Chiang Mai to Pai - updated since Saturday!

Feels like a long time since i last posted but think we've just packed a lot in a few days again that it's not that long at all :-)

We had to say goodbye to another couple of Intrepid-ites in Chiang Mai so it's now just the Brits, me, Chris, Rosie and Pete and portuguese Jorge left up north. We didn't do much in Chiang Mai as we were all pretty knackered from 6 weeks of non stop travel, so we booked ourselves in to a very funky guesthouse and chilled for a couple of days.

Random shots of Chiang Mai:

Chris eating a cricketJust when we were recovering, we decided it would be a good idea to spend the day hiking up a mountain and then mountain biking back down... it was kind of a good idea, but a very very tiring and sweaty day :-) The hiking was going well until the guides took us 'extreme hiking' down to a waterfall and then straight up through the jungle with no path... owch. We were glad to reach the top and have some tasty tasty nooooooodle soooop and a few litres of water! We got all kitted up (the only time i've seen health and safety in SE Asia) to cycle down - helmet, knee and elbow pads and chest protection! Little bit excessive and made us all really hot! The cycle down was scary but fab- pretty much straight downhill on dirt tracks - Chris bimbled off with one of the guides to go really fast and on single track paths instead of having to wait for all us wimps :-) It was a wicked last day to spend as our mini-intrepid group of 6 :-)

From Chiang Mai, Chris and I jumped on a wee plane to fly 35 mins to Mae Hong Son - a tiny town near the Burmese border surrounded by beautiful mountains. The highlight of our couple of days there was climbing hundreds of steps up to a hilltop temple to watch the sunset over the hills - beautiful :-) We also hired a man and a jeep to drive us round the countryside to see some waterfalls and a cave full of fish, and we stopped at a mud spa on the way back for a mud mask and a soak in a mineral bath which smelt like farts! Skin felt good (didnt smell good) afterwards though!

We got up at stupid o'clock to catch the bus to Pai - 100km of crazy windy road northeast. Pai is a very chilled, hippie and thai-tourist filled town in the hills. It has a whole load more atmosphere than Mae Hong Son did and it's nice to be able to have stuff to do beyond 8pm! We by chance ended up staying at the same guesthouse (bamboo huts looking at the river!) as Rosie and Jorge so me and Rosie spent the afternoon lounging and chatting by a swimming pool all afternoon yesterday and then we all had a good evening listening to some live music and drinking Thai whiskey :-) Today, we hired some bikes (not mountain bikes - town bikes complete with basket and no gears!) to visit a nearby waterfall - a local lady told us that it was an easy flat 8km cycle.... hmmmm.... turned out to be 11km uphill. And stupid us left at midday so cycled all the way there in the blistering midday heat and sun - oops. We all had a well-needed cool off in the waterfall when we finally got there and coming back home was great :-)

Rode elephants and bamboo rafts today - another exhausting but fab day. We had a 2 hour ride down river on a bamboo raft - very peaceful and relaxing and frazzling as it was cloudy when we set off and quite chilly but the sun quickly burnt the clouds away (as it does every day between 10-11am) and we'd forgotten suncream and sunglasses...oops...After a tasty lunch of noodles, Rosie and I had to overcome our fear of being plonked on a giant animal, and spend 2 hours perched on an elephant with only a piece of scratchy carpet between us and Mr Chang (as we named our ellie). Was very good fun but very painful on the backside and legs and it's a heck of a long way down from up there! We rode for about an hour through the jungle and then headed down to the river - going downhill was petrifying! The elephants and us still kind of perched on top had a wee swim in the river and then the mahouts instructed the elephants to shake their heads to chuck us off into the river :-) I decided to become official photographer at that point and watched Rosie and Chris be thrown off over and over!

I had a bit of a run-in with a wall and the side of Mr Chang when we had to get off - bit of a squashed foot now but it's only a wee cut and a bit sore - could have been a lot worse! We all had a well needed soak in the hot tubs filled by natural hot springs afterwards

