I'm now in Chiang Mai which is in the north of Thailand.

After Bangkok I went to Kanchanaburi with Yolande, the South African, for a day or so. This is a big site for the death railway which was built by POWs during WWII. Really very interesting and very powerful. There's a museum there run by the local monks which was very powerful. The POWs were allowed to take pictures of life in the POW camps and what we saw was amazing.

Other than the death railway part (which I'm very glad I saw), Kanchanaburi was a lot of fun. Met up with some other travellers (Hungarian, Canadian, and English) and had a party of sorts in one of the bars. I think we were the only farangs (foreigners) there. That's what happens during the low seasons!

Left Kanchanaburi after a day and Yolande left so I headed up to Chiang Mai which is just awesome. I could easily spend months in this city - there's a lot to see and the people are friendly and willing to talk to us farangs. I got here about 4 days ago and was attacked in the railway station - "come.. you stay with us. 100 Baht only". 100 B is about 50 cents USD. Very cheap. So I stayed with Mama Honey (the lady who grabbed me in the railway station) and ended up booking a trek through her guesthouse. Trekking is very big from Chiang Mai but even so it was a lot of fun.

So here's the part about the trek. The first day we rode in the truck for a few hrs, stopping at a market in a village to pick up any last minute things. There was this lady there selling crafts and she managed to get us all to buy water bottle holders (which actually were very useful). But she had the blackest teeth! I was amazed. We ended up walking a couple hours down to a village in a valley. This village was awesome. Only about 150 people lived there. We ended up playing a game with a couple of the teenagers in the village that was a cross between volleyball and hacky sack. I had a lot of fun even though I completely sucked at it. In the evening some of the older people came to our bamboo hut and started showing us tricks with ropes. It was a lot of fun actually. A very simple way of life. The second day we walked about 4 hrs to an elephant camp and actually got to ride elephants for a couple hours. THat was so much fun! It's amazing how agile they are - they were walking down really steep tracks that were only a couple feet wide. And riding an elephant that's walking down a steep hill is an experience in itself. But one that I wouldn't miss for the world. We got to the next village which was a bit larger - 300 people and swam in the river. Heaven. We were so hot. Then most of us just crashed when the sun went down. It had been a very long day. The third and last day of the trek we rode a bamboo raft down the river. This was definitely an experience. Since it's not quite the wet season here, the river was really low. So at least the rapids weren't too bad but we still had to get off the raft and lift it over the rocks at least every half hour. And this trip took about 6 hrs - seemed never ending. Our guide was a bit sexist unfortunately. The women weren't really allowed to use the poles to move the raft and in most of the rapids we had to get out of the raft and walk along the shore. I wanted to help out! But towards the end our raft started breaking apart which was a bit scary.... Oh well... it was a lot of fun.

I guess I should mention those villages we saw were hill tribes - we saw the Lisu and Karen tribes but there are several others around. They live semi-nomadic lives and don't really work with the western world at all. Very different cultures than the rest of Thailand.