Chiang Mai

We took the night train to Chiang Mai. This turned out to be nearly 1000% better than taking the night train through Serbia. I was both grateful and disappointed by this. We made friends with our Thai train hostess who brought us a steady stream of Chang Beer, good soup and bad green curry. We fell asleep in curtained off sub-arctic mini compartments and woke up twelve bumpy hours later in the jungly north of the country. The only really exciting thing about our train journey was the 1960's inspired, or more likely still in service, car of the train decked out in smoke, haze and dim lighting. We think it was the restaurant car, though no food was available, and the picture hardly does it justice: We were greeted by our trekking company who held a sign signalling 'Jon Than'. It took us two moments to realise this meant us.

From there, nothing overly exciting happened other than monsoon-style continuous rain, our first backbreaking Thai Massage experience and meeeting our energetic but slightly drunken trek guide, Jay Jay. He had an affinity for Liverpool Football, 'no money, no honey' jokes and, to no great surprise, Chang Beer.

So we set off on foot to see the local environs. From what I gathered, Chiang Mai is the study abroad equivalent to Edinburgh. This made me love it. But we only had one day to explore the city, and in that one day, we saw: temples, temples, temples, an angry dog, a happy monk and temples.

But they were pretty:
We made friends with the retired ladies in this temple who beckoned us in to participate in a Buddhist service with them. They were delighted we spoke Thai (our one word, thank you) and offered us sticky buns, sweet buns and drinks. The monks stared at us amusedley and after ten minutes of bowing and genuflecting, we rejoined Chiang Mai society.






Loving the spelling mistakes in this country

We had a minor evening debacle of trying to find a restaurant that didn't exist but essentially made it home early for our 6am next morning start. This is, of course, when my camera died, if only briefly for my trek through the jungle. So the next post(s) rely wholly on Sara and Jon's photos.