Chiang Mai.

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Chiang Mai is really pleasant. It's not too hot, not too busy or crowded, easy to navigate, rather less costly than other places we've been and the food is good. People are welcoming - it is evident that many Thais are feeling "foreigner fatigue" as they are bombarded by enthusiastic travelers from all over the world - I don't blame them. However Chiang Mai doesn't seem to mind, and we feel welcome as opposed to just tolerated.

We thought we'd only stay a few days, but discussed it this morning and agreed that with no pressing need to go anywhere immediately, we should stay. Enjoy it until we become restless, as for the moment it's charming us every day.

Days have been languid, but we are doing a fair bit. Chiang Mai is a hub for a lot of trekking tourism, but for the most part it's rather out of our price range. In order to properly enjoy all the countries we're visiting we need to be cautious not to overspend in any one place, and Chiang Mai is a city where you could spend a lot of money on excursions and adventure tourism.

There's been lots of walking, exploring, reading, talking to people. A few highlights:

An afternoon spent at the Baan Kingkaew orphanage was good times. We went with a new friend named Teddy, a Lao-American we met. Teddy grew up in Chicago, but now calls New Orleans home, and he's near the end of a year long trip. He was going to the orphanage to play with the kids, having recently donated a soccer ball and invited us along. Jon and I made cash donations and spent a couple hours with a group that was about 3 or 4 years old. The orphanage was beautiful and the staff kind and affectionate, and the kids utterly hilarious. We were exhausted after! The sad part is that despite the loving nature of the staff there, there are 53 kids that want and deserve attention. They're craving physical contact, because as well as running around playing we did a whole lot of cuddling, they pounced on us for cuddles immediately.

The temples are beautiful. We're going to another one tomorrow in a national park. So far my favorite has been Wat Phra Singh here in Chiang Mai.

The Tiger Kingdom is a big touristy tiger zoo. It's got a successful breeding program and rescue project and it's a big slick place. You can pay to interact tigers which are under no sedation of any kind. They divide them into age categories and the adult tigers cost less, presumably because people tend to be more afraid of them? We chose the adults because, well, they're so impressive. The kittens sure were cute, though.

I could not predict how intense and...emotional (and counter-intuitive) it would be to be in the enclosure with them. It was amazing. The only control tool the trainers use are tiny bamboo canes and when the tiger is too playful or they want to reprimand them it's a gentle tap on the nose or cheek - a very light tap that the tigers barely seem to notice. We were under strict instructions to keep our hands away from their paws, throat and face. Their trainers do play with him, and can read their behaviour well, but obviously the tigers aren't allowed to let loose with random tourists. The tigers are segregated by age during the day but combined to play together after the facility is closed to the public every day.

When I was lounging beside Edward (we were placed with three brothers from the same litter, 21 months old, Edward, Leonardo and Oliver) he rolled onto his side for a belly rub. To my absolute delight after a few moments he began to purr loudly. Eventually he rolled onto his back and swung his face around towards me, completely exposing his throat for a good chin scratch, purring away. His mouth was inches from my calf - I'm not going to lie that suddenly I had a huge adrenaline/fear response and had to control myself from not jumping up...I had to take a deep breath and respond to the trainer who told me to move my leg away. The sad part - I really wanted to give that soft white chin a scratch. He wasn't being the least bit aggressive, but I was always aware I was sitting next to an alpha predator! All for about $10, believe it or not.

We went to a snake "farm", where they house many of the worlds scariest snakes to produce antivenin. We saw a king cobra show and handled a bunch of Burmese pythons. The cobra show was crazy, it still had it's fangs and venom and was several meters long. At one point he slithered out of the ring and the "charmer" had to catch him. There was no barrier between us and him, we were in a little seating area and it was ridiculously unsafe. At least we knew they had antivenin there, heehehehehe.

Yesterday Jon and I went to the awesome Crazy Horse Buttress with a very impressive climbing company called CMRCA. They were awesome. We're both very beginner climbers and this was a great opportunity to take a good top-rope course so we feel like we can start to accompany our O'hara friends more competently. Our instructor Taw is on the Thailand National Climbing Team and we loved him. Calm, patient and encouraging, a super nice guy. We feel a lot more able to join people who are leading and not need to be shown everything. We climbed a couple different 5.8 routes and feel good about our day. We were three in our class, a guy named Trevor from California was with us, and Taw had an assistant instructor with him named Ooan. Pretty sweet teacher-student ratio! The whole day cost us $85, the setting was stupendously beautiful and we feel that the course was a really good decision. Their bouldering gym is sweet and really inexpensive and we've dropped in a couple times cause it's like half a block away from our guesthouse, making it a nice option when we have a few hours to kill.

After we got back to Chiang Mai from Crazy Horse we went for dinner and some beer with Trevor and it was the Sunday Walking Market, a weekly street market in Chiang Mai. It's really cool and I wanted to shop!!!

Alas, I keep trying to upload the video of tummy-rubbing the tiger but it just won't work, I think it's too big, although photos are uploading nice and fast on this computer. I'm going to try to send it in email format to you all.

