture & had to cycle back to the hire shop as quickly as my lil legs could before the tyre was completely flat. A distance of about 2 miles in 37 degree heat on a bike with no gears.... near on killed me!!

From there we caught the bus to Chiang Mai where we have been for the last 4 days. This place is our most favourite place in Thailand so far. It's a really pretty city surronded by a moat & the remains of an old fortified wall. There are lots of good bars & restaraunts with lush green & leafy gardens.

Yesterday we hired a scooter & rode up the mountain (1700m) to hang out at a temple & get amazing views of the surrounding countryside & down onto Chiang Mai. We then headed for the hot springs for a natural bath & jaccui. 3 hours & 3 tanks of petrol later we had to give up as we couldn't find it. So we stopped of at a really lovely little town called Mae Rim & had dinner.

Sunday 8th July 2007:  We have just got back from a 3 day trek into the jungle of northern Thailand.  We were very lucky as we had a really good bunch of people in our group. 3 irish girls, 1 american girl, 1 canadian boy,us & brilliant thai guide called Date (pronounced "Dead").

Our adventure statred with an elephant trek into the jungle & down to a water fall where the elephants played in the water with us sitting on their backs.  We then took it in turns to sit on our elephants head & rode him up a track...somehow I dont think he liked it very much as he kept picking mud up with his trunk & throwing it up at us so I guess thats his way of getting revenge!

We then went for a 6km trek into the jungle & through a hill tribe village to our first camp for the night.  Our guide & a couple of the tribe people cooked us a fantastic meal on the fire & we then went to visit one of the tribes family in their house.  All the houses in the village are built with timber & bamboo from the jungle.  They are on stillts about 10 feet up with pigs& chickens living under the house.

We were introduced to the head of the family & all had tea with her which tasted nothing like tea, more like smokey water but somehow it was still pretty damn good. We we're able to ask anything we liked and learnt so much about their way of life and the history of the tribe. It was really amazing to have the opportunity to gain an understanding of what this tribe has gone through and how they live and work throughout their everyday lives and how they would deal with situations.

The next day we had a 10km trek through the rice paddies, farmland, along a river, over the river, through the river, up hill, down hill, round &round the garden..... It rained the whole time which at first was a blessing as it would of been too hard to do in the blazing sunshine, but the more it rained the muddier it became & the girls kept taking it in turn to slip, slide and fall all over the place- very funny to watch but not so much if you we're in the line of fire!!

As we were walking a long, Andy suddenly noticed he had a leech on him!! Eurgh!!! We then all checked and found out that we all had leeches all over out feet, in our shoes on and up our legs and beyond!! Little blood sucking barstewards!! We spent the next couple of hours letting out screams of abuse and freaking out everytime we felt the slightest of thing...Looking back, I wish we filmed it purely for comedy value-it must have looked hilarious!

We eventually got to our home for the night- pretty much in one piece. It was lovely little bamboo hut in the middle of the jungle with absolutley nothing around it apart from the River Mae..which also turned out to be our shower for the night! We all decided to jump in and have a scrub up to make ourselves as squeeky clean as possible ready for the candle lit dinner but couldn't resist a few timotei adverts before hand.

We had another fantastic meal all made by our guide with the simplest of tools-this guy was seriously talented! We had a hilarious evening making him do Borat impressions...just another string he can add to his bow....(Pause) NOT!!!!!! (if you've seen Borat you'll know what I'm talking about!?)

On our final day we went on bamboo rafts down the river Mae and its rapids...We had 4 people on each boat one with 3 drivers including Andy and one boat with 2. Andy had to steer the the boat with a huge bamboo stick guiding it and pushing it away from the rocks in the river under the instuction of Date...My driver couldnt speak a word of english and was half my size so I wasn't quite as confident. After about three minutes we managed to have a an 'issue' with a rock, which made us all go flying forwards and eat raft! After that slight hicup, things were going pretty smoothly until the driver lost his stick, and abandond ship-without any explantation. We all held on as tightly as possible and we went crashing into some rocks and trees....We kind of felt safer there than with the driver in control until we heard screams from behind us and saw Andys raft heading straight for us!! We managed to get off the raft into the stream and Andys boat smashed into ours making Date land head first into the rocks...I swear the man is invincable!! He got up and started tieing bamboo together to fix the boats-literally within a couple of minutes we were back en route...about 10 minutes later we were heading through some rapids and crahsed into another rock-possibly one off the biggest rocks that was in the river- and to be honest- we should have been able to miss it, it wasnt exactly hard to see!?

Our boat was wedged onto the rock and the river was flowing really quickly-pushing all three girls into each other so we were all in a ball at the front holding onto each other as tightly as possible!...Our bloody driver had abandoned ship again but thankfully Date came swimming down river to save us.  The next thing I knew I had lost my grip and slipped back into the current and started going down stream-I absolutley s*** myself!! Thankfully one of the girls and Date grabbed me before I hit the rock that was behind us in time...We then had to balance on possibly the sharpest rock in the world until Date could fix our raft, save our bags and work out how to get us back to saftey.....it was such an adrelanine rush!!

Once we got back onto dry land we did the final part of or treck-the weather was really beautiful so we were really fortunate to be able to get some lovely pictures and capture the moment.

We then did our final treck for about an hour and then started to head back to Chiang Mai for some noodle soup and ice creams...We all fell asleep in the car on the way back until we reached our last treat of the day which was a stunning waterfall!! It was really impressive, incredibly powerful and a great way to finish our trip.