The Journey and Place!
Sadly said our goodbyes to team chilli and stepe and i ventured back to Bangkok and treated ourselves to a flight up to Chiang Mai, was a little concerend as to how safe the flight would be having only paid about a tenner for it but it was fine! Headed to the highly recommended Spicy Thai guest house. This place was really really nice, couldnt believe how friendly and helpful all the staff were! Met up with a new group of people on the first day and spent the whole time in Chaing Mai together, again really nice people! really enjoy this aspect to traveling!! We headed to the night bazaar together which was cool. Loads of stalls and pushy sales people, but a good experience. On the first night in true british fasion we bought a load of alcohol anbd sat on the roof terrace till 5am drinking, laughing and getting to know each other!! Chaing Mai is pretty much the opposite extreme to the south islands we have come from. Much cleaner and alot more scenic, alot more laid back here, not like the partying south. A refreshing change!!

Maui Thai!!!!
This was soooo awesome!!! You would of loved this azzman, i have taken some videos for you!! Turned up and this dodgy looking stadium, if you can even call it that!! The evenings events started with 2 1o year olds kicking the crap out of each other!! It seems they start their national sport early in Thailand, i wouldnt wanna take these kids on!! The second bout featured 12 year olds and ended in a K.O.!! Really cant be good for a growing child, but highly entertaining! The fights got better as the competitors got older. Great value for money, there were  fights and 7 of them ended in knock out! One fight featured an American guy vs a Thai bloke. This was fight of the nightm didnt look fair the American was twice as big as the Thai!! That power came through when the thai took a massize right hand followed by an elbow and was unconcious for a good few minutes!! it was awesome!!!!!!

2 days 1 night trek
Been so looking forward to this! We were driven 2 hours north of Chiang Mai to firstly visit the long neck tribe. The women here wear big gold rings around their necks to originally protect from tiger bites. The effect of this stretches the neck. It was interesting to see but kind of felt like a human zoo. Next we rode elephants! I expected this to be over flat planes or perhaps down roads. But no, it was up very small path ways up the moutain side! Our elephant did us proud though. Kept cracking me up how the guide sat on its head and controlled it by making a series of grunts and wiggling from side to side! Great experience, really felt the power of this animal through the thuds of every step it made. Now we started walking, much more difficult than i expected. Narrow, ducty pathways with sheer drops to the side. We walked through thick jungle and saw amazing sites. Our guide 'Ton' was a legend, really looked after us. We reached a beautiful waterfall in which we swam, was really cold but refreshing after all that walking! Day 1 final destination was the 'black larham' village. This was one of those things i never thought i would dom we spent the night in a village in the middle of a jungle with a tribe! Ton cooked us a fantastic meal & we watheched the tribe do a traditional dance around a fire, we all joined in! Party was over when a spider crawled up my trousers and bit me!! Very scary/painful time, was just waiting to pass out. Apparently this spider was only dangerous to children or weak adults. After a covering of tiger balm and 2 gloves of garlic straped to it i was right as rain!

Day 2 started with breakfast followed by 3 hours of jungle trekking. Our first destination was the bat cave. To my dissapointment Bruse Wayne was no where to be seen! Pretty cool cave tho, the bats didnt sounds best pleased to us being there! The afternoon was VERY SKETCHY white water rafting. Im sure the so called 'captain' was trying to make us hit all the rocks! One point we crashed into a huge rock and the boat was sticking vertically into the air!! Was a scary moment but we got out of it!!! The day ended with a nice somber trip on a bamboo raft up the river. Fantastic trip, got all that for about 2o quid.