James and Cat’s Jazz-tastic Journey!

When we left you last we were leaving the dreary, raininess of Bangkok for the cool, mountainous scenery of the North!  We were the first ones on the bus to Chiang Mai, and we got on literally, just as the heavens opened, and we sat there dry and smug as the bus filled up with an assortment of drowned rats!  The journey wasn’t bad as sleeper buses go… we watched a brilliantly awful film called ‘The Condemned’, starring Vinnie Jones and the wrestler Stone Cold Steve Austin!  We could tell it would be good purely by the calibre of the actors!  It was basically an American version of Battle Royale, with the tagline ‘Nine people die… You get to watch!’  But it whiled away a couple of hours on an otherwise uneventful bus journey.

We arrived in Chiang Main at stupid o’clock in the morning, about 6am, and as usual the bus company took us to a hotel of their choice and spent half an hour trying to get us to stay at their place and sell us their treks, but we did get a free cup of tea, so swings and roundabouts as James would say!  When the guy had finished his spiel and I’d finished my tea, we headed off to a place called Julie’s which had been recommended to us by some girls we met in Hampi in India.  With two girls in tow who had no idea where they were going and wanted someone to follow, we found the famous Julie’s and, sod’s law, there was a big sign outside saying ‘WE HAVE NO ROOMS’. Great!  The two girls we were with (whose names I don’t think I even asked) decided to go and look for somewhere else, but we weren’t to be put off so easily.  We sat in the bar area waiting for reception to open at 8am, but it seemed the guests at Julie’s were early risers, so James spent the next half an hour asking everyone who came downstairs ‘Are you leaving today?’  All the responses were ‘No!’  The next question was inevitably ‘Are you sure you can’t be persuaded?’ which was also met with a resounding ‘No!’  How to win friends and influence people…. I think not!
Eventually, the boss lady turned up and told us she thought there might be rooms but we’d have to wait a while, so we ordered breakfast and she soon returned to tell us there was indeed a double room available but we’d have to wait for them to clean it.  Well, that was fine by us, we ate our breakfast and I soon began to nod off at the table, not having gotten too much sleep last night.  I think the boss lady thought I was making the place look untidy, so she led us up the rooftop terrace to have a doze in the hammocks until the room was ready.  We woke up about 12noon to see the boss lady peeking her head round the door… it turns out she’d come to tell us the room was ready at about 10.30 but we’d been dead to the world and she couldn’t wake us!  So we went downstairs to see the room, and it was beautiful, we had our own bathroom with hot water, and unlike most of the budget places we stay someone had actually put some thought into the decoration; we had purple sheets and walls painted in bright colours and there were even paintings in frames!  Gorgeous!

We spent the day wandering round town… we walked the whole way round the old city walls (me managing to break yet another pair of flip flops along the way) and ended  up in the Queen Vic for a cup of tea and a game of pool.  It was quite nostalgic for me actually, as this was where James first taught me to play pool over a year ago now….
Anyway we headed back to Julie’s for dinner and got chatting to a Northern Irish guy called Paul, who we’d tried to evict from his room earlier on that morning.  He didn’t seem to bear too much of a grudge though and we ended up going to the night market with him.  We wandered round but didn’t buy anything, not even shoes… oops!
So we spent a pleasant few days in Chiang Mai, Paul has now become our constant companion…  and we decided it was time we did something cultural instead of just playing pool, so we made a trip up to a Wat in the mountains called Wat Phra That Doi Suthep.  It was absolutely beautiful, with gorgeous views out over the city and so much exotic plant life it felt like you were in some sort of secret garden.  It would have been an idyllic, tranquil get away, really the sort of place spiritual people go to ‘find themselves’ if it weren’t for the swarms of chattering tourists all clicking away at their cameras and sticking their enormous zoom lenses under your nose!  But still it couldn’t quite take away from the charm of the place.  This place was also a big deal for James, as he’d been banging of for ages about this Wat he’d visited when he was on holiday in Thailand with the family and there was this story that one of the ancient Kings had a beloved elephant and when it got to old age the King released it into the wild and where the beast dropped down dead, he built a Wat in honour of his favourite pet!  James had told this story to several people, including locals, but he was met with blank faces every time… but it turns out this was the place!  The story differed a little; apparently the elephant was sent off with a sacred Buddhist relic and where the elephant died was the place the relic should remain, so they built a Wat to house it. 
On Sunday James and I made a trip to the huge Sunday market which seemed to stretch on forever but we braved the crowds and came away rewarded.  James got two more pairs of the flip flops he loves and I got the awesomest pair of batman converse and instead of flips flops (which I only seem to destroy) I got JELLY SHOES!!!! It makes me feel like I’m 5 again! 

