We endured yet another tortuous journey to Chiang Mai, a 2 hour boat journey to Chumphon, 7 hour bus journey to Bangkok, a crazy pink taxi ride through Bangkok and then finally a 10 hour bus journey to Chiang Mai, the capital of North Thailand. The journey marked our 5 month anniversary of travelling. (We ask ourselves every time we have a long journey, why do we put ourselves through this torture......to see the world I guess!)

Chiang Mai is a city of temples, and as we have had our fair share of temples/places of worship over the last 5 months...(shamefully, they have lost the *wow* factor they had early on in our travels) they all look the same...so we just took a quick wander around taking in the temples. We got our bearings and found that Chiang Mai is easy to navigate, Chiang Mai is basically a neat square bounded by moats and remnants of a medieval wall built 700 years ago to defend against the Burmese.

The evening was spent night bazaar bartering for some clothes and cheap fake goods. On our way back to our guesthouse we discovered an awesome cycle cocktail bar raised 2 metres off the ground. What turned out to be 'one drink only' turned out to be several after finding out we were surrounded by Liverpudlians and Manunians. (Yay for Helen!) A good night was had and thankfully we weren't drunk otherwise we would have fallen the full 2 metres to the ground! We had to get our jumpers out for the first time since the Cameron Highlands which was not that long ago but it was high up in the hills. I think we will be seeing a lot of our jumpers in the next 4 weeks.

The next day we did a Thai cookery course taking in 5 different Thai dishes. At the start of the course, we visited the local market to learn more about the different sauces, exotic vegetables and rice. Over the course of the day Helen cooked hot and sour chicken soup, Veg spring rolls, Chicken Red Curry, Holy Basil Chicken and sticky rice with Mango while Nick did hot and sour prawn soup, Thai spicy beef salad, Massaman Chicken Curry, Chicken Fried Rice and Banana Fritters.

The lesson we learnt was that every single dish was easy and quick to make and that they were all absolutely delish. (we will be hosting Thai nights for the lucky ones, when we return home eventually to show off our culinary skills!). Needless to say we were absolutely stuffed at the end and had to return to our guesthouse to have a lie down!

As Nadal was playing Federer we hunted down a good old' English pub to watch the game and indulge in British Tea and Cheese! We bar hopped watching various sports (Triathlon for Nick) etc, met some lovely people and played some pool. We were hoping to meet some friends who were returning to Chiang Mai after a trek but it didn't happen! As we were still stuffed from our Thai cooking, we wandered around for a yummy snack before retiring to bed!

On Friday morning, we took the long and winding road to our next destination, Chiang Rai!