Nong Khiaw - When the Going Gets Tough, the Tough Get Wasted

It was strange going back to somewhere we'd been before, used as we had become to perpetually moving forwards.

After the beauty of Muang Ngoi the majesty of Nong Khiaw's resident mountains seemed a little diminished but it was still a breathtaking sight. A vast mountain rises up straight from the river and the town struggles for air on both banks, connected by a deceptively long bridge.

Some Like it Hot

After such a long time in the wilderness we decided to pamper ourselves on our return to relative civilisation and took a trip to a local steam bath. This involved sitting in a boiling hot shed built over a huge tank filled with water and herbs under which they set a fire for 10-15 minutes at a time. The intervals between your two or three sessions are spent dripping in the comparatively cool evening air drinking small cups of green tea. This is meant to be extremely good for the skin, resting the muscles and for curing colds. We were certainly relaxed when we left, we were so hot we were almost comatose.

American No Get Tour

When you're tired of sitting in bars beside the Nam Oh drinking Beer Laos the only thing to do in Nong Khiaw is to get on a bike and explore the countryside. One of the closest sights that we wanted to see was Tham Pha Thok, the vast caves where many of the locals lived during the American bombing of the Ho Chi Minh trail. For once we were anxious to assure the young guide who met us at the cave entrance that we were British, not American. He showed us the long jagged scars on his leg and the warped angle of his arm before he asked us our nationality. "English? English good. Australian good. American sorry no. Many bomb here, me and my sister both hurt by bomb. Sorry no American, no get tour."

The caves were half way up a sheer limestone rock face. Now reached by a flight of steep concrete steps our guide told us they used to have only a bamboo ladder. Inside the caves were large and fairly even under foot. They were very impressive, until you remembered that for many desperate people they were home. It quickly became dark as we walked through the sleeping area, the place the local government met to talk and finally the vast hospital. The floor of the hospital cave was far below us in the gloom and the ceiling impossible to see. Our guide told us there were huge spiders and bats up there, the people who lived in the caves used to eat the bats with sticky rice but the spiders he said were no good, they are too poisonous. Needless to say I was not keen to hang around or take the perilous bamboo ladder down to the hospital floor, which was where our guide said he had been injured by UXO. Hundreds of bombs were dropped here he told us, so many that in one place they made a huge crater in the ground, forming an unnatural pond by the caves entrance, a lasting reminder of the horrors that were endured here. Many people died he told us over and over again, many bombs, many died. The atrocities of the war appeared much earlier than we had anticipated on our holiday. I was prepared for it in Vietnam but I didn't think we would find it here, in this quiet, easy going country, in harmless little Laos.

When the Going Gets Tough, the Tough Get Wasted

Much of our time in Nong Khiaw was spent relaxing and drinking Lao Lao cocktails. Lao Lao is a locally made rice whiskey that people tend to brew up themselves, so you never quite know what you're going to get. It's strong and clear and not really tempered with much taste to mask the alcohol. It'll blow your face off if you take too large a slurp. The cocktails we found were a great invention, mixing the toxic spirit with coke and corriander or just lemon juice and sugar. One fateful evening we were plied with the lethal stuff from a bottle containing all sorts of dubious looking vegetable matter by an extremely exuberant local proprietess named Mama Lao. We drank for a while with an unfortunate Australian who was recovering from a vicious bee attack on the bridge. I'm sorry to say that the result of that particular evening was my decimating the peaceful beauty of night time in Nong Khiaw by throwing up off the edge of the bridge and losing my camera in the process. Lao Lao is not for the faint of heart.

In many ways Nong Khiaw was peppered with disaster. We'd had to do more and more laundry (in Udomxai the situation became so desperate I contemplated leaving the room wearing part of the soft furnishings) and lazily made the unwise decision of leaving it with the hotel. Professionals they were not and our washing came back blue. Sadly the Lao people do not understand the term refund.

Further chaos was caused during nap time when nature threw further fury at us in the shape of a massive spider sprinting towards us across the bed. Theo galantly threw me from harms way and hunted down said spider with a flip flop but I still insisted on changing rooms.

So chaos abounded in Nong Khiaw and though we enjoyed our time chilling out by the river we were not sorry to be moving on, having spent so long in one area. We had thoroughly soaked up the infectious lethargy of rural Laos and were ready to go back to the action packed city life.

Muang Ngoi - Resting Lady

And we thought the buses were rammed! The boat up the river from Nong Khiaw to Muang Ngoi was so packed that its edges were barely six inches above the water level. We all piled in long after we thought the boat was full, people half sat on top of one another like a massive, nautical game of sardines. Another slightly concerning fact was that our driver only had one hand.

