I am now in Chiang Mai, which is a really nice place and much better than Bangkok. Well, Bangkok isn't a bad place or anything and I do like it, but I still am not loving the big cities that much. Chiang Mai is actually the second biggest city in Thailand but it's tiny in comparison to Bangkok, and Birmingham for that matter. It's got little winding alleys and is right next to jungle and mountains, there's even a cockerel next door. You definitely don't get that in Birmingham!

I spent three days in Bangkok, which is plenty of time to be honest. The ping pong show! Well, the first one we went to we kind of got scammed, which was obviously going to happen as the moment we asked the tuktuk driver to take us to Pat Pong he discounted the price and took us to this place which looked like the outside of a working man's club on a random street. We said thank you very much and headed off to try and find something else. There was a suitcase shop down the road and Sarah had some friends who had been to a ping pong show which was above a shop, and as we were looking at it and wondering if it was the place the people called across to us and ushered us inside in a very secretive manner ("we cannot show downstairs because of police)", took us upstairs and opened a secret door to reveal....Gucci handbags. Still, girls like handbags so this distracted us for a while. Onwards, we ended up walking up and down the main road for a while because tuktuk drivers kept telling us we were going the wrong way but with the aid of a 7/11 and a map we eventually found the right area. The first place we went to charged 100 thb (about 2 pounds) for a drink, and we were sceptical, but all the places were saying the same thing so we thought we may as well go for it. I wasn't entirely surprised when after half a beer and a couple of "turns" they slapped down bills for 1,300 thb. We escaped with paying 300 and resigned ourselves to shopping for the rest of the evening. The show wasn't that exciting and girls were pretty unattractive considering their job...in fact I'm sure one was a man.

After Sarah considering getting a piercing and me very briefly considering getting a tattoo and buying a scarf, we ended up outside another place with very friendly people outside. Again they said 100 thb for a drink and we were really unsure as it would be pretty bad if we ended up getting conned twice! Whilst we were considering though these two English business-men showed up and said they would "look after us" so we of course went for it. This one was a lot better and much more professional. It was very interesting and I perhaps won't go into too much detail, but feel free to email me for that! I'm really glad I went though as it was definitely an experience and the girls are lovely.

The rest of my time in Bangkok was very civilised. I went on a river boat which they use to get to A to B rather than as a tourist thing which was pretty cool, much better than buses and trains. Oh, and I got chatted up by a footballer (apparently) on the boat who said "phone me when you get back, maybe you not need to pay for hotel" and showed me pictures of him topless, his car and his ex-girlfriends. I always get the weird ones!

After the coldest bus journey ever (seriously, coldest I've been since Mongolia, and it was for 12 hours) I arrived in Chiang Mai yesterday morning. I had to go straight to bed as I'd been too cold to sleep on the bus but I've recovered now. I met a French guy who is really cool, he's cycling around SEAsia for four months, and literally cycling everywhere he goes - no icy buses for him! He's gone off today though to do a Buddhist retreat for a month. It sounds very interesting but I'm not sure if I'd like to do something like that. When you do it though you are only allowed to eat from 6am until noon so don't worry I've already decided that wouldn't be a very good idea! I did go to a temple yesterday which was interesting and good to stroll around. I had to keep sitting in the shade as it was so hot, whilst these two Thai men made several laps jogging round the temple grounds. They had "Monk Chat" so you can, well, chat to the monks. There were none free though.

This morning I lived up to my "fit and adventurous" tag and went zip-lining through the jungle. It was really fun and there were only three of us so it was a good experience. The lines are 50 metres above the ground and there was some abseiling too. I now can do abseiling without getting scared, even when they dropped me a little bit - I was only 3 feet from the ground at the time, but still! Anyway that was heaps of fun, and in spirit of my adventurous start to the day, I decided this afternoon to rent a bike. Now, those who don't know me very well won't think this is such a big deal, but I can't actually ride a bike so it was more of a learn-to-ride session than anything else. I decided that if I can zip-line between trees 50 metres high I shouldn't be scared of riding a bike. I'm not exactly biking off to remote hilltop temples yet but I'm improving (though having a break). A random man appeared out of nowhere and gave me a lesson, and I've spent the last hour going in circles with one foot on the bike. Still, I bet I'm the only girl from Yorkshire to have taught themselves to ride a bike by tottering round a Buddhist temple carpark in Thailand :)