Mae Nai Gardens Chiang Mai

... time, teaching, 2 hours of more meditation. Then you arise at 5 AM and begin the process the same way the next day.

I was a Vipassana mediation student at Wat Umong which is an International Buddhist Education Center. In the peaceful forest like setting in the Chiang Mai foothills, this wat promotes practical tools to promote human happiness, inner contentment and peace. I have found the next word to this journey...PEACE. Seek and you'll shall ...

... and a dinner set. What a fantastic experience this was!

After we returned, we had a tour of our hotel, which included a look at the beautiful spa. I wish I'd had time to have a treatment there or take a yoga class in their teak yoga pavillion. When we were returning from the spa, there was a rainbow in the sky, which seemed especially appropriate considering we were in Shangri-La.

After our site inspection, we would have had dinner, but we were all too full ...

... out the seats and watched a movie, the wind howling the wagon screeching around us, the seats squeaking and the whole length of the train seeming to be in utter chaos. The dinner ladies came and asked if we wanted more beer (which we did not) or breakfast.
The city thinned out, the shanties, buildings with the flickering of TV screens from inside and Banana trees mixing with tidy little gardens and flooded lands and lakes: they all flashed by the open doors of the train, where ...

... br>The Past


Chiang Mai literally means new city and has retained the name despite having celebrated its 700th anniversary in 1996. King Meng Rai founded the city as the capital of the Lanna (A Million Rice Fields) Kingdom on Thursday, 12th April 1296 during the same period of time as the establishment of the Sukhothai Kingdom. King Meng Rai the Great conferred with his friends, King ...

... and the stalls on the road in Chiang Mai and things here are just sooooo laid back, which is totally me.

Next day we were booked in for the Elephant Safari. We got to ride elephants, go bamboo rafting and then visited one of the small villages of Karen tribe people. They are hill-tribe people who are originally from Burma and who have the ladies with the long necks and wear the brass rings. It was actually kind-of sad visiting them. I ...

... carefree moment of my past couple of months, in the middle of nowhere. It is amazing too how quickly strangers bond on top of a tree.It is a crazy idea to slide between trees when you first look at it, but at second glance, it looks perfectly safe. The longest and highest ziplines have two cables ...

... shirt with the following printed on her back between her shoulder blades: "Who Needs Brains if You Have These?")

Here's a heads up to Asians--especially girls-who buy such clothes. If you don't fully comprehend English, take someone you trust shopping with you who does. I just saw a teen aged girl, dressed conservatively in flat shoes and jeans, no make-up, giggly and demure, wearing a shirt that ...

... 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 ...

... t think Soph was prepared for the experience. From a hut in a tree I hopped on to our elephant ... Soph was actually shaking as she didn't realise how high up we would be but after some persuasion I took her hand and she nervously stepped on. To be fair it was much more comfortable than a camel but an hour was well enough. At the end we got to feed our elephant bananas and she at last looked happy having been hit on the head with a stick for the last hour! The next stop was ...

... that we were taken to was the site for an elephant ride. We were offered the chance to buy a sizeable bunch of bananas to feed the elephants for 20 baht (40 pence), which I took them up on. We divided ourselves into pairs, and climbed up a stand to mount the elephants. The way to get to the seat that was harnessed on the elephant's back is to walk on its head and neck! It sounds an awful way to mount, but I assume it does them little harm ...