A Distinct Lack of Teenage Kicks

Up river an hour later and still in one piece a few jumbled together buildings breaking out of the jungle came into view, flanked by towering mountains. The forest is so dense that from the river you can see only tiny patches of vertical cliff that aren't green. Muang Ngoi is a tiny roadless village. It has only one main street that stretches straight from the monastery to the Resting Lady Mountain. The whole town is struggling for space with nature. It is beautiful and remote and probably the worst place in the world to be a teenager. There are only a few shops and restaurants (which always seem surprised and disorientated to have customers) which cater solely to the tourists and nothing very much ever happens. There are only one or two boats to Nong Khiaw everyday and of course, no road, so no cars or bikes which in turn means that there are chickens and ducks and cats and dogs and all their numerous offspring all over the place.

Roosters wake you up at 5am with their incessant growing, which doesn't matter for the locals because they get up early anyway. Why? Well because they have to utilise the daylight because there is no electricity! Generators provide power for three hours in the evening until 10pm but that's it. Some people (swanky guesthouse owners) have their own generators but not many, but aside from that there's no TV, no music, certainly no internet and almost no phone signal.

The author - Main street of Muang Ngoi towards the Resting Lady Mountain

Still for a tourist it's a veritable Lao paradise. Half the town virtually tumbles into the incredible scenery of the river while the rest has that traditional feel travellers crave while still having the necessary conveniences. Life moves slow here and we found ourselves a little bamboo hut in a small garden in a beautiful location overlooking the side Nam Ou river and the mountains beyond. We sat out front in our hammocks all day watching exotic birds and butterflies wheel around.

It's always warm in Muang Ngoi, even in the pouring rain and we sat in the restaurants at night until we couldn't see the river and the mountains were lost in a swathe of inky blackness. The eateries are cheap and friendly and always have a cat or two to keep you company tend to kick you out at 9 ish so they can go to bed. Back to the bungalow we would go and read until the sad winding down noise let you know that the generators were about to die. After that all you could see outside were the stars.

We sort of had to become one with nature during our stay, which Theo managed much more successfully than I did. While he led hungry chicks up the street like some sort of poultry pied-piper and pondered the feasibility of using lizards to carry messages to each other (there are more of Louis' friends and relative than we care to count in Muang Ngoi), I continued to wrap myself up in the mosquito netting brandishing a flip flop and shrieking if anything brushed against me. There are bugs everywhere, ants in the bathroom, millipedes in the door frames, spiders in the ceiling and once a big fat beetle under the scoop for the toilet (no flush here either). At night the crickets are almost louder than city traffic.

The Resting Lady from the Nam Ou river

In to the Wild

Our first Muang Ngoi excursion was a kayaking trek with Laos Youth Travel led by a young man named Kaow. Like Chiang Rai's Ken, Kaow was super cool. He was dressed in the Laos equivalent of surfer shorts and a Super Dry shirt (that is baggy shorts and a fake Super Dry shirt) while also nonchalantly sporting a baseball hat and spiked earring combo. After paddling us and the kayaks upstream we stopped on a convenient beach and got into the kayaks. Kaow, of course, was a natural. He knew all the routes that caught the best currents and glided along effortlessly whereas Theo and I, who had both kayaked before but not in a double and I had never been on a river, splashed and squabbled and span round in circles. We did OK once we got going but we didn't seem to have any gear between drifting in the current and full race style powering down the river. At one point we had a total communication breakdown and crashed straight through a large bush.

The Resting Lady from the Nam Ou river

Kaow took us downstream and showed us the Resting Lady mountain, a vast peak that resembles a lady sprawled on her side, and generally bellowed questions across the river. He was extremely chatty, which was a pleasant change from all the blank staring. We stopped at a small village to have a look around, it could have been from any era save for the fact that the bamboo huts had all been updated to have metal roofs. It was totally silent, everyone being away in the fields. The only people we saw were a few old ladies and a group of little girls playing some sort of strange game where you fought over your shoes.

Back in the kayaks we paddled to the village from which we would walk to a waterfall. I managed to gracefully leave the kayak but unfortunately lost my balance in the slow boat we were using as a stepping stone to get to shore and fell on my bum, rolling around in the bottom of the boat with my legs in the air. Fortunately Kaow, Theo and the sober looking Laos man who had been driving the boat thought this was hilarious. "Too much Lao Lao (whiskey)" Kaow said knowingly.

At the village we rested and were examined for a while by lots of solemn faced children. Kaow took a great interest in Theo's John Lennon t-shirt and told us with glee how he'd met the man himself last year. He was very upset when we told him he was dead.

The walk to the waterfall took us first through pretty paddy fields with the mountains all around us. We took the winding paths across the fields and crossed little makeshift bridges over streams of water that ran for miles over the tiered plots. Kaow showed us all sorts of things along the way, beetles, frogs and grasshoppers. He told us about farm life and what it's like to live in Muang Ngoi and how he hopes they'll get electricity soon. He explained that the little huts we'd seen scattered across the hills were resting places for the workers and the miniature houses outside peoples homes were for the spirits.
  

