We stayed in Chiang Mai for a week. In this time we took ourselves on a trek, visited the Golden Triangle and went White Water Rafting.

We started our exploits with a trip to the Golden Triange. This is a patch of land between Laos, Burma and Thailand that wasn't owned by any country and therefore was used for opium dealing. Obviously we tried to get some but fingured life in the Bangkok Hilton wasn't in our life plan. It did allow us to see all three countries at once which was pretty cool. However, the highlight was prob the visit to the long neck and big ear tribe. Denise was particulary keen after the guide pointed out she had a long neck and then Jenna proceeded to tell them about her stretcy ears. The tribe was pretty amazing, women can have up to 20 rings onthe neck...all in the name of beauty. As vein as Denise is she didn't fancy the boiling hot rings being put around her neck so decided to leave with the others.

We opted for a one night trek and thank god we did. It nearly killed us. This is where we met Bans, our fellow non-trekker where we quickly became the last and slowest in the group. Our guide Som looked after us, calling out regularly "slowly smiling", a phrase we adopted. He even offered to carry Jenna and took himself off and made us hats/walking sticks whilst we gasped for breath at about 10 step intervals. We thought we got to meet the village people (not in the YMCA sense) but infact we were put in a seperate hut where we played drinking games with a bottle of Samsong Wisky. We called it a night but Dan continued and from the bedroom we could hear him declaring his love for "England cos his English", putting the world to rights and telling everyone he knew where we sweated! Nice! Needless to say he was a little sheepish in the morn. The trek was completed with an elephant ride, which was loads better than the one in Kanchanaburi as we got to go through rivers. Finally we went on the bamboo raft. This was a little different to the other one as the 'raft' was continually under water had held together by strips of leaves! We had the all important take of shouting out to the boys directions which we're not sure they fully appreciated especially when we started on the captin and deck boy role play!

If we weren't worn out enough we took oursleves off white water rafting which was amazing. The guides were fantastic and we had a right laugh. We had a full briefing on the safety measures and instructions we had to follow. We quickly learnt the "Get Down" position leaving the rowing to the boys. Having said that we were much braver as Gino actually threw himself out the raft in fear of it being capsized and Dan screamed like a girl! It was quality and a great end to Thailand and Chiang Mai.