The locals in Mae Hong Son are, if possible, even more welcoming than those in the tourist centres of the south. The difference is that tourism is new out here and people are therefore genuinely pleased to see you - on the gulf, managing to maintain a perfect smile while a drunken lager lout throws up on your shoes is probably just part of the job description. The traders at the local market have all begun to display a tendency to open any conversation by letting me know that my girlfriend is very beautiful, as though I may not already be aware of this. They do, however, usually use the word wife instead of girlfriend - in this part of the world, courtship involves spending most of your time hanging around with your respective families to ensure that everybody is compatible right the way down the line, so the idea of jetting off around the world with a member of the opposite sex before bothering to settle down and marry them is a concept they are not wholly familiar or comfortable with. Still, stallholders must sell a lot of goods to unsuspecting tourists this way - there's nothing quite like being told that I'm dating a supermodel to make me want to buy a trinket from somebody. I don't, however, think this approach to buttering up the customers would work back home, where telling the six foot body builder who has just come in to buy a newspaper that his girlfriend is a bit of alright may well land you in hospital with a newspaper protruding from an orifice.

Mae Hong Son has a total population of around 250,000, of which half are members of hill tribes and therefore living in remote villages scattered widely around its 8500 square kilometres. This makes the province remarkably uncrowded, and for visitors from the west it is truly refreshing to be able to tramp through virgin rain forest for hours or head down the river in a boat without ever coming across another person. Even in the more densely populated centres where the hotels are, there are few enough people around that you can find time to smile and wave at everyone who goes past. As we stroll along the narrow street outside the Imperial Tara each day, we might encounter the occasional vendor plying his trade from a stall or roadside cart, and at the top of the hill there's a small shop in case we wish to buy an ice cream after the exhausting uphill trek from the hotel, but that's about as busy as it seems to get. One thing I do find slightly surreal is that there is quite a large French community in Mae Hong Son - or, at least, as large a community as you can get in a town of twelve people and a dog. When we settle down in the evening at one of the disproportionate number of restaurants that have sprung up in the middle of town, we do tend to find ourselves surrounded by people speaking French. Perhaps they have a foreign exchange program, and somewhere in Paris there are a large number of bewildered Thai farmers looking for somewhere to park their elephant.

Jong Kham lake is very much the centre of life in Mae Hong Son, surrounded by shops, basic accommodation and rustic looking open fronted restaurants. Some of these look as though they may collapse on you unexpectedly in the middle of the soup course, while others offer a taste of the sixties complete with psychedelic multicoloured cushions, stoned looking individuals and clouds of smoke which make you float on the ceiling when you walk through them. This is also where we came across one of our favourite local eateries with a slightly less local name - Chez Tom - which confused us enormously until we began to notice the amount of people speaking French around town. The food on offer around the lake seems to be wonderfully varied, from local cuisine to burgers and fries - albeit often served up by an elderly Thai lady with a cigarette hanging from the corner of her mouth - so expect to get your cheeseburger with an extra portion of ash.

The idea of a town arranged around a central point of interest certainly isn't unfamiliar to me. Many rural villages back in England surround a public area in which people can meet and hang out, whether it's a green, a pedestrian square or a picturesque boating lake. Granted, most of these places quickly become overrun by local children on bicycles and skateboards attempting to prove that Evel Knievel was nothing but a rank amateur, but at least there is somewhere to go on the rare occasion that the contents of the English Channel isn't falling from the sky. In Thailand, they have a similar love of gathering places, but also feel rather strongly that no social venue is truly complete without a huge glimmering temple the size of a city block dominating the skyline and carefully reflecting the sun into your eyes wherever you stand. For this reason, any visit to a restaurant on the banks of Jong Kham lake will involve quite a lot of open mouthed staring across the water at the magnificent temples of Wat Jong Klang and Wat Jong Kham, because having only one hulking great temple at the center of your town clearly isn't enough. Still, they certainly make the old stone churches we have back home, which I had previously thought of as the epitome of craftsmanship, seem like they were thrown together in a weekend by a cowboy builder. Mae Hong Son is very much a town built around its temples, especially when you consider that these are not the only ones - they are simply the only ones on the lake.

Wat Jong Klang is spectacular even by Thai standards, and bear in mind that Thai standards tend to be rather unforgiving when it comes to buildings with any sort of religious significance. I remember reading somewhere that all the gold in the world would form a cube only sixty feet on each side, small enough to fit underneath the Eiffel Tower - a cursory glance around the temples of Thailand, and it's hard to believe that they don't have most of it. Built nearly two hundred years ago by the Shan, a primarily Theravada Buddhist ethnic group which inhabit Burma and parts of northern Thailand, Wat Jong Kham is the oldest of the two temples, housing a large seated buddha within a building at the northern end of the complex. Neighbouring Wat Jong Klang was originally a simple rest stop for passing pilgrims, with the Wat and monastery being added in the 1860s by the local Shan people. Inside, visitors can view a collection of carved wooden dolls and painted glass panels depicting stories from Buddha's life, but it's the magnificent gilded Chedi (1) which towers over the lake, a structure traditionally built to house a relic of the Buddha or the ashes of a king, which has people reaching for their cameras. First thing in the morning when the mist is rising on the lake, or after the sun has gone down and the temple is lit up in all its glory, this is one photo opportunity that you won't want to miss.

Tomorrow: Elephant Trekking and the Long Necked Karen

(1) Chedi is primarily a term used in Thailand. In other parts of the Buddhist world, this same structure is usually referred to as a Stupa.

About Simon and Burfords Travels:

Simon Burford is a UK based travel writer. He will be re-publishing his travel blogs, chapters from his books and other miscellaneous rantings on these pages over the coming weeks and months, and the entry on this page may not necessarily reflect todays date.