Sawatdee!! (Hello in Thai!)

Well, our journey up to Mae Sariang was absolutely amazing. We went up in one of those Sangthaew, basically a pick up truck with wooden benches down either side, which was quite an experience! At first we thought it was a joke, a 6-7 hour journey (depending on the weather) up tiny mountain roads in the back of a van lol. It was actually pretty comfy until about 20 other people piled on, hanging off the back and everything. They all got on around the refugee camps. There were so many and one of them had tens of thousands of people living piled up on top of each other in tiny wooden and leaf shacks. Although they were very pretty and traditionally built, it was quite sad in a way to see, makes you appreciate your house at home alot! They had no running water or electric or anything. Eventually most of the people emptied off and we stretched out on the uncomfortable wooden seats, we had very numb bums.. and Ben spent about an hour hanging off the back snapping photo's!!

The views on the way up were absolutely stunning, we've literally never seen anything so beautiful. We were going up teeny tiny little roads, and such sharp corners and steep hills I was convinced we wouldn't make it! It was just mountain after mountain and all you could see for miles was more mountains! We met a girl from New Zealand who was volunteering in a tribe village and she showed us to a guesthouse when we got there. The village was tiny and exactly what you'd imagine from a thai village, and the guesthouse was all teak and wood and very friendly (and cheap!) We were only going to spend one night there as a stop over but ended up staying another day as it was so peaceful. There wasn't actually anything to do up there so we just chilled out, reading and eating some wicked food...we ate one night at a restaurant pretty much over the river with views of mountains into Burma all round and had Japanese pork (basically battered pork) which was really good!

We could have gone trekking and visiting hill tribe villages, but it was alot of money based on our budget, and it didn't seem quite right turning up at what is essentially a refugee village (even if they are permanent.. like 10 years old at least) and gawking at the people and the way they live. Would feel pretty rude, and snobish doing that.

We only actually spent one whole day there so didn't get much of a chance to explore and such but was really nice to see a normal Thai place that wasn't overloaded with tourists. That's one thing we have noticed about Thailand is that there are tourists absolutely everywhere and it's quite hard to get away from all that! The Thai's cater for it very well (too well you might say) and even have a seperate police division called the Tourist police, kind of shows how many English you get in Thailand lol!

Anyway, the next day we got a little rickety bus up to Mae Hong Son and then to Pai from there......... read all about it in our next blog.

Big love

xxx