I'm rather frustarated, for some reason Chiang Mai computers do not want to let me put my photos up on the internet. I've tried 3 different cafes and it seems like they somehow block your camera from connecting to the computer. Fingers crossed when I move on to Pai it'll be different. Such a shame though, since this is the cheapest and quickest internet I've found in the whole of Thailand! But since I've prepaid for an hour and I can't do what I wanted to do, I thought I may as well update this!

The first day we arrived in Chiang Mai we were both a bit knackered. I think the previous week of zooming around all over the place finally caught up with us. But we decided to explore the night bazaar that Chiang Mai is famous for. It was huge and quite overwhelming for 2 very tired farang girls! So, after a short wander and some food at one of the night stalls, we decided to call it an early night. Next day, bright and fresh, we decided to get some reasearch in before we went on our hilltribe trek and headed for the tribal museum. It was quite interesting, if only to read some of the display translations. Then we headed for a big shopping centre and went to the cinema again! This time to see Bolt. It's quite nice, the cinema's almost feel like a little bit of home in Asia, except for the part about standing whilst they play the national anthem and a short video that basically demonstrates how amazing the king is. In the evening, we decided to try and find a street called the 'moon muang', which is full of restaurants and bars. We walked around for ages, trying and failing to work out the map we had been given and in the end we decided to jump in a tuk tuk and get them to drive us there. Once there, we wanted to try and find a specific restaurant called 'herb garden' and walked up and down the same stretch 3 or 4 times trying to locate it. When we finally found the little soi it was tucked away in, it had the shutter down and a note saying 'closed for today, sorry for any inconvience'!!!! Eventually we settled for somewhere else and actually had a very nice meal.

On Wednesday, we were bundled into a sangthaew taxi with 10 other people and taken off on the trek that we'd book. It was quite a mixture of people (a couple from San Fran, 3 german girls, 2 isreali guys, 1 american/isreali guy and 2 other brits) but everybody got on really well. First stop was elephant trekking. It was so good to have done it, but it was pretty much as you would expect, slightly uncomfortable and very bumpy. One guy nearly fell off the elephant though when the bar infront of him snapped (which was both scary but quite funny). After that we set off on our uphill walk to the hilltribe village, passing a waterfall slide on the way along with lots of other stunning scenery. The stop at the hilltribe wasn't quite what I'd expected, there was very little interaction with the hilltribe people themselves, although we did get to play with the kids for a bit. Watching the sunset from there was really nice though and, after a tasty dinner of red curry, we spent th eevening sitting round the campfire before settling into our bamboo hut for bed. The next day the walking was a lot less strenuous, although downhill is a lot more scary (and dangerous!) than uphill! The scenery was even more stunning, as we were passing through real jungle and stopping off at really beautiful waterfalls for a bit of a cool off. There was one part where we had to walk over a fallen tree that was really high up over some rocks. It was quite frightning, one wrong move and that would have been it. It wasn't until later that we realised that people closer to the front of the group had been told that there was another way round if they didn't want to cross the log! WE made it to our second jungle camp just before sunset and had a 'shower' (basically a pan of water you could throw over yourself) and a nice dinner before settling down near the campfire again. Here there was 1 hilltribe family living and basically keeping the place for people to trek to and the man of the family was showing us all kinds of different mind puzzles with sticks and rope for us to try and figure out. One of the guys also pulled out a pack of cards and started wowing us with his magic tricks as well, but we were all pretty exhuasted, so everybody was in bed by 11. It's weird how tired you get when you have no other light than candlelight from 6:30pm onwards. Before I went to bed though, I did venture to the toilet....and there was a massive spider. It wasn't good trying to keep the torch shining on it whilst trying to squat over the toilet in the dark.

Ok, my time is about to run out on here so I'll finish updating this someother time.