I won't be updating my blog for another three or four days, because Chris and I will be leaving Chiang Mai tomorrow for a three-day trek to the minority villages of Doi Inthanon National Park, set around Thailand's highest peak. We hope this will give us the chance to get out of the city into rural Thailand, meet some of Thailand's many ethnic minority peoples and learn something of their lives, and get in better shape for our Himalaya trek.

When I was last able to get online, I was about to leave Ayutthaya, which I've since discovered is pronounced with the stress on the second syllable and not the third, and take the sleeper train to Chiang Mai. We spent the night in carriage number 13 of train number 13 as it slowly clanked and ground its way north, taking twelve hours to cover the four hundred miles from Ayutthaya. It wasn't a bad night, however, and a good way to cover a long distance and save the price of a night's accommodation at the same time. When I awoke, the train was climbing its way up the single track line, threading its way through a steep valley lined with dense, tropical vegetation, through which a small river at the bottom of the valley was barely visible.

My reading material on the train, when I wasn't sleeping, was Alain de Botton's The Art of Travel, in which de Botton warns that possibly one of the worst things you can do to a place you've always romanticised is actually visit it. Having romanticised Chiang Mai as a city of gleaming temples set in the forested mountains of northern Thailand, I understand what he means. The reality of Thailand's second city is a little more prosaic: several million other backpackers got here first, and in central Chiang Mai it's hard to walk more than a block without seeing another traveller, or several. I'm told that business is down this year because of the tsunami. There's a whole traveller ghetto, something of what I imagined the legendary Khao San Road in Bangkok might be like, full of guesthouses, restaurants, bars (including one that served 'drought beer'), travel and trekking agencies, internet cafes and even colleges offering TEFL training.

What's worse is the people that such a culture attracts. Several times on the main road through Chiang Mai we were stopped by friendly, charming, English-speaking Thais who, after a couple of minutes of small talk about our travels, offered us the chance to buy some cut-price gems, or silver, or silk. It's a scam, of course, and an easy way to get parted from a few thousand baht. One had a tuk-tuk (a three-wheeled taxi seen everywhere in Thailand) and driver waiting for us, and went so far as to claim the gems were being sold off cheaply by the government to raise money to help the victims of the tsunami.

The positive side of Chiang Mai? Whatever you need - in our case trekking and internet access - is readily and cheaply available. And Chiang Mai hasn't totally lost its position as the cultural and culinary capital of the north - Chris and I followed what was certainly the worst meal of our trip so far with what was possibly the best: delicious fish wonton and noodle soup from a Chinese noodle shop, at 30B (around 45p) each.

To be honest, neither of us have really taken to Chiang Mai, and we're both looking forward to getting away from the hectic, polluted city and out into the countryside. The tour we've booked is the first thing approaching a package tour I've ever been on, so I am hoping that the hill-tribe villages we visit will be real villages, lived in my real people, not something in a sense pre-packaged for the tourist market. An anthropology lesson follows on my return.