Chiang Mai

Well i have been up to a lot the past few days! I am up in Chiang Mai in the north of Thailand in the sticky hot weather. The first night i arrived the Sunday-night market was on, which is a massive market that lines a street for miles and miles. We walked for hours and saw less than half of it! I bought some fishermans shorts as it seems the two pair of shorts i bought aren't nearly enough.. and Emily and Dionne bought heaps. I had to control myself as i dont want to be carrying lots of things round and sending expensive packages back home! the streets were so busy it was like a river of people moving along, and there was something there to excite all your senses. good food, fresh juices, lots of street performers (including young children doing thai dancing), and so much to look at! And everything was really cheap, my shorts were $4 each!

On Tuesday i went off mountain biking for the day. i signed up for a beginner/interemdiate course but as nobody else was doing that one i jonied the intermediate one. WAs a bit nervous seen as how i have never done mountain biking before but it was heaps of fun! The roads were mostly like 4wd roads and i took it pretty slow at first but got the hang of it after a while, and didnt fall off once. We biked for 5 hours and our 'provided lunch' didnt get to us till we had finished at 4.30. I was pretty hungry and tired by then, especially as we biked an extra hour back to Chiang mai as the support vehicles were already being used. Was tons of fun though am definately gonna try it in NZ.

Then WEdnesday and Thursday i went on a two-day trekking and rafting trip. We did a few hours trekking the first day, stopping at a waterfall which i got to jump off (it looks much bigger in person than it does in the picture). Was a bit scary but again loads of fun. Our guide was a hoot, he was like a 5 year old kid running off into the jungle to find bugs to scare teh Irish girls, hiding behind banana tree leaves to jump out and scare people, and making us walknig sticks and darts out of bamboo sticks and cutty grass. The next day everyone in my group went off elephant trekking but i chose to stay behind as the way they treat the elephants and the way they get them to be ridable is literally torture.. Was heart-breaking to see the elephants tied up with chains and having 4 people on their backs (including one sitting on the neck) but nice to wtch them playing around while the others were off on them... After that we had a trek and white-water rafting. which was extremely tame by NZ standards. the only thing that made it less tame was that our guide knew pretty much no english except for left and light(right) and stop, and we got stuck on every second rock so that was a laugh.

Tomorrow i am off to Laos which apparently takes 3 days of bus and boat trips so that will be interesting. Must get going as my internet time is almost up

cheers,

ingrid