Paddy fields around Muang Ngoi

Now whenever we've been anywhere near a waterfall, Theo and I agreed, the one thing our parents always drummed into us was; don't climb on the rocks! However, the jungle around the waterfall was so dense our trek turned out to be a nice stroll up a river. For a good half hour we waded and slipped and scrambled up stream. At one point we ascended a minor waterfall with the aid of a bamboo railing and Theo almost went back over it again in pursuit of a runaway flip flop. Kaow seemed to find it sufficient to simply shout "careful" every time we fell.

The waterfall was spectacular and after our hard climb we were grateful to swim in the freezing cold pool at its foot. Unfortunately, when we got out we both had our first taste of that glorious jungle hazard, leeches. Not only are they stealthy little scamps but no matter how hard you smush them with a rock they just won't die.

Kaow laid out our lunch by spreading out a huge banana leaf and opening up the takeway boxes he'd brought all the way upstream, although he did manage to dunk them in the river at one point. We had fried bamboo, noodles and sticky rice not to mention the most delicious, sweetest pineapple I have ever encountered. The strange thing about fried bamboo is, as Theo pointed out, though delicious everything else in this country is made from it, being strong yet supple, so you do feel as though you may as well stand up and start eating your chair when you want seconds.

Theo sensibly took it slow on the way back down the waterfall, so I was bounding on ahead with Kaow when I stupidly stepped down into a bit of river bed I couldn't see and disappeared up to the thigh in a large hole. Still we made it down and then home in one piece, feeling very pleased that we had managed to walk up and down a river without sustaining any injuries and convinced of what we had suspected before, that we were in one of the most beautiful spots in Laos.

The Waterfall close to Muang Ngoi

Spiders and Heights and Leeches, Oh My!

The next day we decided to do a trek on our own and set off in search of the nearby cave. Following the signs instead of the guide book we came to what turned out to be a different cave and much harder to access. The ascent was unbelievably  steep and there were barely even steps. What's more the earth footholds had been mostly turned to mud by the recent rain and were covered in damp slippery leaves. We were drenched in sweat and covered in bugs by the time we climbed some precarious wooden ladders to the cave entrance. We wandered into the dark, me clutching Theo, Theo clutching the weak headlight we'd been given. After seeing a massive and poisonous-looking spider we didn't hang around. It took us ages to traverse the steep, slippery, slope back down and I was freaking out (spiders in a high place is probably my worst nightmare). Eventually we got back sweaty and tired, thinking the worst was over, only to discover a massive leach lurking in between Theo's toes. From its size it must have been there for a while and it squirmed repulsively around the bathroom floor refusing to disappear down the drain. I panicked and did the worst thing possible. If you ever encounter a full leech, never do this. I whacked it with a shoe. Mud and blood sprayed everywhere. The leech was alive. Theo was bleeding. I was screaming. Now bamboo bungalows have very thin walls, so I'd imagine every single one of our neighbours heard the following:

"Leech!" "Get rid of it!" "It won't go!" "Leech!" "Die leech, die!!" (Whack, another whack, another whack) "Fuck's sake Emma stop hitting it!" "You get rid of it then!"

Stressed out and creeped out we tried our best to relax and recuperate out front in our hammocks, which went fine until Theo's promptly fell from the ceiling leaving him sprawled on the decking. "Too much fried rice" Kaow would have said. 

Our second attempt at seeing the cave went slightly better. Taking a different route out of town the track took us past bamboo homes and scraggy pieces of farmland full of chickens. As the path wound out of town it began to meander up and down past the Resting Lady mountain. Long stretches of paddy fields could be seen between the dense hedgerows that lined the path. On the way we picked up a stray canine companion, as you do. Reaching the fork in the river we visited the cave, a vast craggy place from which one part of the stream springs, and crossed a perilous bamboo bridge to the restaurant. A long time later a round, smiling lady brought us our fried rice then we ate our meal in the company of three cats and four chickens. We ventured slightly further afield down tracks similarly pretty to those we'd walked to the waterfall before heading home. 

Tham Pha Kaew cave

Lao-st in Translation

Of course the main draw of a village like this one is the interaction with the locals. From day one we had young men walking up to us in the street, shaking our hands and asking our names saying "pleased to meet you" over and over again. They seem keen to practice their English (obviously it the young men who are in possession of a decent education here, which is a shame because men talk to men in these countries meaning most conversations tend to go through Theo) and they offer to take us on treks to their friends' village. Our first experience of this was in first attempt at getting food. We placed an order with the teenage girl left in charge and she promptly walked out of the restaurant. Confused we waited and she came back with a BeerLao. That was a start, so we repeated the rest of our order and off she went returning with a man called Noi. A skinny, friendly youth with appalling teeth he sorted out the language problems and then sat down at our table with us as the girl left again. The near-silent minutes ticked by as conversation with Noi faltered and died, still he seemed content enough just to sit. Ten minutes later the girl located the cook and our food eventually came Lao style in dribs and drabs, though I never did get my rice or a drink.

