For today we had booked a cheap 'a little bit of everything' tour whick took us elephant riding (highly uncomfortable!), to a hilltribe village (souvenir hell!), rafting (in rather still water), bamboo rafting (just plain boring!) and to an orchid farm (ditto). The highlight was a trek through the jungle to a waterfall where we went swimming. Beat from all the activity, we were just hanging on a bench in town with some streetfood and a beer when we got caught i...

Festival of Lights is coming up! And the hotel is decorating like crazy...

Morten's road to enlightenment (2) After finally finding the right place where the 'Monkchat' is being held, we got our very own young buddhist monk (orange robe and shaved hair and all) to sit down with us and talk. It started out a bit akward (what on earth do you ask a monk?), but turned into a lively talk that answered many of our questions about buddhism and the life of a monk, which apparently requires quite some dedication: Only two meals a day ( and only...

Morten's road to enlightenment (1) Today we rented some bycicles to ride to a temple on the other end of town where you supposedly can talk with some buddhist monks ...Let's just say that Thailand is not quite as used to Western bikers as Copenhagen is. At a roundabout we encountered some fancy animal blow-up 'sculptures', which apparently stand for the Asian zodiac signs ( like year of the monkey, year of the rabbit, year of the big snake and - surprisingly en...

Chiang Mai in northern Thailand is a city chuck-full of temples... And even being the temple ignorants that we usually are, we just had to visit a couple. That of course means for me: 'polite' clothes aka t-shirt with sleeves and sarong over my shorts. Hot hot hot. The temples are pretty nice though, with the added bonus of a free horoscope station (a little shelf with number compartments in each of which you can find papers with your horoscope. You draw a stick...