Umporn Resort Mae Sai

... grazing on bamboo and wheatgrass a few hundred yards away. All the tents (15 of them) are arranged along a cliff in a large, obtuse semi-circle, overlooking the plain below, and the river (separating Thailand from Burma) below. The tents are just far enough (hundreds of yards) apart to be private, and yet there is still a “community” feel to all of them. To call each dwelling a “tent” is almost insulting, but true to construction. Each had ...

... un avion cargado de opio con destino a Singapur. No nos quedaba mas remedio
que volver a Bangkok para, desde ahi, coger un avion. Por el camino paramos
en Sukhotai, otra de las antiguas capitales de Siam (y no la ultima!).
Nos paseamos en bici por sus impresionantes ruinas, entre las cuales se
encuentra una figura de un buda de 32 metros de alto. De alli nos dirijimos
aun a otras ...

... stinging my eyes along with the swarms of air-born bugs.
Somehow, we made it, and stopped in a safe place, 6km outside of Chiang Mai, to give our backsides a break. Tommy, who only came for the ride and didn't need a visa extension, was visibly shaken and said he had never been so scared on a bike in all his life. Mish was shaking and my head was about to explode from hours of concentrating on the road. What started out as fun had slowly turned more dangerous by the hour ...

... while drinking beer with you. And since in Asia there are no knives on the table you have no easy access to means of stabbing your eardrums out. But in one respect they are better to drink beer with than Australians--at least you can count on probably not ending up in a fistfight, which is generally how the Aussies conclude a night on the town. And the German means well.

Got the best foot ...

... with them when we were only planning on 3. I feel that we handled it really well though, and we didn't freak out or anything. They also had lots to do, so it was all good. On Sunday we spent time with just the Harbor House girls. We made them a pancake and scrambled eggs breakfast, which I think they liked a lot. It was difficult to cook them though, just because their pans were VERY different from what we're used to at ...

... was grown and cultivated right here at Harbor House. They seem so sweet - I can't wait to get to know them better and start doing our projects with them. The girls seem very shy, which is completely understandable considering what they've all been through. I'm a little bit concerned about how well we'll be able to communicate with them, considering ...

... Laos and had been teaching Burmese refugees for a few weeks while I did the multiple country tour and Laura had gone onto to Thailand and had joined Sharon a week ago and was also teaching. They had emailed me telling me they were the only teachers in a school, out in the country, with over 75 students aged 7 to 20 something's - all who live on the school grounds (displaced children with no papers - no status), no teaching curriculum, no ...

... Laird ** Atonement - Ian McEwan *** The Tesseract - Alex Garland ** Mr Vertigo - Paul Auster *** Never Let Me Go - Kazuo Ishiguro *** The Girls Guide to Hunting and Fishing - Melissa Bank ** The Perfect Storm - Sebastian Junger *** The Pelican Brief - John Grisham ** Cold Mountain - Charles Frazier *** Gap Creek - Robert Morgan * All my friends are going to be strangers - Larry McMurtry *** Chasing Cezanne - Peter Mayle (rubbish) The Broker - John Grisham *

... woke us at 6.30am (Keith these Asian chickens are skinnier and louder you wouldn't like them!) we saw it as a great excuse to get up early for once and get on with the day. We went out and got ourselves some bikes from town and armed with a map we headed off to find the ruins of an ancient Lanna kingdom. So what is a Wat? A Wat is a Thai Buddist Temple and a Chedi is a Thai Stupa or Shrine. There are literally dozens of them aeound Chiang Saen. Some restored others ...

... tropics then but compared to a couple of days before it was definitely different). We booked our trip to Thailand from one of only two English speaking Cafes in town and waited by heading out in search of Palms trees, iced lattes and geckos by the tonne. Dean's first view of a gecko was as if a very large lizard had crawled into our room and was about to devour us but after a bit of reassurance he has come to love them, like I do - they eat mosquitos OK so they are ...