Laithai Guest House Chiang Mai

Right, finally got some news to tell you so lets go back to 2nd June when we left Kanchanaburi......... After watching England vs Sweden game, we ran back to the hotel where a taxi truck was waiting to take us to the train station (they wanted to leave at 6.00 but the game didnt finish until 6.30 so we made them wait!!) we then embarked on a hair-raising drive with Nigel Mansell on a 2 & 1/2 hour extremely bumpy journey where our bums left the seats on numerous occasions (however this did...

Monday afternoon we finally managed to drag Ged out of bed at 3 o'clock to book our flights to Chiang Rai, lazy sod! He informed us that Chang, the Thai man who was driving us around could not make Tuesday so we had to go Wednesday which wasn't a problem so we deceided to spend Tuesday lazing around the pool of our old guest house The Lai Thai. Wednesday 19th June, we had an early start as our flight was at 7.30 am, we were a bit worried about Ged getting up but after a couple of nagging phon...

Our post mortem for Laos is, similarly to the one for Cambodia, based only on the 2 cities we visited, Vientiane and Luang Prabang, so it's severely limited.

The good:
- Sidewalks on which we can actually walk and drivers who respect traffic signs
- Lots of children and babies everywhere, good for a country which has only 5.7M in population
- Warm and nice weather in the day, cool and comfortable at night, especially in LP
- Everything is quoted in the local currency (kip) ...

We arrived at the bus station and were lucky enough to just make the bus for Chang Mai... a pretty boring journey to Chang Mai for 4 hours with ****** air con made me a bit stressy !! But soon enough we were dropped at the bus station and haled a taxi to the Laithai Guest house. The guest house was situated right in the centre of the town and had a lovely pool and really nice clean and comfy room. It was pretty late in the day once we settled so we took a walk and ate at a roadside cafe where...

After all the fretting last week on whether or not to stay in Luang Prabang longer and shorten my time in Chiang Mai I wonder if ever I've made a more sagacious decision. Now that I'm in Chaing Mai I wish I were still in Luang Prabang. That will hopefully change once I get the lay of the land. The decision to fly here was a solid one, as well. Not 20 minutes into the flight did the captain announce that we were crossing into Thailand. Had I chosen to travel by boat that would have taken me tw...

I had reasons for not buying all of my airline tickets at once prior to leaving New York. I wanted a degree of flexibility and I also knew that often times it's cheaper to buy tickets in the country of departure. The main reason was that I was concerned about political unrest in certain places on my proposed itinerary. One that I was most looking forward to I had scheduled 10 days just for one city. That city was the capital of Nepal: Kathmandu. A little over a week ago the king dismantled th...

We made it to Chiang Mai!!! Let's see...Steve has composed the last two entries, so I need to get my bearings here again! We left you just before the long bus trip through the mountains...long, but not too bad. There was a lot of gear shifting, and some 5 MPH climbs, but we made it here on Wednesday morning (one more day in Chiang Mai than I had hoped for!) at about 8 AM. We checked into the hotel and promptly took a very long nap! I think we MAY have gotten 8 hours on the bus between the two...

We last left you on Saturday afternoon in Chiang Mai with 2 days left in this wonderful city. After finishing our last update, we caught a taxi to the Airport Shopping Centre to experience movie watching in Thailand. We decided to see "Get Smart". After grabbing a pre-dinner feast at the Pizza Hut around the corner and a little shopping, we headed for the 20:00 show (they use military time in Asia if you haven't caught that yet). I was a little confused as when we could actually go into the s...