sendeuros

I’m officially sick of travelling! Lucky we are on the beach now for 7 days in Koh Samui 😛

Our last day in Chiang Mai was rather un-evenful; Philppa got a Thai massage and than we saw a movie – Kung Fu Hustle (dubbed in Thai with English sub-titles). Was really bad,… yet really good (in a bad way) 😛 The sub-titles were sporatic at best, and our fellow movie-goers were laughing out of sequence with us! If it gets to Melbourne – a must see!

We boarded our 9.50PM sleeper train from Chaing Mai to Bangkok after an hour of arguing with the station master about getting our tickets chainged (we were originally going to get off before Bangkok). Finally he told Philippa that you could change them on the train and didn’t need to see him at all, groan! The crowd gathering behind Philippa wanting to purchase tickets were relieved to see her go!

The train trip was hot, smelly (gotta love the waste disposal system of the Thai trains – it all goes out the side, including the poop which gets caught in the wheels and stinks out the place) and full of killer bugs – somehow we ended up on a train without A/C (even though we paid for it)… someone asked us later if we were Americans (as we were whinging so much),… I replied with “hell no” and promptly shut up and enjoyed the rest of the trip 😛

We arrived back in Bangkok about 15 hours later and promptly sought out the nearest fast food joint (which was KFC) – Speaking for KFC, its just not the same in Asia – kinda tastes like, ummm, Marathon Chicken (as dad once explained KFC in Asia to me)! McDonalds and Burger King is good though, its pretty much the same everywhere!!

We caught the next Tuk Tuk to Wat Po. When we got out of the Tuk Tuk we were promptly told by a man on the street that the temple was closed and that it would re-open in a few hours; he suggested that we visit his friends Suit Tailor shop to pass the time 😛 – we told him to go away and continued on to the very much open temple! Inside we saw the famous giant reclining Buddha which was, well, big and pretty impressive – apparently it is older than Bangkok as it was made in the 17th Centuary, well before the city was established – to date the oldest “thing” I have ever seen! Wow!

Next was a taxi ride with a friendly driver to an air-con shopping centre in Bangkok – he was realy nice untill we tried to pay with a 500 baht note (about AU$18.00) – he called us all sorts of names and got realy angry as we didnt have smaller notes (and was outraged at us thinking that he would be able to change it). The taxi fare was a little under AU$3.00 for over half an hour in the taxi; its a different world huh! We tipped him generously once we got change 😛

We past the rest of the time, waiting for our next train to Koh Samui (due at 7.30PM) by watching another movie – Finding Neverland! Oh – here’s a travel trip for you, the toilets at nice shopping centres are greeeaaatt!! Much better than train stations or smelly trains! Heh – I went twice just for the fun of it!! 🙂

The train to Koh Samui was a little late, but was much nicer than the one from Chaing Mai – we at least had snooty, posh air-con this time! The trip was also somewhat shorter, our train arrived at its destination at about 7.00AM; we than caught a bus and a ferry boat to the Koh Samui island (sounds more exciting than it was, promise!)

We were ripped off as soon as we arrived; we paid at least double what we should have for a shuttle bus to our hotel – pffft, …and they made me get our bags off the roof of the bus! Mongrels!! 😛

The hotel is great, the Samui Orchard – its also a zoo and bird park and everything, sleeping with tigers is great! The rest of the day was catching up on sleep and sitting on the beach, nice and relaxing!

That brings us to today, again, nothing exciting – we caught the hotel taxi into town and had lunch and jumped on a computer! Thats all folks – miss you all more than I would dare admit! — Matt

Well it seems that we have a bit of catching up to do!

So Matt and I collapsed on the beds at the hotel when we arrived in Chang Mai, recovering from the hotel California and the sleeper train trip with the horrible, abnoxious, drunk English men!

We didn’t have much time to rest because the next day we jumped on a mini bus and weaved through the streets of Chang Mai picking up guests for our day trip. Our gorgeous (not looking) tour guide was Kon, who was jovial and seemed to know a bit about the places we visited. Our first stop was a hilltribe the Mao people, from Lao I think. It was a forty minute walk up hill. Matt got to the point where he dug in his heals and said “I am not going any further” and we happened to be 10 meters away from the tourist sign welcoming us to the village. From what we could tell, nobody actually lived there it was purely set up for the tourists! So why not 10 meters from the road 🙂 It was an old village that they had preserved, which made us feel a little more comfortable rather than it being a “Human Zoo” experience. We both had turns at shooting a cross bow. Matt shot a bulls eye, through target on the mellon that was hanging.

We then set off to go elephant riding. It is hard not to fall in love with the elephants. I was a big skeptic, but when you have two little cubs following beside you and then go walking and playing in the river your heart melts! There is something about the way that there trunks grab the bananas and manovour it into there mouths that gets you!

After our traditional Thai lunch we went bambo rafting, which isn’t quite as exciting as it sounds. Though it seems to take more skill that you would think from observing. Matt ended up in the drink after having a go, it was the rapids that caught him out. We all got wet, which is always fun.

