Author: Sarah Northway

So much to say! But I’m feeling kind of sleepy again (the cold) so I’ll have to save the ten-page whatnot for later. We rode elephants today! Yes, ever since Umut told me about it I’ve wanted to ride on an elephant too. And it was as cool as I’d hoped. ^_^

Day before, we went to the big fancy flower expo with Luke & Tabitha. It was pretty cool too; highlights were the giant orchid diorama contest and a temporate greenhouse that reminded us of BC. Also franken-flowerbushes and a big… thing… made out of gold leaves.

It was very cool hanging out with Lukitha… Taluka.. those guys. Tabitha’s Thai is quite good and made bartering/etc pretty fun. They knew where to get the best Khao Soi and Pad Thai, for the best prices too. Have I mentioned before, how cheap things are in Chiang Mai? At least food, clothes and market knicknacks.

It is quite a pretty city I think; reminds me of Vancouver in ways. Lots of trees, lots of little alleys and neat shops and restaurants that only serve a couple things.

So, we’ll probably be off on our way home before we post again. We took the plane over but will take the train back. Might stop in Bangkok to break the trip up, or save it for another time. Yay for having such freedom!

Hey all.

Hangin in Chiang Mai with Luke and Tabitha. Nice city. Everyone speaks poorly of Bangkok and everyone speaks favourably of Chiang Mai.

There is a royal horticulture/flower show on that has drawn a big number of people into the city. Hope to see it tomorrow.

We visited the famous sunday market, which was amazing. It was like the market in Wien*10. No exageration. Although the Chiang mai market had no second hand section whatsoever which was the coolest part of the Wien market.

Anyway, vast and varried.. sort of. There where bascially clothes and knicknacks for sale for kilometers. And while any given catagorie was reproduced ad-nauseium there was extremely little repetition of actual things. Very impressive. There was one section where a 1/2 dozen artists had all put out their work. Gorgeous vibrant stuff. I really really wanted to buy some but there are practical reasons I didn’t.

I took no pictures.

I am sitting in a huge mall that has > 5 camera stores. I am seriously considering spending far too much money on a new camera.

That is all.

We’ve arrived in Chiang Mai! Yes, we were pining for the thrill of being on the road again after three weeks of mostly stationary adventuring. So we’re going to meet up with Luke and Tabitha shortly and do this town up right.

Anyone know anything about Chiang Mai…? (this was a little spurr of the moment to say the least; amazingly we didn’t have any trouble arranging travel plans with one day’s notice). Now to find a place to stay the night – we are tyyyyyyyered!

Yes we have reached into the heavens and plucked an intertube of our very own from the sky.

Big dish eh? The newer ones are apparently smaller and apparently less powerfull. At least thats what the guy said. Could well be they’re just cheaper and he makes a little more off of the big one. Either way I’m happy. I’ve had to reset the connection a couple of times this-morning although I’m not sure it was necessary. At one point everything went dead and was all ready to start cursing the thing out. Until I noticed I had pulled the ethernet cord out of the back of the modem. Oops.

Everyone keeps telling us we have been extremely lucky with the weather so far. You get the feeling from them that the 40 days and 40 nights are right around the corner. The gulf put on the biggest storm yet this-morning. All last night we’d get bright flashes of light in the window and just the occasional faint, ominous, rumbling of thunder. I’m nursing a bit of a cold and it didn’t make it easy to sleep. I kept imagining commandoes landing on our long shallow bay overpowering the island in a first big to conquer Thailand. I actually had to reason with myself that even if there where a state with such interests (or if the southern seperatists grew in size by an order of magnitude) they would probably start with Bangkok or Chiang Mai. Or Phucket if they really wanted an island.

So thismorning I woke to a furious rain, the worst so far. It lasted a long time too, at least 10 minutes. I just can’t believe the transitive nature of rain here. It refuses to rain for more than 10 minutes at a time. No matter how cloudy or thundery or how hard or how lightly it rains. It _always_ peters out in just a few minutes. Which is a bit of a shame considering how nice this house is to be in when it rains.

The roof generates great noises in the rain and we aren’t really shielded from them by anything. House construction here is very different. They don’t need insulation of any kind!

Take our house: It is esentially one large piece of concrete. This actually took me a while to figure out. I had to go around knocking on all the walls to convince myself. If you stripped the paint, roof and windows it would look like one of those bombed out soviet era appartment buildings. Except in bungalo form.

When the satalite guys put the modem in they had to get the wires from the satalite to the living room so they just drilled two holes in the floor. I can see the ground outside through the holes in my living-room! The things you can get away with when it never drop below 25!

Okay there is a weird bloody frog (?) noise coming from outside. It sounds like a wheezing squeeze toy being squeezed slower every time. Between that and the crickets and Colin snoring… well it’s none of their faults, I’m just awake tonight. At least the flashlighters are still awake with me past midnight. They are way, waaay out there now. They must be at the reefs by now, at least a kilometer out.

There are little bugs bouncing around my screen since I turned the lights off to better see outside. We’ve had the A/C off the last three days as it’s seemed cool enough and we’d like to acclimatize. It’s obvious why half of our walls are also doors; you can get a nice breeze going through with them all open. But you get lightseeking bugs and ominous wheezy croaky noises in exchange.

I guess you guys in BC must be starting work right now. I just discovered google knows “what time is it in vancouver”… as evil as they may actually be, those guys never cease to delight me. Let’s see who’s not working to hard to chat with me… :)