Greetings from Chiang Mai!

We arrived here on Monday morning after the train ride of joy.....12 hours on a 'basic' train were certainly a travelling experience! It was fine though (well except the toilet, but given the last few days, a toilet like that would have been a luxury!) Chiang Mai is really cool and we have found that it actually has a normal road structure, therefore we're able to navigate ourselves around it - bonus all round! They also say it has a cooler climate this far up north...for the record, they lie! Its still boiling! The first day we got here we did a little exploring and guess what we found......that's right, another 112 temples!! (But we did end up popping into a Chief Monk's funeral in one of them; at least that made it different from all the others!) We also did as the locals do and ate our dinner at one of the stalls on a street market and had yummy pad thai for 30baht (50p!).

Yesterday we went on a 2 day trek through the jungle. Now THAT was an experience and comedy all round, starting off with the shoes! We needed to get proper shoes like trainers or something to trek in, but the cheapest thing we could find were things that could only be described as year 3 school PE pumps...! Honestly, they were actually more awful than they sound, if that is at all possible! And then the icing on the cake was that we had to wear socks with them, so we had little ankle socks pulled up over our PE pumps....absolute fashionistas! We were in a group of 12 and started with a trip to an elephant park and a ride on the elephants, which was really cool. We also had some crazy tour guide who let us sit one by one on the elephant's neck (rather than in the safety of the basket) which was fun, if not a little scary. Interesting texture of an elephants skin....think bristly pubes....(sorry to the parentals)

Post elephant ride, we started a hike through and up the jungle for 2 hours up really steep and uneven terrain in the boiling heat and humidity - needless to say, we were sweating like Matthew Kelly in a kids playgound (again, sorry to the parentals!) by the time we reached the Village. We stayed with the village people for the evening and they made us dinner etc and our tour dude played loads of old 70s songs on the guitar while we tried to sing along (but really, we just ended up butchering all the old classics!) The toilets and shower were an experience....lets just say, we have now learnt how to squat! Everything in the village was made of bamboo, including the hut we stayed in - it was all very quaint and lovely until you realise just how many creatures there are and how many different noises they make during the night in the wilderness! I think by the time we got woken up, we were all very ready to throw something at the godforsaken rooster who found it necessary to be crowing constantly for the last 3 hours!

One the second day we went on another trek but this time shorter (about an hour and a half) and down a scarily steep hill to a waterfall. After a few near-death slips, we made it to the waterfall, played there for a bit, then carried on trekking until we reached a river where we went white water rafting (really fun!) and bamboo rafting (which should really be re-titled to 'Floating Along 3in Deep In Dirty Water')

Overall the trek was really really good and we're both really glad we did it. It was certainly challenging at times, but was totally worth it in the end! We have one more night in Chaing Mai, then off to start the 3 day journey to Laos (yes it really does take that long!) Also, the mossies are alive and kicking over here and we are both proving very popular meals for them!

Hope all is well with you all, will post again soon xxxxxxx