Author: Sarah Northway

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… :)

Ah, sweet constant 50kb/ps. We finally got our satellite connection installed today and at 1/5th the advertised speed, it still rocks the pants off our temporary cell connection. Actually, I lie: it was low earlier in the day, but now (10:30 at night) it has flown up to 175! A good time to download some more Battlestar for Colin I think. I don’t know if we have a monthly download limit, but by god we are going to find out!

I’ve heard, since we are actually bouncing back down to a network in Bangkok, that some sites are blocked and some ports unavailable. So far we haven’t run into any…

It’s low tide again and those guys with the flashlights are back out there in the water tonight. Waay out there. We learned from a local guy that they are looking for shrimp by reflecting the light off their eyes that poke out of the mud, then stabbing them with a stick. Colin and I went out there ourselves but didn’t spot any (and didn’t know what we were looking for at the time).

Oh! So this local guy owns a restaurant up the street, and he and his wife have an amazing garden and grow most of the vegetables, fruit, chickens and herbs that they cook with. Colin went around asking “what is this tree?” and “what is that bush?” and they were happy to show everything off then just shoot the shit for awhile. We took home a papaya from them, and Colin ate a chili pepper right off the vine and declared it (once he had chugged a beer and could breathe again) “the spiciest thing so far in Thailand”.

We shared a table there with some fellows who are renting bungalows on the property. Friendly german guys (Colin used “köstlich” to describe a drink we were sharing).. divers I think. LOTS of divers on the island: probably half the people we’ve met here are divers including our next-door neighbor. I’m still digging the snorkeling right now; I’d like to see what our reef looks like at low tide, and head up to the point at Chills which has a little picture of a snorkle in some maps. Then maybe a boat trip to Koh Tao!

We went up to Chills (a small, relaxed nearby resort) for their monthly barbeque the night after Full Moon. They’re mostly vacant now so it was very relaxed, a bunch of hung-over and tired people like us swapping stories and eating a delicious buffet.

GREAT food here, have I mentioned? Spoke to someone today who gave us some pointers on where to find good baked goods on the island. We’ve found a place that does rye and multigrain breads, but Colin is in search of the elusive croissant. What’s next – Thai doughnuts? As for me, just keep those curries coming!

The shrimp-finders are still at it, despite the lightning and occasional rainstorms. At least the jellyfish seem to have moved on before they got too large (if those knobbly guys ever get big enough to sting a human… although we did spot a couple of a different species that looked more traditionally stingy and stayed out of their way)

Mmm-kay I should head to bed now. Check our Flickr gallery again if you haven’t in awhile. I’ve been trying to use their semi-crashy “Uploadr” (heh) to put some new stuff up but I’m not sure if it’s working.

Okay, forget their uploading tool; Flickr’s interface for renaming photos and adding comments is COOL!