The elephant nature park is about an hour away from Chiang Mai and we visited after our stop in Pai. We had decided on getting to Chiang Mai that we wanted to see some elephants. We had also decided we didn't want to spend a fortune on the usual tour that is sold everywhere in Chiang Mai. These tours usually involved an hours "trekking", a 30 minute ride on an elephant and a sail down a river on a bamboo raft. We did this last time and whilst we enjoyed it, this...

Chiang Mai is along the Ping River and is the largest and most cultural city in Northern Thailand. The last time we were here we stopped for a week in a guest house with a crazy old lady who spoke hardly any English, but was an excellent sales person by simply giving a brochure and shouting "You book with me now". This time we decided we needed some more r&r time so we chose a pricey guesthouse (£11 a night!!!) that had a swimming pool. The plan was to ...

Got up and after packing we checked out of the crazy lady's guesthouse - we had become quite fond of her over the last 8 days!Our train was at 9pm so we passed the day sunbathing at the ice pool. Had our first beef steak in Thailand which wil also be our last.If it hadn't been served cold, been cooked as requested and not been taken from what seemed like the back end of a doney it might have tasted half decent. Again we made it to the train station with PLENTY ...

Went to the train station this morning and booked our tickets to go back to the capital. No 2nd class sleepers available till the night of the 12th of Feb! Argh! Big problem for us as we need to pick up our passports from the Vietnam embassy on the 12th and we have a flight booked first thing in the morning on the 13th! We had to settle for a second class seat tomorrow night for 12 hours! Numb bum or what! Chilled out for the rest of the day doing nothing - lo...

Up bright and early for our one day trek. We got picked up as planned and the first stop was to pick up a gorilla shaped woman, with the gruffest voice, no smile and was smoking a fag - well, not really smoking it, more like sucking it like it was the last fag on earth. We looked at each other and thought 'smart'. Thankfully she was in the wrong van and was asked to leave! After picking up the rest of our group, 8 in total a father and daughter from Ottowa, C...