Staying just off one of the most crazy streets in the city meant that once we were able to get out of its noisy, tourist-filled grip it was actually quite pleasant to walk about in other areas. With the Lonely Planet to hand – now looking a little tired after its month-long ordeal – we followed a couple of walking tours about the city. The first of which took us to the Grand Palace via a group of women who would force a bag of corn into your hands, make you tip it out for the pigeons, shout ‘for good luck’ and then promptly follow that line up with ‘now you pay!’… which we didn’t. Fortunately these women were not part of the walking tour.

Inside the walls of the Grand Palace we managed to find the Emerald Buddha in its final resting place sitting atop a huge pile of gold bits and bobs. We were quite pleased about finding it, as we’d followed its path down the country during our trip, had learnt its story and visited a few of its previous homes.

I thought I’d seen enough Buddhas, but in a similar way to the fascination of Russian dolls’ decreasing size, the prospect of seeing an even bigger Buddha than the huge ones we’d already seen in Sukhothai grabbed my attention and we visited the final Wat of our Thailand trip, Wat Pho. This one earned the name Big Buddha (not its official title) with ease as it’s a 46m long and 15m high reclining Buddha.

Satisfied that we’d seen the biggest Buddha we could for a long time we moved on through to the Amulet Market where densely packed stalls line the streets selling thousands of tiny amulets and talismans. Many of the stalls had people hunched over them, each with a magnifying glass, carefully studying their potential purchases.

The following day we braved a long walk down to Chinatown, passing through an odd street which seemed to only have two types of shop – unfortunately we weren’t on the lookout for a guitar or any army supplies, so we moved on. Starting the tour at Hualamphong Station, Bangkok’s biggest train terminal, we headed into some packed market alleyways filled with everything you could think of. The density of the people was highlighted every time a motorbike slowly tried to cut its way through the crowd which could barely move anyway. The tour guided us to a small street with an open fronted cafe filled only with old Chinese men. We read the description of the place and still managed to walk past it twice before deciding that it must be it. This was La Sae and is one of the city’s oldest coffee houses. Feeling very out of place we stepped in, were greeted warmly and were offered a seat amongst the regulars. From my seat I could see that they were brewing their coffee in tall steel pots with the coffee hanging into the water in what looked like a child’s fishing net. We opted for a standard black coffee, which turned out to be one of the strongest, thickest and sweetest coffees we’ve ever had – this caffeine hit would last us for the rest of the day. Amazingly it was also one of the cheapest coffees we’d had in Thailand. It was clearly a place that hadn’t changed in ages, and a place that made me want to be able to speak just a little Mandarin so I could tap into the hundreds of years worth of experience and stories, some of which were probably the subject of conversation at the time, well… for the few of the guys that weren’t talking about us.

With the black syrup burning holes in our stomachs, we floated off through more markets and back alleys, finding shrines and old houses of note and ending up at a French coffee shop by the river. Needless to say, we didn’t have a coffee but Alexandra’s favourite Thai drink, a pineapple shake.

After the long walk back we had dinner at our favourite Bangkok restarurant, and headed over to Rajadamnern Stadium for a night of Muay Thai Boxing. After paying the heavily bloated tourist price to get a 2nd class ticket (as we wanted to be amongst the local crowd) we took our seats on the coliseum-style concrete steps and waited for the first fight to begin. It turned out that sitting with the crowd was definitely a good decision because they ended up being almost as entertaining as the boxers. The fighting was brutal at times, with the 5 round matches progressively made more and more tense with beating drums and cymbals throughout each round, and the crowd cheering on their home fighter with a synchronised shout of ‘ee!’ every time he managed to get his knee into his opponent’s ribs. But it was the two minute periods between rounds that were especially fun as the sound of the bell that ended each round sent the crowd into a frenzy of waving odds, shouting and passing cash around. I didn’t want to move in case I accidentally bet 10,000 Baht on the guy who was bound to lose! It certainly was a cultural experience to remember!