Nam Ou river at sunset from Muang Ngoi

Generally speaking the restaurants in Muang Ngoi could be bit hit and miss, like the time we went the one owned by our guesthouse, which looked more like a shed full of children's shoes and toys than a restaurant and waited over half an hour to get fried rice. Not that you can blame Nicksa, the nice lady that owned the place, she seemed completely snowed under, running the guesthouse and the restaurant, doing DIY, laundry, cooking, hacking down the occasional banana tree and chasing after more small children than we could count. One afternoon we somehow got left with two of her toddlers, who seemed content enough to stay with us. They proceeded to beg for crisps, throw leaves everywhere and take all the empty water bottles out of our bin. All our interactions with kids were a little like being attacked by the touts in the cities. They would run after us down the street giggling and shouting in Lao. One little boy attached himself to the bag and followed Theo down the street. It was with great sadness that we waved goodbye to the hammocks and the view and the dusty street and the chickens and finally, the Resting Lady.

Udomxai - On the Road to Nowhere

The Road to Nowhere

Through the misted rain smeared windows of the bus I saw an old woman and a little girl struggling up hill. Like many of the walkers we had seen (mainly young children) they were barefoot and carried vast loads from straps slung around their foreheads.
The bus crawled along, scarcely topping 15mph as it limped up the mountains. At every instant the road looped back on itself as it carved a path through the steep ascent, affording a jaw-dropping view of the jagged peaks and the tiny villages that balance precariously on the mountainside.
As we drove through heavy rainstorms the peaks became shrouded in mist. Thin wisps of cloud clung to the mountains as if they had fallen from the sky and become entangled in the tree tops. Here and there we passed a landslide, the monsoon sending piles of mud and trees sliding into the road.
Chocolate rivers snaked their way down to the valley floor far below, swollen with mud and water they burst their banks and spread out, flooding the paddy fields. Skinny half naked children ran screaming through the flood waters while their parents sat in the doorways of their wooden homes watching the rain fall with solemn eyes.
These villages that spring straight out of the hillside are a strange mix of old and new. The houses at the top sit flat near the road but the ones further down teeter on impossibly steep slopes on their stilt legs. All the buildings are traditional and thatched but the washing outside is all football towels and brightly coloured t-shirts.
I'd seen these pictures on TV but you never really fully grasp the situation until you see it for yourself. The mud and the dirt and the one room homes and the sheer remoteness of it all just blows your mind.

The Tree of Life

Udomxai is a small central town completely surrounded by imposing mountains. This small basin contains the larges nearby town for most of the surrounding hillside villages and as such is mostly full of motorbike repair shops and the odd bank. They did have some great restaurants though, cheap and friendly and usually with a resident adorable puppy to wee on the floor while you eat.
The sights of Udomxai are few and we saw them all within a few hours. On both sides of the main street a steep flight of steps ascends the hill. On the west side the steps lead to the local temple, a small quiet place, followed by a large golden stupa (a large pointed monument said to resemble the lotus flower). The stupa and the standing Buddha beside it gaze out over a spectacular view of the whole town. On the east side the steps were steeper and strewn with debris, as if they had been flooded by the recent monsoon. At the top stands a strangely deserted mansion house that contains the town museum. By-passing this w walked on to the quieter part of town and the monastery there that contains the "tree of life".
It is said that a tree that stood on that spot contained great power in each of its branches. It could turn any whole are its fruit wise, strong or into a man or a beast. However, when the fruit fell it caused a mighty earthquake and the animals fled so Buddha sat under the tree and controlled the fall of the fruit so all could eat. The tree there now is made of cement with metal leaved and animals that rattle in the wind. 
Our one final errand in Udomxai was to withdraw enough money for our forth coming trip to Nong Khiaw and Muang Ngoi (both without banks). We spent hours traipsing the street to banks, trying different ATMs and harassing a poor pregnant bank worker before finally, four credit cards later, we managed to exchange our travellers cheques and get enough kip. Possibly at the expense of Theo's sanity. I might add that the first thing we noticed on reaching Nong Khiaw was a fully functioning ATM.


And so our uneventful bus hopping through the mountains drew to a close with our arrival at Nong Khiaw. In deepest darkest northern Laos, a place with out internet or phone signal, and we felt for the first time like we'd really managed to get away from it all. 

