14/10/07 - 16/10/07 Malak Guesthouse 160B

The border from Lao to Thailand was really weird and relaxed, at Lao we just walked along to the rivers edge, got our passports checked and stamped then jumped in a longboat to cross the river. Almost forgot to pass through Thai immigration at the other side... but the tuk-tuk guys reminded us... d'oh! Then jumped in a tuk-tuk to the bus station (I use this term loosely!). Although there is a bus straight to Chang Mai, it was looking decidedly empty and without driver. Plus it looked like a VIP bus (aaarrgh!) and pretty expensive so instead we jumped on a local bus to Chang Rai, hoping to change there.

We had heard good things about Chang Rai, so decided that if it looked good we would hang around there for a while... it didn't! This is the fisrst time this whole trip where I have felt a massive culture shock... and would you believe that it was re-entering a westernised country. There were chain restaurants and massive concrete buildings all over the place and it didn't look like a place I wanted to be! The buses from here to Chang Mai are really frequent but get booked up super quickly so we ended up having a few hours to kill before we could get out of there. We got chatting to an ex-pat who told us that it was his favourite city, but as it was so big there was much more to explore. This may be true, but we weren't there long enough to find out.

Arrived in Chang Mai early evening and the station here was even busier, to avoid hotel touts we decided to pick a guesthouse at random from around the backpacker area and just grabbed a cheap tuk-tuk there. The first few quotes we got were for around 300B a room, but a nice lady from one of these places pointed us in the direction of Malak, a nice place with some basic kitchen facilities, a rooftop terrace, free internet and free coffee for half the price. Me and Hazel decided to go and investigate the surrounding whilst Mel called it an early night.

We wandered down Moon Muang with all it's bright lights and food stalls, thn another street and a few side streets off that. We stumbled across a reggae bar down an alleyway and thought it would be rude not to stay for a cheeky chang or two. Plus there were a couple of live bands, thai rastas doing Bob Marley covers and some other classics. As we'd forgotten to ask if there was a curfew... and the three of us were all sharing a double so had to climb across Mel to get to bed, we decided we'd definitely leave by midnight... so around 2am we stumbled out, with just the street rats for company and headed back down Moon Muang, only to be ditracted by a dirty burger place. This non-meat-eater joined Hazel in a dirty cheeseburger and chips and got (for the first time ever) to interrupt a conversation with the words... "oh my god, there's an elephant right beind me" as some guy had stopped to get a burger whilst taking his elephant for a walk down the street at 2am... as you do! Couldn't really understand why we were so drunk (other than the obvious consumption of loads of large Changs) however we later found out that although the bottle says 6%, the brewing is a bit random, so the bottles can be anywhere between 6 and 10%... eek!

The following day we spent some time wandering around the town (partly in the rain), walked along the canal and in the evening went to the night market which was pretty cool, but very busy. W'd heard about an area of the market dedicated to food stalls, which I was really excted about as I had visions of food stalls all along the road serving up various delights. But when we found the area it was more like the sort of foodhall you'd get back home on the top floor of a shopping centre, but it was outdoors. Although I'm expecting these sorts of thing in Singapore, I didn't really expect it here and we were not feeling it so we headed back towards the guesthouse area (a tuk-tuk route via the red-light district) for food.

Before leaving Chang Mai Mel and I changed our flight dates from Singapore to Sydney as we've been having such an awesome time in SE Asia that we'd never make it to Singapore in time for our flight without rushing the rest of the journey.