Chaing Mai

We had about 3 days in Chaing Mai and we spent our time getting pampered and shopping pretty much. It's so cheap in Chaing Mai, much cheaper than anywhere else we've been. We had ourselves a Thai massage, 45 mins worth for 200 bht each (about 2 pound 50!) That was so nice, they bend you into all sorts of funny postions and poke and prod at you, all a bit wierd and quite painful at thimes but felt so good afterwards! We also had a full on 4 hour pampering another day with steam bath, foot massage, body scrub and oil massage, it's the sort of thing you want to do at home but can't cos it's so expensive, so we made the most of it here!!! Our evenings were spent walking up and down the night bazaar, getting hassled to buy stuff here and there and haggling for our wares. Rich is getting really good at it now, I'm still rubbish. We spent a lot of time in the antique shops too, Rich is becoming a bit obsessed with them, I find looking at dusty opium pipes and budda's with no head a bit dull, but hey, he's happy!!

We also went on a little day trip into the hills to 'gawp' at hilltribe people, there are many tribes in the hills, not Thai, alot of them originate in Myanmar and are a bit nomadic and ended up on Thai soil. The king has been working hard to get them out of growing opium (traditionally their main crop) and into growing rice and weaving silk and making stuff for us tourists, and they seem to be happy with that. When us tourists come to visit we visit their market stalls not their homes so we didn't feel so much like intruders and they all seemed pleased for us to be there as we bought their tourist tat!! The tribes funnily enough are called 'Karen', there are long neck Karen, big ear Karen and many other amusing ones!! We visited the long neck karens. The ladies wear these big having bronze rings around their necks, not to extend their necks (as they don't, they push the shoulders down). This tradition only started about a hundred years ago and this is what we were told the reasons were:

1 - People were being attacked by tigers about 100 years ago and they thought they'd done something to upset the 'spirits' and were being punished by these tiger attacks and so they wear the bronze rings by way of apology to the spirits.

2 - Only the ladies wear the rings as protection from Tiger attacks, the men don't need to as they can run from the tigers faster than the ladies!!

So there you go!

It hooned it down for a lot of our time there and had to take shelter under the roof of the market stalls, and so were pestered into buying stuff. Hey ho, they were very friendly types!!

We also visited a butterfly farm, a temple, a cave and had a boat trip, these seem like standard fare for any daytrip in SE Asia!!!

On one night in Chaing Mai we were having a couple of quiet beers in this bar and this very brash texan bloke kept buying us drinks, I think it was just cos we were western and he was rich and wanted everyone (especially the thai girls draped over him) to know how rich and generous he was! We got chatting to him (as you do) and the thai girls and he was a knobhead, but we took his free drinks and laughed at his jokes all the same! It was really interesting talking to the thai girls though, they all seemed to have quite sad stories and were telling me why they look drape themselves over knobheads like this as they want someone to take care of them, for many reasons....to provide homes for their children who aren't allowed to live with them, to pay for a sick relatives medical bills, and many other things. There is much poverty in Thailand and it's pretty sad to hear these girls stories. Some do find rich thai men or even nice western men, but easier to find are the rich knobheads like this one. Poor girls.

After Chaing Mai, we'd decided to go to a little peninsula south of Phucket called Railay, Kit had said it's a really nice beachy type place and we booked ourselves a flight there as it was fairly cheap and better than 2 days of trains!