Michelle and Brent

Thursday February 28, 2008, 4 pm
Greetings!!
Have we ever done alot since our last post. We left Bangkok, as we intended on the overnight train. It took about 14.5 hours. It left at 10pm and arrived at 12:30 the next day. Our cabin was open (not airconditioned) which ment that I had the window open almost all night blowing on me while I slept. Very breezy and pleasant. When we arrived we checked into a nice place called S.D. Guesthouse and after a shower we booked a trekking overnight up to a hill tribe complete with elephant riding and rafting. Here on this side of the world they call hiking trekking. So, we booked an over night hike up to a hilltribe. Hilltribe peoples are a group of people still living in a very rural and traditional way up in the northern hills of Thailand. That evening unbelievably we ran into our English friends who we last saw in Krabi (Thailand) and who we had met in Singapore.
The Trekk was really good fun. We spend the first day hiking straight up a mountain for about 1.5 hours and then, sadly, back down, and along to a rural farming village. We were with a group of 8 people and 2 guides. We had some challenges with an older, crazy man from Japan who had minimal english skills and was very eccentric. By eccentric I mean whenever we stopped anywhere, the first thing he would do was to chug a can of beer, he downed a bottle of whisky in one evening sitting, and would make everyone shot glasses of bamboo leaves and force you to drink. He also had a huge knife which he liked to chop things with and during the rafting, had no interest in paddling when the guide would yell "paddle hard." That night we all slept in a bamboo and palmtree hut after watching a traditional Karen tribe dance performed by some of the women.
The next day we hiked some more, rode elephants, which was the highlight of the whole trip and rafted down a river. It was a pretty good break in trip for the Gibbon Experience we were preparing to do in Laos.
After Chiang Mai, we took a bus to Chiang Rai, about 4 hours further north and en route to Laos. Chiang Rai had a wonderful evening market, with traditional dancers and musicians playing on 2 different stages and vendors and food stall all in the middle. I bought myself a necklace. We spent one evening in Chiang Rai and the moved on into Laos the next day. We crossed from Thailand to Laos at Chiang Khong to the town of Houay Xai. We arrived one day early for our Gibbons Trip which was OK as we both had some laundry to do and enjoyed the day of relaxing and catching up on the world news with the BBC on one of our first TVs. We also found out upon enterring that Canadians have to pay the most of any other country in the world to get a visa to Laos. We asked the reason for this, and found out that it was because for Lao people to come to Canada, it was the same.

Hope everyone is well back at home.
Lots of Love
Michelle