Sawat dee ka from Thailand!

Sorry for the long wait for a Thailand blog, we've been moving around so much I've not had any time to myself really.
My trip from Costa Rica to Bangkok all went smoothly. Bangkok was really hot and humid so I had to buy some more lightweight clothes for the trip and have been enjoying the haggling on prices in the markets very much so far!
The group Im with is great, there are 8 of us all between the ages of 24 and 32, which has been ideal for fitting into a songthaew! We have a few nationalities too...English, Australian, German and Dutch. Our tour leader is local and is called Mai.

We started the trip travelling on the public bus to Kanchananburi where we stayed in floating raft houses on the river kwai. While we were there we went on longtail speedboats (great fun and extremely fast!) alon the river and visited the JEATH war museum, the POW cemetary, some limestone caves and at the end of the day got to the bridge itself just in time to see the last train of the day crossing. The next day we visited the Erawan waterfall, which has pools you can swim in at 7 levels, all with lovely clear water and fish that nibble at you while your swimming...very strange! We also saw some monkeys.

We then moved on to Ayutthaya for a few hours, which has a lot of ancient temple sites. That evening we caught an overnight train to Chiang Mai, which was much more enjoyable than I was imagining! The seats folded down into full size beds, there was airconditioning and we had a 3 course dinner with waiter service...all very cheaply too!
When we reached Chiang Mai we had a day to look around and then started the 3 day hilltribe trek the next day. The first days trekking was hard work as it was all up hill in open ground for most of the way and 38 degrees heat! Once we reached the first village we had a wash in a very cold stream (while wearing full length sarongs!) and spent the evening playing cards in candle light with a Thai whisky forefit, Im very pleased to say I didnt lose once on that evening so didnt have to have any! I havent been so lucky since and had to drink a shot of whisky poured from a bottle with a dead cobra in it which some other members of the group kindly brought back from a border crossing to Laos for us...it really didnt taste good!!
Back to the hilltribes, we slept on the floor in bamboo huts and it got a lot colder at night than we were prepared for. The next day of trekking was much nicer and was mostly in the woods. Our local guides were brilliant....we had 2 members of the karen village tribe. The guy leading us was in his 50s and had a very fast pace which he didnt vary no matter what the terrain. We reached the karen village at lunchtime on the 2nd day and they had prepared some lovely food for us. We only learned later that they have to prepare the rice grains every day using a machine which is like a big morter and pestal, which is foot operated! We had a go at this and also at cooking a dinner for the village children. On the 3rd day we trekked for another 4 hours and had a very welcome swim below a waterfall close to the end of the trek.

We travelled back to Chiang Mai and the next day I went on a cycling tour of the city. It ended up being just the 2 of us and a guide on the trip, which lasted for 4 hours and was brilliant. Our guide used to be a monk and knew a lot about all of the local sites. We visited some temples, a leper colony (now a rehabilitation centre for the old and disabled), some of the original city monuments and the rice paddy fields outside of the city.

To be continued...