We got up early in the morning this time so as to secure a place on the bus to Chiang Mai. The Thais dont seem to have come up with an advanced booking system for bus tickets, so unless you're there early on the day you pretty much always face a few hours waiting. Luckily our 6am start paid off, and we reached Chiang Mai not long after 1pm. As we planned to spend a week here we spent some time choosing a guesthouse we were happy to stay in for a while. Chiang Mai has lots of little sois off the main road, many with guesthouses on them, so its easy to find somewhere quieter.

For our first two days we took a Thai Cookery Course at the Chiang Mai Cookery School, which Ben bought me as a present for my birthday last year. As you can imagine, it had been a much anticipated couple of days, but neither of us were disappointed. We were presented with a very comprehensive cookery book with all of the recipes from our course in it, as well as the others they offer, advice on making curry pastes, substituting thai ingredients with those available at home etc. The School itself is owned by Sompon Nabnian, a famous Thai TV Chef, and the classes were held beside his house. On the first day, however, the classes were taken by a group of local Thai girls all of which spoke fluent english and, as we later discovered, had quite a strange sense of humour which i'm not sure even they understood at times! They firstly taught us vegetable carving, which was quite tricky but both of us managed to make something resembling a rose, lotus flower and leaf out of some tomatoes and a carrot! We then moved on to the cooking. All of the dishes were very simple to cook, and we were given a demonstration beforehand and then tips while we cooked. In total we made 7 dishes, including spring rolls and red curry with duck. Ofcourse, after cooking each dish you got to sit down and eat it...it wasnt long before i wished i hadnt had any breakfast!! By the end of the day we were utterly stuffed.

On our second day at the School, Sompon took our class himself. It was quite nerve wracking cooking infront of a professional chef and i was very self conscious of my chopping skills, or lack there of. He turned out to be quite a friendly guy, not like Gordon Ramsey in the least! He seemed to share the same strange sense of humour as his staff though, at one point telling Ben he had something in his eye to try and get him to touch it when he was chopping a chilli! He taught us some the more traditional dishes such as green curry, pad thai and tom yam soup. All very tasty!

Later in the week we visited the Night Bazaar, stalls of crafts and souveniers that sprawl over two or three streets. We saw lots of nice things but were reluctant to buy anything as we're coming back to Thailand before we leave and there are plenty of markets in Bangkok selling similar items. We also took a trip out to Bo Sang, on the outskirts of the city. Here we saw women making paper umbrellas from scratch which were very pretty, but again quite hard to bring home. Our bus driver took us to a few other places on the drive back including a silk factory and gem store (he was given commission by each place for taking us there), but everything was quite a bit out of our price range and we felt very out of place standing in our scruffy clothes next to exquisit diamonds and silk!

On our final day in Chiang Mai we visited the Elephant Nature Park, a few kilometres outside of the city. The park is home to 30 or so elephants which have been rescued from harsh working conditions and abusive owners. The park is run by a woman called Lek, who is well known among animal rights organisations for her work in encouraging better treatment for working elephants. We were introduced to all of the elephants by our guide, and told some of the more harrowing stories of their past lives. One of the elephants was completely blind as her owner had stabbed her in the eyes with a knife whenever she wouldnt cooperate. It was an awful realisation for us that things like this were still happening in Thailand, but nice to see these elephants so happy and well cared for in their new home. We were able to help feed the elephants fruit for their lunch, which was an awesome experience. They took the fruit straight out of our hands with their trunks, although sometimes the younger ones were a bit cheeky and made a grab for the entire basket! We also took the elephants down to the river and bathed them which was a lot of fun. In the afternoon we were shown a documentary about the park which had been made by National Geographic and were again reminded of the awful conditions that had resulted in these elephants being here. Then it was time for a second bath! We both had an excellent day and felt we'd definately made the right decision coming to this park instead of some of the others in the area, where elephants are often mistreated and forced to paint etc in order to entertain tourists. It seems a shame that people would still be tempted to go to places like that.

-S