Luang Namtha - Raining Cats and Dogs and Giant Spiders

The bus wound its way through grand hillsides before climbing through the most amazing scenery I have ever seen. The mountains were sheer and jagged and covered in dense foliage. Staring out the bus window it took my breath away. I couldn't believe that I was actually looking at that place where all adventures start, the jungle!
This was of course our first taste of a Laos bus journey and that too was certainly an adventure. The bus was absolutely rammed, Westerners, locals, children and chickens, no one is left behind even if the bus is full. They have fold down seats in the aisle so once everyone's in you're trapped until the toilet break. Ah the toilet break. This is a free for all where everyone oiles off the bus at once and tried to wee in the same few metres of grass at the edge of the road. There's no point looking for somewhere to hide, on one side there is a sheer drop towards the valley floor and on the other a sheer cliff. One thing I would highly recommend (and fortunately this didn't happen to us) is going at the same time as everyone else because at least then (Lao's are fairly modest people) men and women go in different directions. If you stop the bus specifically for you, which the affable drivers are more than happy to do as no one in Laos is ever in a hurry, then everyone else on the bus will stand up to watch.
Luang Namtha is made up of a string of villages which over time slowly joined together to form a single town. Although to be honest there is still an obvious gap between the settlements and the place looks more like a few separate attempts at a town dotted along a straight road rather than an actual cohesive place.
The tourist part with the guesthouses and restaurants is a fairly unremarkable place. The only events of note on our first night there were trying Mekong catfish, which was not as delicious as I had hoped, and the appearance of a spider so huge in the restaurant (and I know many of my friends and family back home will sympathise with this) that I had to go back to the room and cry for a full ten minutes to regain my composure.
The opportunity of doing much else in Luang Namtha was taken from us by the arrival of the monsoon. In the middle of the night the storm struck and the heavens opened. The rain battered down all night and we were caught by a few more showers while we were there. This not only made everything ridiculously muddy but also cut off the power. Time to move swiftly on.

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Chiang Khong & Huay Xai - For Crying Out Lao-d

Border crossings. You never know how they're going to go. One day one official might decide to charge you a little but extra might decide that they actually don't want to let you into the country unless you pay a separate fee. You can queue for hours or for minutes, and so it was with great trepidation that we approached our first one.
The bus to Chiang Khong, right on the border with Laos, was the first rickety old bus we'd been on. It was noisy and hot and precariously piled with stuff, for South East Asia buses not only transport people they also seem to function as some sort of unofficial FedEx. The journey through town was a hot walk up a fairly nondescript street that took much longer than we had anticipated and my first boat trip on the Mekong lasted for approximately three minutes.
The man issuing our visas was certainly in no hurry but we didn't have any problems. We waited and sweated and he chatted with his colleague as he tauntingly dangled his rubber stamp over our passports.
We took a brief glance around Huay Xai (very easy as like Chiang Khong it is essentially one road) and crashed out in the most revoltingly frilled and fancy guesthouse room I have ever seen.
As we cooled down we foolishly thought the worst was over, but very soon we would come to realise that for us, Huay Xai was cursed.
You'd never guess at first glance that this simple little place of guesthouses and restaurants would be so intrinsically evil, but so it was. The trouble started for us that very afternoon when we tried to use the internet. Every interaction with local people we had was difficult. The Laos response to our questions, which they didn't understand, seemed to be to stare blankly over our heads and walk away. So as you can image it took us a while to find somewhere we could use a computer and when we did no one could tell us how to stop the page randomly translating back into Lao every five minutes. This ultimately resulted in Theo's card getting blocked.
The next day I woke up to find two things amiss, one was my boyfriend rolling around on the bed clutching his stomach and groaning, the other was my sponge bag, which was full of ants.
Very soon I was too ill to get on the minivan we had booked to take us away from the accursed town and we rolled across the street and checked into our most expensive air-conned room yet.
Of course we knew it would happen eventually, we'd been having far too much good luck really, but that didn't make me have any warmer feelings for Huay Xai. The next day we both felt fine so we packed up and got the hell out of there.

Chiang Rai - Brits on Tour

"This is definitely the place"

"Are you sure this is right Emma?" Theo asked for the fourth time as we marched out of the tiny bus terminal.
"Of course I'm sure Theo, why don't you trust me? The sign said Chiang Rai, the ticket office said Chiang Rai, the driver said Chiang Rai."
"Ok fine, then why didn't anyone else get off the bus?"
"Check the sign yourself if you don;t believe me," I shouted angrily. We stomped over to the bus station entrance and read the vast sign. "There see, Chiang Rai bus terminal....two, since when were there two?"
Later, when we were checked in to the guesthouse and cooling down in the bar side pool Theo fortunately seemed to find my slight error quite funny and so you'll be pleased to know that I still have a travelling companion. Although, I wasn't sure how overjoyed I was about that when he dived bombed into the pool and splattered water across me, the bar, the reception and a nice Australian lady enjoying a drink with her family.