Kop Chai Lai Lai Laos

We’ve said goodbye to our tour group and leader yesterday – some are heading home, some off on other tours and 6 of us are sticking together for a few more days – weaning ourselves off the group! Since my last post, we’ve said goodbye to Laos and ‘Sawadee ka’ to Thailand. Laos and Thai language is very similar and I’m still saying the wrong hellos and thank yous! We spent one more day in Vang Vieng and 6 of us hired some bikes from the guest house and headed out to a cave about 7km from the village. The bikes we had were definitely pootle around flat town roads kinda bikes, and not dirt road hills kinda bikes (except Chris who got the only mountain bike…) so it wasn’t the most comfortable of rides, but the scenery was spectacular. Vang Vieng was a small village sitting by a meandering river surrounded by limestone hills until Laos reopened it’s borders in the late 80s and tourism kicked off and has turned the town into a beach like town with guesthouses, bars and restaurants springing up right, left and centre. It mainly caters for the ‘gap year’ crowd who want to do activities like climbing, tubing and trekking during the day and then party all night. We were quite happy to join them for a couple of days! Anyway… we cycled for about an hour through small villages and over some very rickety wooden bridges until we reached the cave area. We had a bit of a scramble up a path to reach the entrance of the cave, but it was well worth it. Unlike the cave we visited in Halong Bay, there are no electric lights installed (yet) and once we got out of the entrance of the cave, it was pitch black and we were glad we bought torches. We latched onto a couple who had hired a local guide so that we could find our way around the cave – think we may be still in there if we hadn’t! We got pretty sticky clambering around the cave, so we were very glad of a swim in the blue lagoon in the valley below the cave. From Vang Vieng, we headed north to Luang Prabang, the capital of Laos before the French moved it to Vientiane. The road snakes across the mountains that cover Laos, and it again provided amazing views over the hills and also passed through a number of villages populated by Hmong hill tribes. The day we drove was Hmong new year, so each village was holding a party and there were lots of girls dressed in traditional Hmong costumes. We arrived in Luang Prabang a nauseating 6 hours later and spent the evening eating tasty vegetarian buffet and meat-on-a-stick from market stalls (for 40p) and exploring the night market selling handicrafts. The following day we spent exploring the town and surrounding villages – we had a tour of a temple and the local market in the morning and then visited the palace that was inhabited by the King and Queen until 1957 when communism took over and the King and Queen were sent ‘north to be re-educated’ and no one has seen them since… After lunch, 6 of us jumped in the back of a jumbo (big tuk tuk) and headed out on a tour of local villages to see a blacksmith, rice wine distillery, silk weaving and paper making. It was really interesting to see how all the stuff we’d seen in the market is made, and made me much more appreciate the effort that goes into everything and maybe I shouldn’t be trying to get so much of a bargain in the market! We finished the tour a little early so our driver took us to visit the local office of Laos UXO – an NGO working to clear unexploded ordnance across Laos and also provide education about UXO to villages across the region. Unlike Cambodia and Vietnam, there was few battle fields in Laos, so the acres and acres of minefields that plague those countries don’t exist. Laos has it even worse. The American heavily bombed Laos during the Vietnam War to try and stop the Ho Chi Minh trail. The statistics of how many bombs were dropped on Laos are staggering and the whole of the country is still littered with UXO. This was a tad daunting the next day when we trekked for 3 hours over countryside and farmland through small villages to Kwang Si falls. Fortunately we didn’t see any suspicious pieces of metal, and the walk was well worth it as the falls were beautiful – photo opportunities muchly improved when some orange robed monks appeared! We had more monk-y photo time the next morning when we all got up bleary-eyed at 5.30am to take baskets of sticky rice to offer the monks of local temples as alms. We all sat on wee plastic stools on the pavement and popped balls of rice in the monks bowls as they passed. All happened very quickly and the guidebook had been very enthusiastic about the experience so it wasn’t as interesting as we had all expected, but was nice to have taken part in the tradition. From Luang Prabang, we spent two days on a slow boat on the Mekong heading upstream to the Thai border. In total we spent 18 hours on the boat with a stop overnight in a small riverside village. The views from the boat were great once the sun had burned the mist away and we spent many many hours playing cards, reading, playing cards, listening to music, playing cards, sleeping… ! We spent our last night in Laos at the border town of Huoy Xai and then had to say goodbye to a fabulous and beautiful country. We crossed the Mekong by longtail boat to get to Thailand and then we were on our way to Chiang Mai – our last stop on the 40 day tour from Bangkok. We had our final dinner at a restaurant owned by our tour leader, Bom, which was a nice way to say thanks and goodbye to him and to the people heading off. We’re now ‘proper travelling’ and have found ourselves a funky guesthouse to stay in for the next couple of nights and it is costing us all of 2 pounds each a night for a double room with bathroom! We’ve got a mountain bike/trekking day booked for tomorrow and that’s as far as our plans go for now. Time to do some internet searching for where to go next!