hey hey hey

We have just arrived back in Chiang Mai after a week spent learning how to cook with chilies, trecking through jungles and riding elephants, and having thai massages so decided it was time to update the blog!

We arrived in Chiang Mai last week, and after a day spent chilling out looking at different temples, booked ourselves onto a cookery course and treck to the mountains. The cookery course lasted a day, and we learnt how to cook about 10 different thai dishes, and got to sample them as we went along! The course was quite flexible so we chose our own dishes, and much to my delight every dish had a vegetarian option! Once we had chosen the dishes we were taken to the market where we were taught by our teacher about how to pick the right ingredients, and the difference between small and large chillies and green and red papaya. The market was great in itself just to look round - so much fruit and different vegetables, and they even had a counter just full of tofu! Our cookery teacher was quite a character in himself, and his commentry as we were cooking was worth the money in itself - i don't think i've ever seen anyone so enthusiastic about rice before! we really enjoyed all the food we made, and it was great to try out so many different things.

The day after the cookery course we were booked onto a 3 day treck to the mountains, wherewe went elephant riding, bamboo rafting and did alot of walking through the mountains to visit different hill tribes. We stayed in the mountains with different tribes on both nights, which although absolutly freezing, was really interesting. The tribes lived really simply, getting all their resources from the surroundings - i never knew that bamboo could be used for so many different things - it was used to build houses, cook sticky rice over an open fire in, and the tribs even made cups out of it to drink tea from! On the first evening we were invited to one of the villagers houses, where we were given thai tea in bamboo cups and shown how the tribe used different resources to cook and work with. The lifestyle was unbelievably simple - abit like stepping bakc 500 years in England, but interestingly alot of the villagers who had ventured to the cities came back to the villages as they prefered the life there. After a very cold and hard nights sleep on the bamboo floor of a hut, we spent the second day trecking through the mountains via different villages, before ending up at a village next to a river, where bamboo rafts had been made for us to use the next morning. We spent the night in bamboo huts again, and after dinner were taught some traditional tribal campfire songs - im sure we were getting the tones all wrong and singing completley the wrong words though! On our final day we bamboo rafted with all our luggage down the river, before being picked up by a truck which drove us back to chiang mai. The whole experience was really unique, and certianly something which we were really glad we did - it was helped by having a good group of fellow treckers with us, and a good guide who knew the area and the different tribes.

We have spent the last two days in a town called pai, which is further north still than chiang mai. The guide book described it as a 'place where the hippy trail is well adn truly alive' - it did have a slight bohemian feel to it, but was much more commercial than we imagined it to be. We really enjoyed it though, and spent the two days relaxing after our hard treck by having a thai massage (mine was quite relaxing, Phil got squashed and pinched to death!) and visitng some hot srpings. The springs were natural, and in the top pool the water was so hot you could boil eggs in it - we were really impressed as we'd never seen anything like it before.

We're now in Chiang Mai for one final day before catching the night train to crazy Bangkok, where we'll spend our final days in Thailand before staring our journey home.

Hope everyone is well, and look out for a final blog update before we set foot back in good old Angleterre!

Love Cat and Phil xxxxxxx