The morning of our crossing over to Laos, we wake up to the sounds of birds, the river, and Mariah Carey. Charlie is downstairs preparing breakfast, and apparently has terrible taste in music. Before we arrived at Charlie's, we were told by One how he was the Waffle King. He makes unlimited waffles and as long as we want them, he'll make them. Great, we're starving. We have our first waffle. Yum, time for the next one. Oh, Charlie has run out of batter and isn'...

Leaving Chiang Mai we headed towards the most beautifully bizarre temples we had ever seen (the stray secret stop off). Wat Rong Khun 'The White Temple' in Chiang Rai by artist Ajarn Chalermchai Kositpipat. A pure white temple built with the same ideals of traditional temples but with a modern twist. The Matrix, Predator, Spiderman, the burning twin towers, George Bush and Osama Bin Laden were some of the images depicted inside the temple. It had to be seen to ...

Finally leaving Bangkok, we meet up with our Stray group, where we'll travel up to the north of Thailand and eventually cross over into Laos. First thing, finding the Stray office. After checking out of Lub D Silom hostel, one of the staff kindly wrote down the address in Thai. Perfect. All we have to do is jump in a taxi, no problem. That's how it started, anyways, except the driver had no idea of the address, and had to keep getting out and asking fellow taxi...

We've set our alarms for 9am, and actually manage to get up when they go off. We leave the hostel, ready to start our day sightseeing, and guess what? It starts to rain. Pour, in fact. Makes a nice change. We eventually make a run for it as the rain starts to slow down, and have our first little adventure on a Thai train. The system took a while for us to get used to, three lines not interconnecting and only on the east side of the city, but we manage to arrive...

We decided to pop across the street from the hostel to the little restaurant for some well deserved food. No westeners inside, so that had to be a good thing. It turned out to be one of the most amazing authentic Thai restaurants around. The 'restaurant', when I say restaurant, I basically mean an old man cooking everything at the front in one wok. I ordered a lime and chilli fish soup and Rachel phad thai (original, I know), along with 2 giant singha's to coo...