Thailand

Here we are in Siam, otherwise known as Thailand. We've been here a few days now, having crossed over the border from Laos and our present location is Chiang Mai in the north. Thailand is a very modern country, all the comforts of home really, but at a lot less cost. There're also more cars on the road which we haven't seen the like of since Japan...and they drive on the correct side of the road. Its a sizable country, being twice as big as the UK and has a population of about 64 million.
We're just here for a couple of weeks, before we jet off to meet Andy and Emma down in Malaysia, where we'll be for a couple of months before resuming our travels in the south of Thailand.
We arrived at a border town over the river from Laos called Chiang Khong where we spent a couple of days relaxing our nerves after the Gibbon experience. We stayed in a really nice little place called Bamboo Riverside guesthouse owned by Mr Miyagi (no he's not dead, just living in Thailand) where our first taste of proper Thai food was.....Mexican! Fantastic grub, just not what we were expecting. Living at the guesthouse was the worlds oldest living dog, probably, 18 years old!! It really looked 18 too, which in human years is 126 and was stumbling around looking very frail, but Mrs Miyagi couldn't bring herself to euthenase the poor thing as she'd looked after it all its life.....sweet :)
She spent her day trundling around after the thing, supporting its back legs with a towel. After much laundry washing (not by us), sleeping and blogging, we got the bus to Chiang Mai.

Chiang Mai is the second largest city in Thailand and is reguarded by most people as the cultural heartland of the country. We assumed it would be much like Luang Prabang in Laos, small, peaceful and quaint, but Chaing Mai is a proper big city, the likes of which we haven't seen since Phnom Penh. Six lane motorways, cars everywhere, lots of nice houses and high rises; all the things you'd associate with a big city. In the center though its a different story and its here that you find the peaceful streets, the many Wats and the large amount of restaurants and noodle bars. On our first day here we trooped around the center of town enjoying the splendour of the various Wats. There are some cracking ones here, one in particular grabbed our attention, mainly because of its name "Wat U Mong"! I'm not joking, I even checked it with a monk and he confirmed it, he wasn't a mong, there are mongs round these parts, but I'll leave that for the next blog :)
The other two Wats of interest we visited were Wat Phra Singh which had some amazingly lifelike models of former monks on display, can you believe how realistic this picture is? We also took a tuc tuc to the top of the nearest hill to see the palace and a temple called Wat Phra That Doi Suthep. We had been told that the palace grounds were very nice to walk around, unfortunately for me, we hadn't been told you had to wear trousers, so I had to hire some Thai fishing trousers, the worst kind of clothing that are only worn by gone native westerners, a particlarly loathsome type of tourist who pretend they're one of the locals, try and live off one dollar a day and spend their time whinging about how it used to be and calling themselves "Sitaram". You can imagine I wasn't best pleased and you can also imagine how funny Sam found the whole thing, Grrrrrrr :)
(Sam here - I absolutely wet myself... for much of the afternoon. I took many photos and look forward to showing them off - especially to Rach & Flan. Priceless, though he did loose his sense of humour about it towards the end of the day! Just look at his little face.)

After the palace of horrors, we moved on to the Wat which was absolutely stunning. Lots of gold sparkly things everywhere and some majestic views from the hill of Chiang Mai. It reminded us a bit of Miyajima in Japan, one of the nicest temples we saw there. We took lots of photos, so have a gander at the slideshow.