Chiang Mai Lite

Chiang Rai ia a small practical town at the capital of Thailand's nothern most province. It lies directly in our way to the Laos border but is also a tourist draw due to the quality and diversity of the surrounding attractions. The morning market in Chiang Rai is much more geared towards the busy local than the hungry tourist. There is a whole maze of stalls in the vast covered area packed with clothes, household items and mysterious vegetables. The night market is more for the souvenier shopper, towards the other side of town it glitters with fairy lights and resonates with Thai pop music. Endless stalls of t-shirts surround a vast street food section with a mass of picnic tables at the centre.
The two wats here, Wat Phra Kaew and Wat Phra Singh are actually slightly smaller copies of the two in Chaing Mai and pretty yet unremarkable, although one did have an intriguing collection of turtles.
The only other thing to see in town was a vast gold clock tower. We trapsed down to see it before dinner as we had been promised that at certain times it did exciting things. So off we duitifully went and....nothing happened.

White Temple

Brits on Tour

All in all there's not a whole hell of a lot to do in Chiang Rai, which is why we decided to book a tour. It promised a lot of busing and a lsightly dubious buffet lunch but we hoped it would enable us to see all we wanted in the surrounding area.
With great anticiaption we awaited the arrival of our tour bus and we were surprised when a six seater 4x4 turned up driven by a super cool looking Thai man in a stylish shirt and shades. His name was Ken and he was to be our English speaking guide. Ken was awesome, at each place he would gather us together and in a soft voice tell us about the great beauty and history of the place we were looking at, never removing his shades. Then he'd go back to the car and smoke while we looked around. He also drove like a demon, which seems pretty standard in this country. He cut people up all over the place and beeped at everyone moving more slowly than him, including old ladies on tottering motorbikes.
So with three other tourists we set off. Our first stop was the White Temple, built by Thai artist Chalermchai Kositpipat on order to give something back to his home town Rong Khun and entirely paid for by the artist. The temple, which is still under construction, draws bus loads of tourists and is pretty much impossible to describe. Such a twisting, spiralling mass of ornate turrets gather on the traditionally shaped temple with its low sweeping roof. Brilliant white and covered in swirling patterns of mirror tiles it is almost painful to look at in the bright sunlight. The whole town is decked out it the artists swirling style, each elegant spire carefully crafted by hand with clay. The temple is surrounded by a gardenm and water features complete with bridge. There is a wishing well, images of hell as well as heaven and even the bollards and signs and shops are topped with white spirals and grinning skeletal faces.

Black House

The artists work dwells on the Buddhist belief of suffering being the path of paradise, reflected in the murals on the inside of the temple. With a really interesting contemporary twist the idea of life as suffering is represented. Neo, Darth Vadar, Harry Potter, all super heroes, Angry Birds, the twin towers, oil, all images of modern vanity and calamity are displayed and from it the pious followers of Buddha emerge and travel down the side walls to where Buddha is seated in enlightenment.
Out the other side of Chiang Ri you can find the antithesis of the White Temple, the artists black house. This structure is all dark wood and animals skins and furs, representing the suffering all must live through before they can attain paradise.
Heading north we visited a traditional village of the Akha people and the Karen people, famous for the gold rings that lengthen their fragile necks. As we had expected the villages were very tourist friendly and devoid of mos real culture. Shops lined the path and the ladies did their best to see us the scarves and trinkets they spent all day making. We strayed from the path slightly and interrupted a man in his bath, it's easy to glimpse the real life of these deprived people (mostly Burmese refugees who rely on tourism to pay for health care and other necessities) just behind the tourist veneer.

Macaques at Wat Tham Pla

Another classic tourist stop as we progressed north was a temple nestled at the foot of a large hill, inhabited mostly by monkeys. Ken wasn't very explicit about what this place was or how it came about, but it was great to dodge the over confident monkeys, climb to the viewing platform that looked out over Mae Sai and to visit the silent, drippy cave that contained a shrine to Buddha. Back at the temple we watched monkeys snatching bags of peanuts from foolish tourists trying to feed them one at a time. Like petulant children the monkeys deemed this vague scattering to be too slow and took matters in to their own hands, seizing the peanut and running of after each other shrieking.
In the car again we drove on to Mae Sai, the northern most town in Thailand. As you drive down the main street you can see the large blue Thai customs building that marks the start of the bridge to Burma. Winding up hill to Wat Phra That Doi Wao we looked over into that other country. Two such different places and yet it is impossible to see really where one stops and the other begins save for the river winding through the middle.

Not far from Mae Sai is the acclaimed Golden Triangle, where three countries meet (Thailand, Laos and Burma, as well as China slightly further upstream). Always a place associated with affluence, due to first gold and later opium, now the place is a popular tourist site and the surrounding peoples have been turned to farming rather than illicit drugs.
The town around the Golden Triangle is an odd place, there is a beautiful quiet temple and a bright little street jammed with stalls and vast gold shrines. A huge golden Buddha sits atop a structure designed to look like an enormous boat with arches formed by the legs of vast model elephants. It is all slightly surreal, and we were never really sure what the towering shrines and boat like building were actually for.
The last stop on our trip was a very different place. Chedi Luang in Chiang Saen is a ruined temple and chedi, once part of the great Lanna kingdom it still functions today, despite being over 700 years old. All peace and tranquility it lies decked out with beautiful coloured cloth to make the holes in the architecture and surrounded by ancient trees.

