Hostelling International Maerim Lagoon Chiangmai Chiang Mai

... it - seemed that it was very popular with the Thais there, which spoke for the food. I rented a bike and cycled through this former ancient capital scattered with holy ruins.
Next stop was Pak Chong my gateway to the Khao Yai National Park. Again very interesting and slightly testing trip......3 hours in a 3rd class train, standing in an aisle squashed between two toilets and with about 50 "tradesmen" squeezing through every ten ...

... Riverside rest we only tried at lunchtime and was good and apparantly is good for evenings. Last night we tried Da Stefanos, an Italian- cheap and cheerful. The Melon was a little underripe but the pastas were excellent. There was an electric shutdown during the evening but the staff just light candles and carry on so probably a regular occurrence in this street. However it did happen just as we were trying to pay ...

... og byrjudum sidan ad ganga. Tessi dagur var sveittastur. Ef eg hefdi vitad strax i byrjun tessa svita hvernig lyktin aetti eftir ad vera a 3ja degi hefdi verid likur a ad eg hefdi snuid vid. vid lobbudum i gegnum hrisgrjonaakra, laeki, fjoll, konguloavefi og ymislegt fleira sem hafdi svo fallegt utsyni og endalausa skoga. Seinni partinn komum vid ad kofa sem stod hja fossi. Vid vorum ekki lengi ad rifa okkur ur fotunum og bada okkur fyrir nedan fossinn (tho hann hafi verid ...

... way before i saw it thank god! But i seem to have got a reputation as a snake charmer and several comments from the group about never travelling with me again! Haha lets hope no more snakes!

Back to town where we cleaned ourslves up and headed out to the nightmarket. We also passed a booking agent on the way and decided to book a flight back to bangkok and then have more time in chiang mai.

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Day Four of chiang mai we headed out to a tourist visit ...

... Our handy guidebook (thanks Joci!) pointed out several great restaurants downtown, so we braved the heat and humidity and walked into town. The weather really started to spike around this time in the trip, similar to Florida this time of year. Oh well. It is late July, after all. We wandered around the old city for a bit, finally settling on lunch at a vegetarian restaurant – pad thai and spring rolls. (Yum!) A certain Tuk Tuk driver had been following ...

... I went back to the hostel and crashed. I wanted to stay up for the game. Glad I didn't. We were 2-0 at halftime, Brazil came back and beat us 2-3. Hmmm. At least competing with world powers now. I see progress in that loss.

So today Shane and I rented a car and went North. The car was delivered at noon. My hands were shaking at the thought of having to sign the contract. I held the pen up as it shook violently and I showed Shane and Noom my utter fear of ...

... we were possibly even on the same topic, maybe.Anyway that night he came back and spoke to us, we nodded and smiled and agreed with whatever he was saying and he went back out again. Not long after he returned, with a bag of stuff. Apparently what he'd said was would you like some beer and crisps. Well now he'd got them we couldn't exactly refuse... So we all shared some beer and crisps and had more of the awesome multilingual conversations. We did ...

... Dao, explained each ingredient she purchased. We tried to chose all different meals so we all could taste each others creations. We learned how to make 4 different kinds of curries from scratch, fried rice, pad thai, 2 thai soups, 2 thai salads, stirfrys, spring rolls, and sticky rice with mango. Most everything was delicious except for maybe the papaya and cucumber salad that my Dad and I made. When Dao had put out the ingredients for the salads we ...

... The hut here was based next to a very powerful waterfall that had many small levels to it. The rocks on the waterfall were very smooth from centuries of erosion, which created a natural slide on one part, which proved to be fun! Some people were climbing higher up, so I decided to too. Through my imprudence, I put my left foot in a gap between two rocks, and fell backwards part of the way down. Fortunately, due to the smoothness of the ...

... and Nathan had baked beans, eggs and toast.

We walked over to the Warotet markets to buy some things to take over for Kam’s family. Nathan bought a box of juicy fruit for 180B. We bought for Kam – oil, 2kg rice, noodles, pork crisps, pot, ladle, assorted cakes, biscuits and a bag of vegetables. We had fun wandering around checking ...