Southeast Asia

[Please note that many people may want to tune out this first paragraph, feel free to skip to the next.] Woke twice in the night to visit the bathroom with terrible diarrhea accompanied by crippling stomach cramps, which ensured that I got very little sleep although I think the majority of it was over by the morning.

I was exhausted when the alarm went at 9:00 and went downstairs to get breakfast with the others, but happily returned to bed to sleep for a few more hours while the others read. I Eventually decided to face the day and I went off to transfer all of my photos to CD so that I could post them home along with all the bits and pieces I bought at the markets last night. I had to wait an hour for the photos so I walked around the town. I’m really disappointed with Chiang Mai, I think the town gets a lot of hype but there’s not really much appeal, I found it very overrated. After picking up my photos, I finally located a post office and sent my stuff home by airmail with no problems, total cost was about 600B. Walking around in the heat all afternoon wiped me out and I collapsed in a heap on the bed back at the guesthouse.

Only about 10 mins after my passing out onto the bed, Dee came rushing through the door saying that she had a tuk tuk waiting to take us to the bus station. Since we had no reason to stay in Chiang Mai Dee and I had made the decision earlier in the day to leave Brendan here to meet up with a friend of his and see us aging in a few days in Laos. It was the fastest pack I had done so far and I was paranoid that I had forgotten something, but it turned out ok. In all honesty I was completely drained and the last think I wanted to do was pack up and leave town, but I could understand Dee wanting to take off, besides we have to cross the border before Dees visa expires on the 29th.

At the bus station we bought tickets for the 5:30 bus to Chiang Rai, which took 4 hours. Although the sun set 30 mins into the trip Dee and I crammed ourselves under the emergency exit light on the back seat so that we could read. Arriving in Chiang Rai we walked around town and checked out a few guesthouses before settling on one, which cost 200B for the night with a hot shower. We had seen a pizza place whilst we were walking and decided to head back there for dinner because I wasn’t sure I could face anything spicy given the state of my stomach which was still not 100% even though I’d been fine since this morning. The pizza place was identical to Pizza Hut and even had a salad bar, it was exactly what I needed.

I walked back to the guesthouse to go to bed, while Dee headed off to feed the addiction in the nearby internet Café. The security guard at the guesthouse was the cutest old guy and he came out to say goodnight.

This entry was posted on Saturday, January 7th, 2006 at 6:24 am and is filed under Thailand. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.