Hello from Chang Mai, We arrived here four days ago, having travelled here on the over night train from Ayatoya. On our first day we visited the hilltribe museum where we learned about all the different tribes which reside on the hills of Chang Mai. In the afternoon we went to a 'monk chat', which is where you can sit and chat informallly with monks and ask them questions about their way of life, which seemed bizarre yet interesting. It's an opportunity for them to practice their English, and an opportunity for us to grill them! In the evening we had dinner at a traditional Thai resteraunt, where we watched and (somehow managed to) take part in traditional Thai dancing. Our Dean is quite a mover! The following day we visited the Im Jai house; a centre housing 52 children between 2 and 17, who have been orpahaned by families with aids. We went along to talk and play with the children, though I found that many of the children seemed aprehensive of us, and language was definitely a barrier. However, we bonded with a few of the younger ones and one particular boy, Michael, latched himself onto Dean for the duration of our stay. We gave a donation to the centre and will be keeping in touch with the staff to hear about the progress of their project. Yesterday we set off on a two day trek in the hills of Chang Mai, which has been, all in all, really fun. We visited a hot spring and a beautiful waterfall before embarking on a three hour treck to the Karen tribe settlement, where we stayed over night. The Karen tribe live a very simple life and are almost totally self sufficient (though they sell chang beer to the tourists somehow!) When we arrived my legs were killing from all the uphill action, and one of the tribal women gave me a nice massage. In the evening we (6 trekkers in all) sat around a camp fire in one of the huts and drank herbal tea...and of course chang beer (they had imported it especially after all!) We slept (ha!) on mats on a hard wooden floor in a little hut in the camp, but I had such a rubbish night sleep because the resident cockrels were cock-a-doodle-doing from about 4am. Then, just as I drifted off, I was awoken by Dean, yelling at me to evacuate the sleeping area, as a massive (I kid you not) spider (was yellow. Don't think that's a good thing...) had crawled into our mosquitto net. Apparently, it was running along my sleeping bag when Dean saw it. Didn't sleep too well after that funnily enough... Today we had a short walk to another Karen tribe settlement, then went elephant trekking along the river for about two hours where we had excellent views of the hills. Our final part of the trek was bamboo rafting, which turned out to be a lot more wild than the last time we tried it! Dean and one of the other lads did the steering with our guide but there were quite a few occasions where we all nearly fell off! (the river was only about 3ft deep to be fair!) Well, anyways, I'm shattered, so the paln is dinner, massage, bed bye for now Claire x