I headed to my first hostel called Little Bird after getting a convenient free cab to some random hotel 100yards away who managed to convince these four Brits to stay there -everyone’s happy! I struck super lucky with my room mates Jacqui (Slovenia), Cecile (New York/Venezuela) and Jessie (London).
Jessie, Kelly, Rowan and I had dinner on the river one evening
My first day was a useless faff day (I’m learning fast that you have these everywhere you go). I still managed to have every meal with a different person (which I LOVE doing) and took in a few temples (barely a day goes by…). I met various backpackers and an Italian woman working with refugees from Burma who were all pretty fascinating. I also read this awesome book called Eleven Minutes which is all about a Brazilian prostitute in Switzerland (I picked it up off a table in the hostel when I was bored) and is really thought-provoking. Faff days also involve getting around to uploading my pictures and writing these blogs (I'm falling progressively further behind each time but at least they're still coming!)
Fortunately, despite my massively unproductive day, Cecile had had a hugely useful one and found a brilliant yoga studio. I made a huge mistake of assuming that I could just pick up on a “level 3” (advanced and fit intermediate) yoga class and suffered for it for the next three days (much to the amusement of various masseuses who tried to work on my shoulders).
I had real trouble remembering to take pictures of the food I'd made before instinctively scoffing the lot!
I spent Christmas eve out with the girls in various bars around Chiang Mai, my favourite of which had a rooftop terrace from which you could see the stars. Our Christmas day cookery course was a tad painful as we tried to recover from the night before but it was still incredible. We were given a guided tour of the food market (different kinds of rice and chilli pepper, how coconut juice, milk and cream differ) and made seven dishes including mango sticky rice (YUUMMM), Pad thai, curries, soups, spring rolls and all sorts. And ate it all!
Tom yum(!) soup that I made
Most bizarre was this appetiser they gave us called something like meu meung which involved wrapping small pieces of raw garlic, shallot, peanut, chilli pepper and palm sugar syrup in an edible vine leaf and munching it whole.
There are some stunning temples in Chiang Mai
Although I enjoyed the cooking and yoga and people, I became a bit dejected with Chiang Mai when I realized that every other shop was selling variants on the same tour (at different prices), and most of the activities were things I’d already done in Kanchanaburi. I wanted to meet hill tribes and explore the mountains a bit but I didn’t want to follow the beaten track.
“Adventure tour” is simply an oxymoron. There’s adventures and there’s tours but you’re kidding yourself if you think an adventure tour is in any way wild or unique.
Getting into a truck with a load of other tourists/backpackers to go around tiger (and human) zoos before being rushed past a waterfall and down a river on a raft, and all before dinner that evening is a tour. Getting onto the back of a motorbike with a guy you met yesterday to go into the mountains for two days is an adventure.
This somewhat sums up the way I felt about getting onto the back of a scooter/moped/motorbike...until last Tuesday
I met Rowan when he was rallying people to head out for lunch at the hostel. At lunch I mentioned that I’d decided it was time to go to Chiang Dao, and probably tomorrow and he said simply that he’d been planning on going by motorbike. Three minutes later we were decided...
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