When you spend your life travelling around the world and soaking up exotic cultures - by which I mean experiencing the traditions of other countries rather than cultivating strange foreign diseases - you tend to find yourself scratching your head in confusion for much of the time. This is because the things we take for granted back home are often as alien to people on the other side of the world as a 42 inch plasma wide screen television might be to a leopard, an...

Eventually, after our elephant had done its best to consume as much of the forest as possible and its mahout had given up trying to get it to take the slightest notice of him, Eloise and I were deposited at the small village of Nai Soi. One of three such villages in Mae Hong Son province, Nai Soi is somewhat controversial in that it is home to the so-called Long Necked Karen, or more correctly the Padaung. The Padaung are known for their tradition of wearing incr...

Today, Eloise and I were collected from the front of our hotel at a time of the morning I had not previously known to exist, and driven down to the banks of the nearest river in a bus to which the wheels appeared to be attached by a combination of sticky tape and prayer. Neither of us could keep our eyes open without jamming matchsticks into the sockets as though we were a couple of cartoon characters on vacation, and the bus didn't do anything to help by jarring...

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...

Unfortunately, many people who visit Thailand do so for one reason and one reason only - to spend a couple of weeks lying around on beaches stoned out of their brains while drinking enough alcohol to kill an elephant. Not only is this something of a damning indictment of modern society, but it also demonstrates just how many people have planned their trip based purely on what their peer group expects them to do, without ever bothering to open a brochure or look t...