Chedi Luang - Chiany Saen

Foooood

As with a lot of our other stops a lot of our time in Chiang Rai was dedicated to eating. Our guest house served the most delicious prawn curries and Thai dishes and e found a shop that sold some sort of strange buns. They were very soft and fluffy cakes with various delicious fillings, sweet and savoury. We tried chicken and basil, pork, egg custard and chocolate custard. They heat them up some how (it ind of looked like they steamed them) so they're all light and warm and goey in the middle. They were a definite rival for the title of best dessert, currently held by the acclaimed banana pancake.

Our final stop in northern Thailand was a diverse and fascinating place. The food was just as excellent as it has been everywhere else and just as we felt like we were coming to the end of the tourist trail in the practical and slow paced city we realised we'd hit a whole new world of tourism, the organised tour. Never a past time to be mocked if it can take you round seven totally different and equally fascinating sight all in the same day. Oh and the buffet lunch didn't kill us.

Chiang Mai - Lanna, Ladies and Lizards

Cheap Choo-Choo

Theo was overjoyed on the train to Chiang Mai, as we bounced along in third class he joyfully worked out that the amount we had paid for the eight hour journey was equal to a single young persons ticket from Cardiff Central to Penarth. We watched as the paddy fields turned to dense foliage and the flat plains to distant peaks. Outside the windows alien birds and butterflies in outlandish colours fluttered past.
Another interesting thing we spotted was the small local train stations. In the remote hillsides tiny ramshackle towns of wooden houses are barely visible among the trees and yet their train stations are smart little affairs with potted plants, beautiful shaded waiting areas and water features. Each one has a smartly dressed guard pulling old-fashioned levers like a mad man and, of course, a vast portrait of the king.

Monk-ey Business

Now sit tight for this blog post because it's going to be a whistle stop tour. Chiang Mai was tourist central for us and I've got a lot to cram in.
Chaing Mai, heart of the old Lanna kingdom, is a bit of a tourist hub, especially in the walled old city where most of the sights can be found. Steeped in trading history and flanked by the southern most tips of the Himalayas the city is second in size in Thailand only to Bangkok and is overrun with McDonalds, Starbucks and Tesco Lotus (Lotus?). However, it is still possible to find some quiet side streets where some Thai ladies will be cooking up their delicious street food. The old city isn't nearly as old looking as I expected it to be, no cobbled streets or wonky alleyways, but it's still got its own busy Thai charm and it is a fantastic place to be a tourist.
First stop, as with any Thai city, is the wats. There are so many in Chiang Mai that we went with Lonely Planet's top three, Wat Phra Singh, Wat Phra Tao and Wat Chedi Luang.
Phra Singh is the city's resident gaudy affair. It's a complex of gilt buildings and sweeping roofs. Dotted all over there were shrines filled with frighteningly life-like monk statues that made Madame Tussaud's look like a four year old with play-dough. Honestly these things are so life-like when I first saw one I didn't want to stand and stare for too long because I thought it was an actual monk in meditation.
Phra Tao was an altogether different temple, made largely from teak and all shady and solemn this temple had the meditative charm lost in many touristy places.

Chedi Luang

For us Chedi Luang was by far the best of the three, not for the temple itself but for the vast ruined Lanna Chedi standing behind it. This huge stone construct towered over the temple and, when we were visiting, was in the process of being cleaned by a large gang of young novice monks. Garbed in their orange robes they scrambled up and down like ants to a terrifying height, sweeping the stepped layers of the Chedi and plucking out the weeds that grew in between the brick work.

Monks at Chedi Luang                                              Giraffe at Chiang Mai Zoo

Our next stop was Chiang Mai zoo. We weren't sure if we would bother, after all a zoo is a zoo everywhere in the world right? Wrong. Chiang Mai zoo is the craziest zoo you will ever visit. Something that struck us early on was that they don't seem to believe in fences. Lions, tigers, bears, you name it, they were all separated from us by a moat and a jump I wasn't entirely convinced they couldn't make if they wanted to. They had so many different animals and there were elephants everywhere. Not just in their enclosures, oh no, they were dotted all around the zoo with their keepers awaiting tourists to feed them or take rides. And that's another strange thing, you can feed pretty much any animal you fancy for about 20p. We fed the elephants and the hippos (not wholly advisable, never get that close to the inside of a hippo's mouth, they don't floss). We passed on the giraffes and the leopards, yes leopards! Health and safety seems to be a big fat zero. We also went to see a slightly disturbing seal show, where the seals jump through hoops and play basketball. For a zoo that claims to be a wildlife learning centre it certainly has some oddities.