We spent our evenings chatting and playing yet more games of pool with Paul, and English guy we met called David, he was maybe in the forties and had been in Chiang Mai for 25 days! Admittedly he’d been ill for 10 of those but still… and also a Dutch girl called Naartje who was doing some sort of foot massage therapy course thing.
We soon decided we’d spent long enough doing very little in Chiang Mai and booked a bus to Pai for Monday; it turned out so had Paul and Naartje! David was staying in Chaing Mai to do his ‘Teaching English as a Foreign Language’ (TEFL) course.  So we were up early on Monday morning (Well, 9am) in readiness for our bus; Naartje was on an earlier bus but we ended up on the same one as Paul.  It was a four hour journey up into the mountains on the twistiest, turniest, windiest roads I’ve ever seen!  But it was well worth the sore arse… Pai is ace.  A tiny little town on a river which, although bus loads of travellers turn up every day, doesn’t seem overrun.  We (including Paul… he sort of makes up the ‘we’ now) got ourselves little huts at a place called Mr. Jan’s, which was recommended to us by Naartje who already had friends in Pai.  The huts are nothing special, but they’re set in the most beautiful herb garden, I can’t describe the loveliness of the different perfumes that come from the plants as you wander round and the bright colours of the hoards of butterflies that flutter about the place.  A real gem.
So, we’re happily settled in Pai now; there’s not much to do here unless you rent motorbikes, then you can head off into the hills and find the various waterfalls and hot springs that surround the place, but we haven’t quite got round to doing that yet.  Instead we’ve been discovering Pai’s plentiful nightlife; surprisingly, it has a wicked live music scene. Myself, James, Paul and Richard (an English guy we met here) went to a bar on Monday night where a band was playing… One guy on drums, a guy on bass, another on bongos, a guitarist and a violinist, playing tunes that sometimes had an Irish feel to them but sometimes sounded positively Middle Eastern. They were brilliant… Dad, you would have loved it!

The one downside to this place is the fact that rainy season has hit early, so we get a torrential downpour every afternoon, or, like today, hours of miserable drizzle.  But that can’t dampen our spirits… we’re in good company, surrounded by epic scenery… what more could we want?

We’ve been umming and aahing about where we’re heading while we’re over here, and the plan at the moment is to pop over into Laos, as James would like to do The Gibbon Experience again (and we have to do a visa run anyway).  I’m not that bothered about going gibboning again, so we’re thinking I might stay in Chiang Rai (where we’re headed next at some point) and do some sort of course, maybe cooking, maybe jewellery making and meet James in Laos when he’s finished swinging round the jungle!  Then hit some spots in Laos before going down to the Thai Islands for some beach time!  That’s the rough plan at the moment (it also seems to be Paul’s so you might be hearing a lot more about him) but we’ll keep you posted on what we decide.

In response to Tom’s comment on the last entry, all Indian people eat only with their right hand… they think eating with the left is uncouth and dirty.  This is because of their toilet habits; Indian people don’t use toilet paper, instead they have a bucket of water beside the toilet and they use their left hand to wash their bum!  So when they see us using our left hand to eat, they think we’re disgusting, but I just want to make them all understand that we don’t use our hands to clean ourselves and we wash our hands after going to the toilet anyway!  But it’s just another one of those cultural differences you have to get used to… like in Thailand it’s very offensive to show the soles of your feet to people, or point at anything with your feet, especially in temples as the feet are considered the lowest and dirtiest part of the body.

So, I think we’ll be in Pai for a few days yet but we’ll keep you posted on all our plans.

Much Love
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This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 30th, 2008 at 3:19 am and is filed under Travel. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.