The next day we left Thailand and flew to Sydney where there will be radio silence for a little while as it’s much more difficult to find an unprotected wifi connection in Australia! We’ll be here catching up with friends and family and just having a nice warm and sunny Christmas (sorry to friends in the UK) on the Sunshine Coast and up in Cairns.

Hope everyone back home has a lovely Christmas!

On arrival in Sukhotai we checked in to our guest house and set out to explore…

There’s not much in new Sukhotai other than swarms of insects gathering around every available light source at night, so we had dinner and headed back pretty quickly.

This morning we got up early, hired a motorbike and headed out to explore the 13th Century ruins of old Sukhothai. Sukhothai was the first capital of Thailand and the ruins are spread across 70 sq km with over 100 historical sights including royal palaces, temples, the city gates, walls, moats etc. Needless to say it was pretty impressive and filled our day! Unfortunately the serenity was disturbed on occasion by hoardes of school children on day trips… it’s quite a terrifying experience having 60 odd children in purple tracksuits on bicycles speeding towards you shouting ‘hello’ and laughing hysterically when you reply!

Off to Bangkok tomorrow… only 7 hours on a bus.

We arrived at about lunchtime on Monday and headed into town to find somewhere to stay. After trying a couple of places we ended up at a lovely little place in the old town called Siri Guest House. Spent the rest of the day orientating ourselves and eating… had falafels for dinner at a fantastic place called Jerusalem Cafe.

We spent Tuesday exploring on foot, after coffee we headed to Wat Chedi Luang – a beautiful Wat with an ancient Chedi which makes a nice change from all the ornate gold that you usually see. The Wat runs something called ‘Monk Chat’ where you can sit and chat to a monk, the idea is that it helps him to improve his English and helps tourists to have more of an understanding about what monks do. We spent about an hour and a half chatting to a very well spoken monk called Nan. We spent the afternoon at Wat Phra Singh, also beautiful! For dinner we succumbed to a Mexican place called El Diablo… it was fantastic!!!

We hired a motorbike on Wednesday to go to the flower and food markets in the morning and then up to Wat Suthep which sits atop one of the mountains surrounding Chiang Mai (Doi Suthep). It took about 30 mins to get there, climbing steadily up (we were quite glad we’d decided NOT to get bicycles!). We were a little disappointed by the Wat itself, but the view over Chiang Mai was pretty spectacular. Next we headed for the reservoir as we’d read that it is a favourite place for local Thais to hang out. Unfortunately it was pretty much deserted and was sort of eerie, this massive reservoir with playgrounds and bamboo huts on the banks all completely empty! We left pretty quickly and headed towards our massage at the Chiang Mai Womens’ Prison. Can’t say much more than it was a great massage and the inmates were lovely! Had a fairly average and annoyingly overpriced meal at one of the night markets, did some shopping and went back to pack for Sukhothai the next day.

So, Chiang Rai…

We arrived quite late, so it was good to have had somewhere booked that was able to come and pick us up from the airport, and even better that the room was decent and the breakfasts (usually pancakes and fruit) in the central garden were fantastic.

We spent the first morning looking for a trek to do, and ended up booking a 2 day trek with an overnight stay in a hill tribe village with a non profit organisation called the PDA, to make sure the cash actually went to the tribes involved. We also found out there that the famous Long Neck tribes are not native to Thailand and were ‘imported’ into the country by a rich businessman purely to create a tourist attraction – we didn’t want to get involved with that. So armed with our knowledge and happy with our booking we went to explore the city. Chiang Rai actually feels more like a town, you can walk from one side to the other in 15 minutes. Still, it was big enough to warrant yet another motorbike hire (it doesn’t take much) and we ended up figuring out the city pretty quickly. It’s such a relaxed place.