So next we go to a town called Pai, and we're in no rush to get there. Soon enough we will train back down to Bangkok and fly to Vietnam on the 8th. We like Chiang Mai so much we're going to hang out for a few more days. Tomorrow we're going to a botanical garden and to a temple that sits on top of a hill.

Hope you're all well. It's Eryn's birthday tomorrow!!!!

Khao Yai National Park + Ayuthaya

So last night I wrote for an hour, a detailed, inspired update about the last little while. The ancient computer I was writing on crashed and I lost it all. Needless to say it was frustrating.

We've just spent a great day walking through the vast ruins of Ayuthaya in the heat, and find ourselves with a few hours to kill before we catch a night train to Chiang Mai, so I'm going to start over.

Khao Yai National Park was incredible. It's a wild piece of wilderness only a few hours from Bangkok. In some regards we didn't know what to expect, and wondered if it would be highly developed and kind of theme park-like in areas. Not even a little, it's a 2000+ sq km piece of wild, dense jungle, and I have a hunch that it will stand out as one of the highlights of our whole trip.

The park has lots of trails running through it, but we opted to splurge on a day and a half of guided tours through our guesthouse, Greenleaf. The value for what we spent was outstanding, our guides taught us a lot about the area and we saw far more wildlife than had we just been hiking on our own.

On our first day we spent some time hiking and tracking wildlife, and saw:
Gibbons (a treat - they're quite elusive and require a good eye and ear, they never come down from the canopy)
pig-tailed macaques
Great Hornbills ( maybe 8 or 10 throughout the day...this is rare to see so many)
barking deer (didn't hear them bark though!)
samba deer
a gigantic black scorpion
Bear Cat (the largest of the civets, totally resembles a cross between a bear and a cat)
water monitors
an amazing array of beautiful butterflies

Khao Yai is the best place in Thailand to see Asian elephants that are still completely wild, and 200+ elephants live in the park. The group from our guesthouse that toured the day before we did saw an elephant...but alas we did not, despite seeing much evidence of elephants in the form of trampled forest and dung. As it is breeding season they are covering a lot of ground in the park right now and sightings are commonplace. We were hopeful, but quite honestly, it was such a fun day we didn't mind.

The next day was a half day tour, and we were taken to a delightful spring for a swim. There's no beach nearby, the park is in Northeastern Thailand, so it's the best place to go cool off...and there wasn't a foreigner in sight, we were surrounded by picnicking Thai families. Exquisite crystalline waters, it felt so great! Before long we were invited to join a random Thai family for some food, they were feeding us the spiciest food possible and cackling away, surprised that we liked it, and pouring us shots of Thai rice whisky. One of those magical moments of connection with no common language at all - so special.

After the spring Mr Nine took us to a very special place... There is a temple just near the park boundary that is built above a network of deep underground caves. I have yet to hear of anyone that knows of it, it's not in any guidebook weve heard of. I have a hunch that Greenleaf makes generous contributions to the temple for the privilege of bringing his small groups down there. We walked down a long steep scary ladder/stairway into the darkness and found an expansive network of quiet, still, warm caves. Walking around just with headlamps I felt like I was on another planet. We felt privileged to visit such a place.

Mr.Nine spent nearly an hour with us down there, showing us how to walk softly so as not to disturb the community of intriguing insects and the bat colony. (There are actually three different bat species in these caves) The monks have set up many altars and shrines throughout the caves, and there is a tiny room that you need to crawl into with a damp rug where the monks go for a 7-hour seated meditation in the still darkness. I wasn't scared down there - it was extremely peaceful. We were introduced to an enormous tarantula about the size of my fist...we needed to be very slow and cautious, not because she is dangerous but because she's very shy. Apparently she's lived there for years and would never jump at someone, but sudden movements or heavy footsteps make her shrink back into her big fuzzy white nest.

After this we left to drive through endless dusty crappy roads through farmland until we got to a hill, and walked to the edge of a cornfield. We stood about 50m under the opening to another cave, and right on schedule, at 6:20, a shockingly beautiful ribbon of two million wrinkle-lipped bats flew out. The sky was clear, the dazzling full moon was out and as the sky changed to darkness we stood for a half hour watching this endless cohesive stream of bats. Mr.Nine had brought a container of pineapple for us and Jon, Pedro from Columbia, Henrik from Denmark and I just stood transfixed watching the bats. The soundtrack of beating wings and cicadas was beautiful.

It happened to be a major festival day in Thailand - it's actually the reason we postponed our trip to Chiang Mai and timed Khao Yai as we did. Later that night we were just hanging out having a beer with Henrik and Pedro when our guesthouse hosts invited us into Pak Chong to join them. We were stoked! The festival was happening on the grounds around the temple...we expected it to be rather austere. Quite the opposite! It was actually pretty rowdy for a Buddhist festival!

Fireworks, midway games, monks handing out blessings everywhere. An endless lineup of carts serving tasty snacks. A muay thai ring with a huge crowd watching people fight. A small karaoke stage. A big stage with a beauty pageant of local girls?! This was seriously fun people watching. We were the only foreigners in sight. Lot of firecrackers and fireworks. Awesome.

