Simon's despatch: Chiang Mai

Wat an awesome place - I love Thailand, there's so much to do and so many bad puns to make!

Even the journey from Krabi in the south to Chiang Mai in the north was fun. We'd decided to fly rather than spend 24hrs on a coach and as luck would have it Phuket airport is near a beach so I was able to get in an hours kite surfing while we waited for the plane! :)

Chiang Mai itself is known as the culture and trekking capital of Thailand. Every 5th building is a Wat (temple), monks wander the streets in orange robes and women are banned from temples under construction due to the bad vibe they bring - I imagine comments along the lines of "gold is a very heavy colour, don't you think beige would create a feeling of more space" and "that picture's not hanging straight" might spoil the Buddist monks Zen nature and knock them back ten notches from nirvana.

Chiang Mai is also packed full of things to do. Annoyingly we were limited to only 6 days due to the silly 15 day visa you get for crossing a land border. So after losing the first morning to planning it was full steam ahead with a quick walking tour of wats around Chiang Mai.

The following day we went on a jungle trek that involved seeing some long necked women (see photos section,) riding an elephant, staying the night in a hill tribe before frolicking in a waterfall, white water rafting and then finally finishing off on a bamboo raft. Phew!

The elephants were cool. It's a slightly weird feeling being groped by the nose of a one ton animal that's following your elephant and knows you've got a stash of sugarcane hidden from it! The whitewater rafting was surprisingly good as the water was quite low making it very technical to dodge between the exposed rocks. The other raft of our group got stuck between some rocks for quite a while and had to put up with spectators mocking them for a while before helping push them back off the rocks.

We met a really fun group of people from all corners of Britain, Ireland and Paris on the trek who we then went to watch Thai boxing with on the evening of our return. After the boxing finished we drifted on to a bar until they kicked us out at 3:30am wanting to close. This goes a long way to explaining why we didn't really achieve anything the next day apart from a late lunch, before our cookery course at 4pm.

The cookery course was great with just one problem - there were 5 courses and after preparing each course we sat down to eat it. This meant we started eating just after 5pm having only started our rather large lunch at 2pm. Rapidly it became a test of stamina and stomach capacity. We couldn't leave any food because it was too nice (of course ;) so instead we just looked at each other with fear and trepidation as we realised we'd hit what should have been capacity by the end of the second course. Luckily gluttony got us through and we had a fantastic time cooking and eating Thai classics before waddling home to be crushed by our stomachs as we tried to sleep.

The following day Beth had a nice pottering relaxation day whilst I went mountain biking with X-mountain biking company. It turns out the X stood for extreme and they were not lying!

They had proper full suspension downhill mountain bikes like konas and treks. We were kitted out in full body armour and full face helmets and driven to the top of a mountain overlooking Chiang Mai. When I asked if people ever crashed I was told it's more a question of how many people crash on each run - how many times. Having so far never crashed during my mountain biking career this all sounded a bit intimidating.

It was without a doubt the hardest, steepest most extreme mountain biking i've ever done. The start was so steep you had to hang off the back of your saddle at all times to not go over the handle bars. The overnight rain had made it so slippery that if you did more than just tap the brake, you'd fishtail and come off. A lot of it was heavily rutted and there were some drop-offs and jumps.... It was awesome! :)

I managed the first course with just putting my forearm down once and completely ditching my bike once, although my feet spent a lot of time in contact with the ground. I was one of the lucky ones however as it was like the charge of the light brigade with bodies flying this way and that. Nobody got seriously I injured though and all bikes survived.

A few people had dropped out by the second & last run of the day. It was even more hardcore. Even steeper and after a slippery top section it got very very rocky! I worked out in the end that the tactic was pretty much just to go straight, go fast, hang on and avoid hitting any rocks that were bigger than half the size of your wheel - the suspension dealt with the rest. This run had even more spectacular falls, a puncture and a broken rear derailer.

However no one got to hurt and it's all in a days work for the guides who fixed everything so we could carry on. I had no falls this time but did blister my hands and then rub through the blister even with wearing gloves due to the vibration of riding down a boulder field for 17k.

On both rides they dried out lower down and there were sections of lovely fast single track once you'd survived the initial kamikaze kilometres - so I had a fantastic time. The only bad incident was as I started down one of the steep rocky sections something stung my lower back. For reasons of self preservation I didn't give much thought to it at the time but as we were going to bed around midnight it still hurt just as much and Beth said it had gone white in the centre with a deep purple ring around it.

Not being prone to worry unnecessarily I googled "bite white centre purple ring" the first hits you get back are 'black widow spider bite' but I was pretty sure they are only in the Americas. Still not being prone to worry unnecessarily I googled "poisonous spiders Thailand" the first hit you get back is 'Thailand black widow spider'. We went straight to the hospital.

Now just because the doctor wrote down 'insect bite' and only prescribed bacterio ban and some anti-histamines instead of anti-venom doesn't mean it wasn't a black widow - he may not know the difference between the two. But I guess the fact I'm fine (except it's still itching a little) and didn't die even a little bit might indicate we over-reacted slightly. However i do think it's funny that despite mountain biking being so dangerous and wearing all that body armour i was ultimately felled by a blinking insect!

Our last day in Chaing Mai was spent learning to be a mahout (elephant rider/keeper to you and I). It was excellent fun although I had a sneaking suspicion the elephants may have done it all before. As when learning to command them where to go, to maintain the illusion, you had to be quick to give your commands to turn and reverse before they did it all by themselves!

We rode bare back and sitting on their necks up to a waterfall, where're we got to wash them while they frolicked in the water. All pretty idillic except for the elephants propensity to defecate in water and the feeling the ele-dung was following you!

We were lucky that our elephant had a baby of two years that kept suicidally running in-between her legs as we trekked. Thus requiring a little more mahouting skills to keep her going than the others - oh yes and it was very cute.

Next Laos!