We took a day trip out of the city on the motorbike to see the White Temple and Khun Korn Waterfall. We visited Wat Phra Kew and immediately realised the amazing sense of calm that Wats can create. I was amazed how different the atmosphere could be inside the walls surrounding the buildings, knowing that there were hundreds of motorbikes, cars and people buzzing along on the other side. Unlike the Forbidden City in Beijing, where I felt like I’d seen it all when I’d only seen an eighth of the place, I certainly felt like I could happily spend quite a bit of time strolling around a few Wats. Just not quite enough to make me want to put on an orange robe and shave my head.

Something we noticed about Chiang Rai is the oddly high number of over 50s westerners that seem to love hanging out here. There were a few mornings when we’d be sitting at the breakfast table and we’d look around to find that we were surrounded by the elderly. Fortunately, they didn’t all club together at try and join us on our hill tribe trek.

The trek started with a longtail boat ride along the Kok River to a Karen village that runs elephant treks. We were a bit hesitant about elephant rides until we did some research and realised that the tourism industry helps to support the Karen tribe to keep the elephants alive and well, train them and keep them away from being used for entertainment in the cities. We spent two hours on elephants and were amazed at the narrow spaces they can pass through. We then had a short walk to a Lahu village where we had lunch and spent the afternoon getting to know the village. We spent the night at there on a thin mattress on a bamboo floor – not the most comfortable night, but an experience all the same. We were woken at 4am by the sound of quite a few cocks crowing and pigs running about and squealing underneath the floor of the raised hut, an experience made all the more strange by the weird anti-Malaria tablet dreams we were having! That morning we had breakfast on a verandah overlooking the mountains and set off for a few more hours of trekking on foot to an Akha tribe village. Learnt a lot, walked a lot, and met some great people, perfect.

Lots of pictures below…

The next day we said goodbye to Chiang Rai and jumped on a bus for the 3 hour journey along winding roads to Chiang Mai…

We spent the last 4 days on Ko Lanta, arriving by ferry from Ko Phi Phi on Saturday afternoon. As you can see from Anthony’s post below the best way to get around the fairly significantly sized (in comparison to Phi Phi) island is by motorbike.
We stayed on Khlong Dao, probably the longest, flattest and prettiest of the beaches here. We didn’t really get up to too much really! Early morning jogs on the beach, out on the motorbike for breakfast either at great little cafe we found on another beach or to the German bakery (best breakfast so far in Thailand!). Cocktails and freshly caught seafood sitting at tables on the beach for dinner. Anthony helpfully fixed our guest house’s internet connection time and again… I think they must have thought he was wonderful, but the truth was, despite the fact we were told we had to pay for wifi, it wasn’t password protected!
The tropical weather systems caused us some trouble. The storms come over incredibly quickly and are quite spectacular to watch. Last night we attempted to get to the furthest resort on the island as we’d heard it has a great restaurant. I was a little dubious just getting onto the ‘main’ road… unlit for the most part, aside from lights from shops scattered sporadically near guest houses and the occasional street light that’s actually functioning!
After struggling to force our 100cc motorbike (Ant driving, me on the back) up the hills on sealed roads (I will admit that I actually had to get off and walk once!!), we suddenly found ourselves on a dirt track. As we’d already come so far we decided to keep going despite the pitch blackness and the frequent diagonal ditches in the middle of the road. Eventually we skidded quite dramatically right up to the edge of a ditch and shortly thereafter decided it looked like more rain was coming over so it was stupid to carry on.
We turned around, and after riding the 45mins back towards our beach found an excellent tapas restaurant and had some cocktails to get over our adventure!

So now we’re on our way to Chiang Rai, flying from Krabi to Bangkok and then from Bangkok up to Chiang Rai. We get in at about 10pm tonight and are planning on spending the next few days exploring and finding a trek to do.

Note the basket on the front for collecting the roadkill that just can’t get out of the way fast enough, and the ultra wide and grippy tyres. What a stunning machine.

Let the holiday begin!