Massages, Elephants and more Thai Whiskey.....

Just spent 4 days up north in Chiang Mai and what a great city! It's so less intimidating than Bangkok, cleaner, lots of tourists and just not as intense. I guess it's the Galway of Thailand! It's a walled city and there are lots of great markets all over the place where you can buy any food you want, any brand of anything you want or even all stuff from the hilltribes, a lot of it probably fake but who knows! So just chilled out there for a few days going around the markets and getting our Thai massages. It was very enjoyable and a whole new experience. You are on a mattress on the ground (see malco right!) and you have this Thai woman sitting on you while she massages you! There are so many of the massage places around and some of them are brothels so you gotta be careful! Speaking of brothels......so many prostitutes in the bars in Chiang Mai trying to pick western men up...very strange too! Yesterday we went on this trek into the jungle. That was really great - spent the day elephant riding (as from the pic below!), white water rafting and visiting some of the different tribal villages.

It was a great day all in all apart from two very annoying French girls (desole aux francais qui lisent cet blog!) that did nothing but complain and give out constantly and then gave our poor guide who was the coolest guy loads of hassle at the end of the day.......
Last night we took a night train back to Bangkok which took us 15 hours. For fear of not been able to sleep for the duration of the trip we decided some help might be needed so we got a bottle of thai whiskey, thai red bull and coke and made our own home made "buckets" on the way back! It was very effective for me and I was sleeping like a baby for a solid 10 hours! Unfortunately Malcolm wasn't quite so luck and ended up staying awake most of the night.......unlucky! So now back in Bangkok and we've met up with some friends of Malcolm's that arrived here yesterday. All off to see some Thai boxing tonight then heading down to the islands tomorrow for the full moon party which is on the 22nd I think. Hope everyone is having fun wherever you are and hope to have some more news up here soon.