We visited the Karen tribe (one of the versions as you will read later), and purchased some weaving – a piece that took three days to weave. When we paid the lady 140Baht ($5), she looked at us as though we were gullible for paying so much. We did pay alot because at the market the next day we saw similar pieces for 65Baht ($2.20), but as Matt said “I’m not going to pay someone 3 dollars for 3 days work!”.

Somehow I persuaded Matt to walk down to the waterfall that we visited. You couldn’t see the waterfall for all the tourists swimming in the water! I think that Matt was pleased with the view (*Matt elbows Phil*). That night we went out to the night markets – the markets are soooooo much fun here in Chang Mai and had Burger King for dinner – too much culture for one day 😛

The next day Matt couldn’t get out of bed for our 7am start to visit the Golden Triangle and more hill tribes. From his lips I could make out “No more walking” in a faint wisper. God love him he was exhausted and the Burger King was playing havock with his tummy – figures. I spent the day on the mini bus, over 7 hours of driving (lucky Matt didn’t come). The golden triangle is nicely set up for tourists, I caught a speed boat over to an enclave in Lao that you do not have to go though imigration in order to go shopping. It was a bit of a joke. The speed boat also took us to see the Paradise Casino set up at the norther tip of Myanmar.

A lot of tourist take this day trip in order to get their passports extended. I met some young Aussies that had run out of money and time, waiting for money to clear from their parents at home.

The rest of the day was filled with visiting hilltribes. We visited another two versions of the Karen tribe, affectionately known as the long necks and the big ears. This felt a bit more like a human zoo, but the village have a cover charge for visitors and plenty of sovineer shops. There where another two tribes living by there side, one which only washed twice a month because they believe that the spirits recognised them by their sent. The hilltribes are all refugees from countries such as Tibet, Myanmar, China and Lao, some have been here for only a couple of years, others have been here for hundreds of years.

Since then….hmmm…we have been relaxing, marketing, enjoying Chang Mai. We love it up here and could easily stay another week however we are catching a train tomorrow and heading south to Koh Samui, two overnight sleepers. Please pray for no drunk English men 😛

Thank you for all your emails and comments. I am trying to get through them and answer them individually, because we really appreciate the news from home. It is good to hear that the water catchments are filling up – I just feel sad for all the little kids that have just started back at school. That is enough ranting from me.

Puff,… what a week!

After tromping around Bangkok for 3 or 4 hours, we finally found a TAT (Tourism Authority of Thailand) Travel Agency who promptly booked us on some tours for the following few days and than a train to Chaing Mai.

We woke up the following morning nice and early and boarded a mini bus which took us to the Bridge on the River Kwai (go on, start whistling the tune). There was a small museum set up there which was absolutley facinating (however slightly unconventional – we weren’t entirely convienced that all the ehbits were what they claimed to be). We saw the final resting place of hundreds of Australian (and Dutch, English and US) soldiers and the now re-constructed bridge. Next was the Hell-Fire Pass, where another museum was set-up (this one was constructed by the Australian government and was realy slick) – we learnt about the role of the allied POW forces in constructing the infamous railway line and the horendus conditions they lived in (well, those that DID live). Seeing the actual cutting (which was a short walk away) actually brought a tear to my eye.

Than we saw some waterfall (more like a rapid), which was apparently beautiful 😛

A local dinner followed on a raft-boat and then we were taken (by jet-boat) to our accomodation – which was nothing more than a shack floating on the river and a mattress on the floor with a door that would not shut properly, let alone lock! We nick named it the hotel California, because the host could not stop singing the song. We had a lot of fun chatting with the other tourists (mostly Dutch) and managed to get a few winks of sleep before we were whisked off to some more *wonderful* waterfalls! (7 actually – I only saw 4, but Philippa saw them all). We had a lot of fun on the tour, packed a lot into the two days. The most amusing part of the whole trip was a couple of French tourists (hippy backpackers) who where happy to try anything – even Cobra mixed with mull!! I’m sure that they will spend a lot of time in the loo on their trip 🙂

The trip back to Bangkok was long and uneventful; we were finally dropped off at the train station for our trip to Chaing Mai at about 6.00PM. We waited at the train station for what seemed like a month; I paid a total of 6 baht to use the toilet (2 baht each time) – I kept chickening out as they where that gross! We finally borded our overnight *express* train at about 10.00PM.

The train was clean, and turned out to be a relatively fun ride except for the fact the it seemed to stop at each station along the way; the train got lost and headed back the direction we come from for a few hours; the drunk brittish tourists (brickies) and of course – they only had squat toilets! We had a ball!!

We finally arrived in Chaing Mai and was greeted by our hotels driver, who was somewhat anoyed at the fact that the train was 2 and half hours late (and he had been waiting for us the whole time). We slept for the rest of the day, ready for a next set of tours the following day!

More to come soon…love all you guys and miss you heaps. Sorry about the spam on the comments site, we have kinda fixed the loophole.