Good Afternoon everyone

Sorry it's been a while, in short I have been on a boat for the past few days and struggled with internet access so a nice little treat for you today will be 3 blogs, one for Chaing Rai, one for Chaing Khong and the other for the slow boat from Chiang Khong to Luang Prabang.

So I will start off with Chaing Rai, we arrived here after a very draining 4-5 hour bus journey from Chaing Mai. We were also greeted with the only rain we have seen all trip so far, a nice little thunderstorm but this only lasted half an hour or so and feshened things up a little. We were going to visit the night Bazaar on the first night but the rain meant this wasn't really dooable so we grabbed something to eat and went into the CAT bar and proceeded to have a few beverages and play draughts and connect 4. Rock n roll I know but it was a good laugh even though I never won a single game of draughts.

The next day we went to visit Wat Rong Khun or The White Temple as it is known to tourists, this is my favourite temple I have visited so far, I guess maybe because it is so modern it was only completed in 2008. In one of the buddha shrine rooms it has painted pictures of popular film and tv characters such as Spiderman, Superman, Ben 10, Transformers and Michael Jackson amongst others. After this we got a tuk tuk (these are the local transport method are shown in the picture attached for anyone who doesn't know) back and decided to go around the local market, after getting lost for an hour or so we headed back to our hostel and had a power nap.

That night we went to the night bazaar which was pretty good, we then went back to Cat bar where I won at pool and continued losing at draughts, we also inadvertindly had tea in a go-go bar or brothel, anyway we decided to hit the night clubs as it was our last night in Chaing Rai so we went to Par Club which is a shaped liked a UFO and is apparently the biggest club in Chaing Rai but when we went in we were the only two people in there, we were joined in the club later by three Chinese guys but we decided to sip our free beer and head somewhere else. So we ended up in a club called Sugar Beat, these was a lot busier and there was a live band on who suprisingly opened their set with a cover of a Justin Bieber song, Earl especially enjoyed this. We were also surprised that all the locals were ordering whisky and other spirits by the bottle. I also got chatted up by a lady man, which scared me quite a bit so I still haven't used my lady boy vouchers. After this episode I wanted to leave as I could feel the eyes of the lady boy burning through me, so we went to a club called The Womb, which was also empty, to my surprise they had the Bilboa v United game on so watched the first half with a beer before heading back at closing time, I wanted to carry on watching the game but no where was open, luckily the receptionist at our hostel had the game on his laptop so I stayed to watch the disapointing second half there, the highlight being seeing a rat run up the stairs and flying cockroach landing on the keyboard.

And that my faithfull blog followers sums up my time in Chaing Rai