The next morning we said our goodbyes at Greenleaf and took a class 3 train (under $1 fare) for 3 hours to Ayuthaya. A fun ride sardined in with hundreds of Thais. It made me really aware of how cold and detached North Americans are with strangers....it was a very social train ride. The nice guy next to me shared his totally new and unfamiliar fruit with us, and helped me when I bought a pomelo - vendors walk the aisle nonstop selling tasty food and drinks. The pomelo, a citrus sort of like a green grapefruit the size of a large melon, was peeled, so I thought I was in the clear. The next layer of skin is a very fibrous membrane and I seriously could not get through it. Buddy showed me The Way, and we had a good giggle.

So glad we came to Ayuthaya....this modest city of 137,000 people was once a very powerful city, the capital of Siam in the 1300s, and it's been very cool. It was a long sweaty day in the sun walking for hours through the ruins and visiting temples and I feel like I have a better understanding of the history of where I am.

In 3 hours we board a sleeper train bound for Chiang Mai, 12 hours to the north. We're stoked for Chiang Mai for lots of reasons, and looking forward to a respite from the heat.

short pit stop back in Bangkok

Just back from a lovely island in the Gulf of Thailand called Koh Chang. Our first impression was that the beaches were beautiful, but it was very crowded and overdeveloped, tons of obnoxious partying foreigners. Made a move and it turns out that the east coast of Koh Chang was really quiet, only a few restaurants and places to stay on that coastline, it was idyllic and restful.

We really preferred that side of the island. We found an amazing place to stay called the Treehouse. It was dirt cheap for a really simple bungalow, that was basically just a thatched hut on stilts with a porch and a hammock, there wasn't even glass on the windows and only electricity was two lightbulbs that only turned on at night. It was basically camping and we loved it. Lots of time on the beach, went kayaking... it's a beautiful island.

We left Koh Chang to come back to Bangkok to pick up our Vietnam visas, which took nearly a week to process. Bangkok is draining, it makes me kind of cranky. There is a lot about it I love, but it's busy, the air quality is terrible and it's just plain chaotic.

We've had a bit of a stressful 24 hours of constantly changing plans - we were originally heading south but based on a few conversations with people who were just there the weather turns out to be pretty crappy, so we thought to head up to Chiang Mai, a really interesting city in the far north of Thailand, but it turns out that there is a major festival for the next 3 days. This would be awesome except the trains are all full and the bus takes FOREVER to get there. Accommodation prices also spike like crazy during this festival, making it kind of too expensive to go. So we've been doing a lot of time consuming running around in the heat trying to make plans and it's worn us out a bit.

Instead we are heading to Khao Yai national park, described as one of the best parks in the world. It's only a few hours away so we'll do a couple days of hiking and hopefully see some cool wildlife. After the park we'll spend some time in a nearby city called Ayuthaya, a historic world heritage sight, the old capital city of Siam nearly 1000 years ago to do some sightseeing. Then head up to Chiang Mai afterwards when the festival is over. We'll stay in Thailand until Dec 8th, our one month Vietnam visas are from the 8th onwards.

We're both healthy and well!

Arrived safe and sound in Bangkok!

So here we are! WOW!

Arrived safe and sound to our reserved guesthouse in Bangkok, in the heart of the travelers mecca of Khao San Rd. It's clean and pleasant and the staff are kind and friendly.

Our economical flight proved that you get what you pay for - we can't say it was particularly comfortable in the grubby old plane that China Eastern flew us in. We have never seen a plane with a shared-use bar of handsoap before!!! Eww. But it got us here. (that was on the Shanghai-Bangkok leg of the trip). The Shanghai airport was expensive, hot and stuffy, grumpy and irritating. By contrast the MASSIVE four year old BKK airport is dazzling -cool, green and leafy with live orchids everywhere, pleasant helpful staff. It is without question the most beautiful and efficient airport I have ever seen.

We checked in a little after 4am at the Tuptim guesthouse, 24 hours after leaving Vancouver. Exhausted. Had showers, a beer and some food and the neighborhood was still wide awake as the sun came up. Surreal to say the least. Went to bed and slept for a few hours.

Today has been very mellow, recovering from the trip out. We awesome 30 minute foot massages ($2.50) today and wandered around getting our bearings.

Khao San Rd, Bangkok is a travelers destination where you can get outfitted in all the gear you need, from bikinis, fake birks, fake North Face backpacks and a pair of convincing fake Ray Ban aviators, all for under $50. There is so much tempting shopping. Lots and lots of tasty food, places to sit and people watch and drink beer - but if you're not drinking your face off or shopping there isn't much to do and the novelty wears off quickly. All it's good for is networking, making travel plans, booking transport and getting organized. As soon as our Vietnam visas are ready we will head south to Railay/Krabi, Ko Phi Phi and Ko Lanta, hopefully in a few days. We CAN'T WAIT to get down south on to the beaches.

Tomorrow is Vietnam embassy, and the Royal Palace.

I shall check in when I can. love to you all.