Making Molehills out of Mountains

Really packing in the sights now, we also paid a visit to Doi Sutep. The mountain in whose shadow Chiang Mai stands, encompasses most of the Doi Sutep National Park. Being leafy and green and with some impressive waterfalls we planned to take a sorng taa-ou to the top and walk back down the main path. Starting at the summit of the mountain we climbed some uber stairs lined with market stalls and vast gilt dragons to the temple. The stairs are supposed to form part of a meditation but it was all I could do to keep breathing on the way up, let alone focus the mind.
Gleaming gold so brightly it can be seen from the city below the temple is a little over the top but still a pleasant place to walk around. Famous for its gold plated Chedi it was packed full of tourists brandishing incense sticks and touts selling photos of the acclaimed gold umbrellas. The views out over the city however were breathtaking and the temple's forest location means that there is plenty of nature to break up the shininess.
Leaving the temple, the path we had planned to take proved to be a main road, and a very busy, twisty main road, with no pavement at that. We set off hopefully, marching down the road while local drivers leaned out of their cars to point and laugh at us. In fairness we made it 9km before we gave up, stopping several times to enjoy the view, other small temples and the odd waterfall. At one viewing platform I bought ice cream served in between two slices of sweet white bread rather than cones. It was strangely delicious, and one of the few things I have ever seen Theo refuse to eat. I couldn't see the problem personally, bread good, ice-cream good, what's your beef?
Determined not to be beaten we returned to Doi Sutep the next day to complete the 3km walk off the road to the acclaimed Mon Tha Than waterfall. It was certainly worth the extra effort. Cascading down in two layers the waterfall is swift and strong but also exceedingly approachable. We scrambled around on the rocks until we were quite close and bathed our swollen feet in the freezing water.

Mon Tha Than - Doi Sutep

This Street was Made for Walking

By far the best sight, despite all these animals and waterfalls, was Chiang Mai's oddly named Sunday Walking Street. This is essentially a market, but a market that runs on both sides of the street from the East Gate of the old city to Wat Phra Singh in the West, a distance of about 1km. The market contains literally hundreds of stalls breaking off into sides streets and temples and selling a mixture of food, clothing and local crafts. It starts somewhat sedately at 4pm but by dusk it is absolutely heaving. Along the street musicians of every sort busk away like some sort of "Thailand's Got Talent". Organisations of all sorts come out to collect money and one blind old women was selling the most beautiful hand-crafted mobiles I've ever seen. Made from wicker, each one had half a dozen intricate origami cranes.
Theo and I delved right in, buying and haggling over new clothes and food. I've come to enjoy the Thai response to the absurdly lower offers of Theo's hardcore haggling. They shake their heads and laugh hysterically, which i feel lightens the mood when you're really pissing them off and usually results in us getting a pretty good deal.
One final taste of culture that we stopped for in Chiang Mai, which we definitely earned after all that walking was to Siam Massage to get a proper Thai foot massage. They pummeled our tootsies in every direction, kneading and rubbing every area with their hands, elbows and at one point a round ended stick. Foot massages here also seemed to encompass a hefty calf massage as well as lots of slapping and stretching. Finally they worked on thighs, necks, shoulders and backs, stretching and twisting our spines in all directions. Despite its vigour it was very relaxing, even for a person with ticklish feet. Top tip though, don't try to make polite hairdresser style conversation with your masseuse, their English isn't great and it just make the whole situation more awkward when they think you are trying to complain.

Ladies and Lizards

Keeping up our excellent track record with food, Chiang Mai has some of the most delicious stuff yet. Just outside our guesthouse we found a lovely old lady (L.O.L for short) who cooked up delicious cheap food in a small shop attached to her home. We went their once for lunch and every day after for a hearty breakfast. She tottered around her tiny kitchen area and cooked us up all manner of stir-fry and rice dishes. My particular favourite was her omelette and rice, while Theo would consume enough to satisfy one of the smaller hippos at the zoo.
Chiang Mai also proved to be home to the best banana pancakes yet. We found a women so devoted to covering them in chocolate sauce that she would leave no hint of the pancake underneath, just one of the many great stalls at the street market. We also pigged out on mushroom skewers, sweet pork and sticky rice, spring rolls and delicious fried banana.
The crowning glory of our visit was the acquisition of a new friend. His name was Louis and he was a tiny lizard who decided to inhabit our hotel room. We didn't mind Louis, at first, until we came home one day and found he'd invited his friend Louis II to the party. I sent Theo down to reception in search of some sort of lizard catching solution. He returned with a small Thai women, a can of anti-bug spray and a towel. What happened next was inevitable, Theo and I stood back and let the tiny woman deal with the terryfying tiny lizards. She reached up to the ceiling with the towel and Louis II promptly jumped down her shirt. Needless to say the Louis issue was never really solved.

Phew, its exhausting even typing it all out. We may not have taken full advantage of the great trekking opportunities yet but we certainly packed in an awful lot of what Chiang Mai has to offer. Like a more chilled out Bangkok, if you're only going to "do" one town in Northern Thailand, this is the place.

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