Steven has been making such a good job of writing witty blogs about our travels, but this time it's my turn apparantly so here goes. Spelling, grammer and wit farewell.
We started our northern adventure with a train and bus trip up to the historical city of Sukhothai. Sukhothai is recognized as being the first Thai kingdom back in 1200AD. Most of the preserved buildings are conveniently in one place and have been presented to tourists as a park. We hired bicycles for the day and cycled round the many different monuments, stopping at the giant Buddhas and old buildings, it was an impressive place.
Chang Mai was our next stop, the 2nd biggest city in Thailand, population 150,000, so more like a large town. It turned out to be much better than anticipated. Much easier to get about than Bangkok and it has quite an arty and foodie vibe about it which we both enjoyed.
What helped making our trip to Chang Mai so good was meeting up with an old friend of mine, Dan Kidd, from college days. He was visiting his parents who have recently moved to Chang Mai.
Dan joined us to watch Thai Boxing at the local stadium. We saw 6 fights. Each round lasts about 3 mins and there are 5 rounds per fight. The first 2 fights didn't get past round 2, after a couple of spinning kicks to the face who can blame them. The 3rd fight was billed as a 'surprise fight' – the surprise being was that they blind folded 3 fighters and just let them go blindly swiping at each other for 3 minutes. The referee got the odd punch which was funny and it was a bit like a Charlie Chaplin sketch of silliness, all good fun. After the final fight the crowd started to clear and it became a bit of a free for all in the ring, with lots of traveler types pulling their best wrestling moves on each other. We made our way over to the punch bags and gave them our best punches – only lasting about 30 seconds, very tiring after 6 beers.
Dan's parents were very kind and invited us round for dinner. They live in an amazing modern Thai house, very beautifully decorated, it was featured in Elle Decoration and its easy to see why. Mrs Kidd treated us to a delicious Thai meal and we had a great evening. We explored the area a bit more with Dan the next day on hired mopeds (5pounds a day, bargain). It was great to have our own transport and after so much practice back home weaving in and out of London traffic Chang Mai was easy.
One of the more unusual things we did in Chang Mai is to have a Monk Chat. The monks get to practice their English and we get to ask questions about monk stuff. Our monk rolled his eyes a bit when he realized he was allocated to us, poor guy. He was true to monk form though and turned out to be very polite and kind natured.
Our next stop was the very small river side town of Tha Thon. We chose to come here to as it's a popular embarcation point on the river down to Chang Rai.
We organized a tour, which turned out to be just the 2 of us and a guide. He took us to a Karen village – 'village' is pushing it somewhat, there appeared to be more handicraft stalls than homes. The Karen people are refugees from Burma. They also known as the long necks because of the traditional necklaces which give the appearance of stretching out their necks. Its more to do with their collar bone getting depressed that makes them look longer, and apparantly if they take off the necklaces their necks don't snap, that's a myth. We also went up to the Thai and Myanmar (Burma) border army post, it was a great view point to see the countryside and good fun to crawl in and out of the army dug outs.
The River boat trip down to Chang Rai was in a large long tail boat operated by a one eyed wiley captain. There were 3 other tourists as well as us which was just as well as 10 minutes in we got stranded on a sand bank in the middle of the river. Steven rolling up his trousers lead the other boys and got out and pushed the boat until we became free. My hero!
Along the way we stopped and a couple of villages, some hots springs and an elephant sanctuary, although I'm not sure 'sanctuary' really describes it very well. More like 'the 10 tethered elephants'. We felt a bit uneasy being there and in turn supporting it, but tried to make up for it by feeding them bags and bags of bananas which was fun.
We had 6 days left in Thailand and so we decided to hop on a train south east and to make the most of what Thailand does best – beaches. We caught an overnight train which was fun. We were in second class (could there be such poverty?) which actually turned out to be great fun. We were served drinks and a couple of hours in a nice porter came and transformed our seats into bunk beds. Its a lovely feeling chugging along and being tucked up in bed at the same time.
Our island of choice was Koh Samed, which is about 3 hours east of Bangkok. Steven found us a 50%off deal on a beach side cabin and we settled into a relaxing 5 nights in paradise, hard life for some!
