After another gruelling trek through the jungle back to East Railey beach, I boarded another longtail boat back around the coast to where a minibus could reach and take a group of us to the bus. On arrival at the bus station we all stared ominously at a banged up bus in the corner of the yard, all thinking 'surely not'. About ten minutes later the engine of the bus started, on the third or fourth attempt, and we all boarded. My choice of seat could have been better as there was a large hole in the ceiling closeby through which water did not just drip, but poured when the bus turned a corner, although I managed to avoid getting drenched. We drove until dark until it was dark and were dropped off at another random drinks stand in the courtyard of someone's house, I believe in Surat Thani, and had to wait a further hour until our next bus arrived. This one was the other extreme, though, being a VIP bus with well padded, fully reclining seats, excellent aircon and a movie to keep us entertained. We arrived in Bangkok early the next morning and true to form were not dropped in Khao San road as promised but in a side street packed with tuktuks. Due to my previous wanderings in the area I somehow recognised it and pushed past the lot in the direction I thought it was, which luckily turned out to be correct. After a Burger King breakfast I bargained for a taxi to the Northen bus terminal in order to catch another bus to Chiang Mai, which I had heard many good things about.

When the bus finally pulled into bus station at Chiang Mai it was dark again so I got a tuktuk to the most touristy area within the old city walls and found a guest house for 150baht a night and went to bed early. The following day was relatively fruitless as I'd developed a stomach problem on the long journey but I managed to explore a little and meet the friendly and extremely talkative Kiwi owner of the guest house. The day after though I managed to book the 'Flight of the Gibbon' experience for the following day and arranged my transport to Laos and the visa. I then explored within the old city walls and visited Wat Chiang Man and Wat Phra Singh. The former was far smaller, was the oldest in the city and had a superb white elephant stupa around the back of the main building. The latter was the largest temple complex in the city and I particularly enjoyed the serenity of the garden path, again behind the main building, in which the trees had thought provoking proverbs nailed to them. In the evening I found a second hand bookshop and bought Tolkien's 'The Silmarillion', to keep me occupied on any long journeys to come and then stopped for dinner at the 'English pub' where I'd earlier been allowed by the Thai owner to choose the evening movie, Starstky and Hutch. There wasn't the best selection.

I was picked up at 9am in the morning by a luxurious minibus full of Australians and on Scot. This took us up into the nearby hills, where the temperature was mercifully about 6 degrees cooler. I enjoyed seeing all the small farming communities along the winding road through the rainforest. On arrival at the Gibbon hut we were ushered on a walk climbing up around a reasonably pretty waterfull, although without a guide and the path went on and on and I'd pushed on ahead of the others and so at some random point just decided to turn back and was givin a cold glass of honey tea at the bottom. We were given a nice lunch and then fitted with harnesses, hats and bamboo brakes and driven to the start. The experience was a series of zip wires and rope bridges between wooden platforms fixed around huge trees up in the canopy. If the zip wire was long enough, we had to use our bamboo brakes, a piece of bamboo that could be hooked over the wire to create friction. These were used to varying degrees of success, many of the users still crashing into the tree at the other end. The final part of the experience was an abseil off one of the most spectacular trees i've ever seen. It was a strangler fig, which grows it's roots from the top of the host tree to the ground and eventually joins them all together to form a solid trunk and kill the host. This one was perfectly straight all the way to where the branches diverged almost symmetrically. Back on firm ground, however, we de-harnessed and siad goodbye to our guides, Tiger and Jabu and were driven home just in time for me to book a cooking course for the next day.

So I was again picked up at 9am, this time by Perm, our masterchef for the day. In the back of his pickup truck, I met three Irish girls and a Korean couple (and briefly another couple who soon left due to hangovers) and we were driven to the local market and talked through a number of local ingredients on the stands. We were then driven to Perms house where he had a number of neat cooking stations for us to use and some helpers to dish out the preprepared ingredients before we attempted each dish. Perm was quite a character and instructed us humorously through 7 dishes and a number of techniques including what he termed 'adventure cooking', which meant setting the pan on fire! My favourite dishes were the prawn and coconut soup and the mango sticky rice. The result of the day was that between 11am abd 3pm we had each cooked and eaten all 7 dishes, a trial for my still struggling stomach but thoroughly enjoyed and I wouldn't have missed it. So later that night I departed well fed, having thoroughly enjoyed Chiang Mai, on a very strange journey into Laos.