Lampang Wiengthong Hotel

... days beginning tomorrow. Having just completed her Thai Massage Course, she met a few other female travelers. Together the eight of us "rolled" in the back of a pick up truck (Yes, this is legal in Thailand..let the good times roll) to the mountaintop village of the Hmong Hill Tribe. Quite an interesting day....you can see by the pictures that the tribe is prepared for tourists as we dressed in their traditional ceremonial gowns. It was more for ...

... graze a bit....and off to the bath. Shauna really got a bath this time....heh heh.....nice thing is that the bugs were not too bad today....yay. So we crawled out of the lake and headed back to the mahout camp.....just down the road. We pull in and Eley gets down to let me off.....I could not lift my leg....no kidding...had to lift with my hands...so I oh so gracefully fell off....but landed on me stumps...yay. We tied them up and tehn got a buch of fresh bamboo ...

... joke material. We finally make it to the eley bath...and saunter in.....and scrub like crazy....My eley didn't like to dunk her head too much...Shaunas did as did Jills so they both got good baths too....so I got most of the mud off and we crawled out of the lake....now time to go into the jungle again and find a parking spot for our eleys to graze.....You guys catching on yet.....feed the eley...wash the eley....feed the ely...etc etc....ohhh find food....and feed bananas ...

... to get some bamboo then Shauna met up with us and off we went into the jungle....4 wheel drive....thru river stream up hill and down dale....Its raining then its not...then its sunny and smoking hot...this is about where we all discovered the Thai version of the canadian horse fly...not as big but more of them seems they like eley meat...and anything near an eley that is capable of producing red blood cells kinda like us....so we learn how to take some ...

We left the noise, traffic and craziness of Bangkok, and arrived at the Thai Elephant Conservation Camp in beautiful Lampang Province in the north of Thailand. The camp, owned by the Thai Government includes acres of beautiful forest and lakes and hills. It is the site of the first (maybe only) elephant hospital in the world! Prahsop, the director and founder of this very special program to save abused, neglected and ...

Peter writes ..... You may remember that back in the summer we made friends with some Australian boating people called Annie and Liam. Well they have a place in Phuket, Thailand, and so rather than go back to Turkey for the winter we decided to pay them a visit! Before going to Phuket however, we decided to take off with our rucksacks and a copy of The Lonely Planet for a couple of weeks just to explore the Northern part of the country. Well, two safaris ...

... the next few days we passed lots of nice looking places nearby our place, but down different alleys I didn't go down at the time. It wasn't a problem and our guesthouse, Bow Chiang Mai was very nice, clean and quiet and with lovely staff. We had a tv too although it didn't have the full range of channels which would become a shame as the week progressed. Having arrived from Vientiane to Bangkok on Friday morning the flights leaving then were too expensive but a bargain flight with ...

Ahh.....back in the Land of Smiles. The Thai people really do smile more than anyone, anywhere. I'm in the north to see and do whatever it is that people come here to see and do....which I have recently learned is alot! When I arrived, I checked into what turned out to be a weird guest house run by a Thai "woman" named "Julie". She appears to have all the womanly curves in all the right places but it ...

Arrived in Chiang Mai after a 5 hour bus journey (2nd class - aircon). First impressions were it was a bit polluted. We found our guesthouse though down a little Soi and it's not bad at all. Got a little pool in the front and I managed to sit thru a Steven Seagal film (Today you die) on the cable telly. Went to the huge night market/baazar last night. Enormous place full of very similar fayre as everywhere else but ...

Once again we were shattered after a 13.5 hour overnight bus journey from Bangkok with very little sleep. So after finding some digs we crashed in our room for a couple of hours. (This has definitely become a common trend - travel, find digs, sleep!) We'd chosen an area just inside the old city walls on one of the many alleys ('sois') that criss-cross the centre of town. Our guest house was called Alley Nine ...