from the golden triangle to chiang mai to koh samui.

posting has been tricky for the past few days. . .

first off, i really haven’t had much of a free moment. secondly, it’s been a little wacky with slow internet speeds. ok, so maybe i was frustrated with the new flickr uploader which took 3x the time to upload my photographs — and dropped quite a few of them. so i stopped messing with the computer. oh, yeah. that and my harddrive is out of space, so posting more pics is truly impossible now.

here’s the rundown of what’s been going down since my last posting:

1) we learned how to drive elephants like mahouts

2) we crossed the friendship bridge from thailand into sop ruak in burma

3) we learned that the making offerings burmese blessings at the temple is a little different from making offerings at thai temples

4) we went to a hilltribe camp in burma, home to both karen and akha tribespeople, and it was not unlike going to a touristy native american reservation, so really quite depressing

5) we realized that for all of the commerce over the friendship bridge, sop ruak has better goods and really should be much richer

6) we had an amazing first christmas eve dinner at the elephant camp. more on this later when i can post pics

7) we drove (ok, so we rode) the 4 hour roadtrip from the golden triangle to chiang mai, with a pit stop at the modern white temple — modernist, buddhist art with craziness like pics of the wtc going down and the matrix painted on the walls of the main temple

8)in chiang mai, we explored the 4 main wats — doi suthep in the mountains, and the 3 in the old town

9) we had a blast browsing all of the thai crafts in the sankampang road area of chiang mai

10) we had one of our best meals in thailand at a restaurant across the street from the celadon factory on sankampang road — wish i knew the name of the restaurant (i have it written in thai)

11) we capped off the day with a dinner in the kalare night bazaar

12) from chiang mai, on to koh samui where we are now. i’ll have to post about the hilariousness that was our first hotel — talk about a disaster first encounter with the kind of beach tourists you really want to avoid (but it was only for one night)

so that’s the past few days in a nutshell. i keep meaning to write a post on the food, which i’ll need to do once i have all my pics up and running on flicker.

the golden triangle: roughing it.

we’ve left the crowds, the chaos and the pollution of bangkok for the serene beauty of the golden triangle.

chiang rai is an hour long flight to the north of bangkok. our camp is about an hour and a half away in the golden triangle — an hour and twenty by car then we got on a beautiful teak longtail boat that took us up the ruak river to our campsite. burma is literally a sneeze away!

we arrived at the landing for the bar and restaurant where we were greeted with fresh coconut water and presented with our itinerary for the four days that we’re here.

after lunch, the camp guide took us on a tour of the campgrounds. the camp is in a bamboo forest — fifteen tents are nestled into the hillside; many of them have pretty views of the river. since we’re not really in deep jungle, we don’t have to worry about poisonous snakes or wild cats, bears, dogs, wolves, etc.

our tent is tent 15: the elephant tent. we’re actually right next to the elephant camp. our patio looks down into the elephants’ pool and the trails.

as you can tell from the pics, life is rough. i’m not sure how we’re going to survive. . .