Day 50 - Great times in the incredible city of Chiang Mai (Thailand)

After originally planning on staying only one night in Chiang Mai, we realised we were enjoying the city way too much to leave and ended up staying for four. Although we didn't do any of the organised jungle trecking, elephant related activites, or other such things that people flock to Chiang Mai to do, we had a fantastic time exploring the city and its surrounds. Doi Suthep Temple on the mountains overlooking the city was incredible; lots and lots of shiny gold. One does get somewhat exhausted of temples in this part of the world, so choosing the ones to go and see becomes important. And it's a very interesting city, the old town surrounded by a wall and a moat, with remnants of colonial style buildings all over the place. There are plenty of tourists around, and yet it is a city full of Thai people and the things that make them interesting, such as entire street of harware stores. I'm not generally into hardware stores but when they sell 50 year old appliances, ponchos and guitars it's a completely different story.

But the thing about Chiang Mai that kept us there for three extra days was the other travellers that we met at our hostel. It's easy for us because we have a car to miss out on this aspect of travelling; we often stay at very cheap hotels in cities we've never heard of where they've never encountered a tourist. Although this is an interesting part of our trip, it is nice to revive our social skills every now and then. We took a drive to Teung Thao lake yesterday, and on the way out bumped into the various people that we'd met while we were there. We ended up leading a ten-person, two-scooter and Trevor convoy, with our first ever passengers in the car, out to this beautiful lake where we spent the afternoon sitting on a bamboo shack over the water.

It was actually quite sad to leave our new friends, but we all parted ways yesterday and we made our way south towards Bangkok. We spent the night in the unknown town of Phitsanulok, about 400km north of Bangkok.

Day 47 - Muay Thai (Thailand)

We had the pleasure last night of experiencing a real-life Muay Thai (Thai Boxing) show. We arrived at the advertised start time of 9pm and paid our 400Bhat (AU$13), to find that we were amongst the only half a dozen spectators. We found a jenga set to entertain ourselves with and quickly realised that the point of getting us in an hour early is to wrangle some extra drink sales. Some more spectators arrived and we noticed the disproportionate number of single middle aged white men.
Eventually the fights started and we were surprised that the first fight was between what looked like 10 year olds. The second opponents were probably 15. We hadn't realised that we would be watching children fight, and the cheap skate in us harked up, considering it to be less value for money. And then our upper-middle class educated and oppinionated upbringings came out and we wondered whether it's right for children to be fighting professionally at all. Surely, if nothing else, they may not be able to develop properly, and the risk of long term injury must be much higher than that of a grown up. I wonder how much, if any, of our entry ticket goes to the fighters.

We weren't overly impressed when we found out that we were also expected to pay for the privilege of using the toilets, if you can call them that. Surely our entry ticket could cover the running costs, considering there's nothing like toilet paper or soap provided, and they didn't seem to have huge cleaning costs. Anybody who's ever travelled anywhere has experienced this type of frustration, but that doesn't stop it from irking me.
As the evening progressed we noticed the increase in young Thai females (or dressed as such) paying attention to the single middle aged white men. By the last fight there were very few groups/couples that weren't made up of this demographic. Interestingly enough, all the bars set up around the area were quite openly catering for this strand of tourism.
Perhaps a Muay Thai show would be better in a bigger, or more famous arena. If it was set up for locals who are interested in the sport instead of tourists looking for a cultural experience, I'm sure it would have been quite a different kettle of fish. Having said that we were tourists looking for a cultural experience, and that certainly is what we got.

Photos

Some more photos of Thailand, and a few from our day in Burma are now up on facebook.

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Day 44 - A change of vehicle and Accident #2 (Thailand)

We decided today that we would follow the crowd and be normal tourists, hiring scooters for the day. All the cool kids were doing it and although having a car is awesome, the idea of scooting about the narrow mountain roads on a scooter did seem appealing. And we certainly did have a very enthralling day exploring the area, including a 40km or so chunk of the mountain pass between here and Chiang Mai.

We did however have our second accident of the trip - funnily enough this one also involved a scooter, but this time the culprit was Ben. Although he had actually been hooning for most of the day (I am obliged to include the fact that his top speed was 110kmh), it was starting to get dusk and we were on a pretty tricky bit of road so we were all taking it carefully. Unfortunately some sort of bug got caught inside his shirt and gave his arm a sharp bite, sending him into freak out mode which resulted in a run-in with the nearest ditch. His legs are actually more cut up than the guy Denner knocked off his bike in Krabi. Special thanks go to Doctor Denner who did a brilliant job of administering alcohol wipes (much to Ben's disgust) and some well secured bandages to the damaged areas.

Day 44 - A day in Burma and a drive through the Thai Highlands (Thailand/Burma)

Having picked up some stupid bug somewhere along the lines, I haven't been feeling very well the last few days, hence the shortage of blogging. But all is now well.

We tried and failed miserably to stay a night in Petchaburi. After driving around the town for two hours and stopping in a shopping centre for directions, we eventually found our way to a hotel. Unfortunately it was a proper posh hotel costing at least five times as much as we planned on spending, so even though that's still a little under $20 each, we couldn't really justify it. On we went to Ratchaburi where we did manage to find somewhere cheap and dingy enough for our requirements.

The following day took us to Tak, a town about 80km from the border of Burma. We've noticed that everybody seems to come out at night a lot more than we're used to in Australia. At 10am there are often not many people on the streets and most shops are still closed. Then rush hour seems to be the duration of the afternoon, and most shops remain open until 9 or 10pm. We've also noticed that most people eat dinner much later in the evening, and the night markets and street restaurants are open until quite late at night. Tak however, perhaps just because it is a much smaller town than Chumphon or Phatthalung, seemed to be up and running much earlier in the day and closing up sooner in the evening.

Day 42 (Saturday 5th May) was the day we've all been looking forward to. Well, one of the many days. We drove the exciting and treacherous road from Tak to Mae Sot, a 80km stretch of wet and windy danger where we passed about a dozen overturned 4x4s, a few derailed semi-trailers and way too many unfortunate scooters in the ditches. Despite it's windiness, the road was actually pretty wide and properly sealed, the local drivers just don't seem to be able to keep their vehicles on the roads. Needless to say, we were much better at staying on the road and managed to get to Mae Sot with our car still on all fours.

We were disappointed, but not at all surprised to find that we couldn't take Trevor with us into Burma. So walked across the Thai - Burmese Friendship Bridge into the border town on Myawaddy. At Customs we were escorted inside the office where we had to pay 500Bhat (AU$16) and leave our passports for the day. Foreigners are only allowed across the border for one day and the border closes at 5pm.

Although probably not a really true picture of the country, being one of the very few places tourists are allowed to visit, and located right on the border of Thailand, it was a very interesting day for us. Their choice of vehicle, unlike the Thais who much to our surprise drive mainly brand new Toyota Hiluxes (although usually with a around six people sitting in the tray), was more along the lines of the beat up van with five times extra rear suspension, piled high with layers and layers of packages, people and smaller vehicles; the tractor type machine which runs on an engine that has been tied to the front with some sort of rope, and bubbles as it runs; the motorised scooter with seven people on it; and the make-shift bus put together with panels from smaller, worn-out cars. The roads and houses were also worlds apart from their neighbours in Thailand, with only one sealed road in the town and very few houses made of anything other than wood.

But the thing that really struck us was the reactions we got from people. Sure, we got stared at and a few of the bolder ones or young children waved at or even talked to us, but unlike what we usually experience in the developing world, it was out of sheer interest and they were ever so polite and timid about it with no hint of asking for money or anything else. It was most refreshing and really helped us enjoy our few hours in the country.

We arrived yesterday in Pai, a small village north of Chiang Mai in the highlands of Thailand. It's our first time since the Cameron Highlands in Malaysia that we haven't been sweating and have even been able to pull out some trowsers, which is a huge relief. Because the 90km drive from Chiang Mai took us three hours (it was somewhat windier and hillier than we were lead to believe on the map), we'll stay here a couple of nights before heading on our way.

Day 39 - Eating in Chumphon (Thailand)

Other than the time we had to treck through sewage, our last four days which we spent on the island of Koh Phi Phi were very pleasant and relaxing. As is what's the norm when one visits such a place, we did some eating and some sleeping, some swimming and some walking, some drinking and some sleeping. We even visited Maya Bay where the movie The Beach was filmed, and went for a snorkel in the rain.

Now we're back to the real part of our trip where we drive on local roads and stay in obscure towns that most white people have never heard of. We have been very pleasantly surprised with the roads so far. The main highway we have taken through Thailand from Malaysia is of a standard that one would find in Australia (possibly better than some parts of Australia), and even the side streets are all pretty well sealed and of a regular width.

Our destination today was Chumphon, which is a charming town close to untouched by tourism. We're staying in a pretty reasonable hotel - the type that have lifts and a lobby and off-street parking. After checking out all the hostels and guesthouses in the area, we found that it's actually a lot cheaper to do it this way - and we get a much better room. This is where the locals stay, so this is how to get local prices.

As we've had a couple of great experiences of ordering food at a place with no menu and no English, we have become pretty gung-ho with our choice of restaurants. This evening we chose one that was buzzing with locals, which we found very appealing in it's busyness and amount of smoke coming from all sorts of cooking throughout the room. As we sat down, a couple of hot tiles were put on our table and some sort of metal device that had something on it that looked like food. We were getting pretty excited, but then the guy just looked at us expectantly. So we sort of tried to ask what we were supposed to do, but as we were speaking to him in English, he was speaking back in Thai. So we decided to just go for it and started saying various words such as chicken, meat etc. Unforunately it was to no avail, as we were received by a blank stare and lots of funny looks from our fellow diners. As a result, I am ashamed to say, we gave up and went to the next restaurant where we sat on a table on the road and were given the option of pad thai with chicken, tofu or egg, and when we ordered drinks she crossed the road to the convenience store and bought them for us.

Photos

There are now some more photos of our adventures in Thailand.

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