through small backalleys to the Royal Barges Museum (as at least I'd heard of that) and spent a few minutes looking round rather ornated and gold/gem encrusted long boats. I also got accosted by four Thai Soldiers who wanted to have me in the photo (as some
kind of tall white freak). Having discovered that the boat down the river to the temple was going to cost me a lot of money I followed a whole bunch of soldiers out in the direction I wished to go and ended up in the middle of the Navy Barracks with a whole bunch of
trainees doing excersises on their field. I hurried past the armed guard at the gate on the way out to the main road to aviod any awkward questions. Once again finding myself lost I braved my first journey in a Tuk Tuk to the Wat Arun temple which was very pretty.
We are now waiting around until 1800 for our bus out of here up to Chang Mai which will arrive in the early hours of the morning.
Chang Mai is a big town but feels really small - it is surrounded by a rectangular moat containing the inner city limits and you could probably walk from one side to the other in 25 mins. There are also numerable temples here (160 within the moat I think) so we checked out about 4 after which your interest in 'Wats' wanes somewhat. While we were in one on the western edge of town we got accosted by some of the monks wanted to check their English out - while I had the pleasure of discussing the problems of prostitution in Thailand (and why it was morally wrong) Dave got caught out by a monk with excellent journalistic reasoning. The conversation went something along these lines.
(Monk) Do you like Chang Mai ?
(DL) Yes
(Monk) Would you live in Chang Mai ?
(DL) Yes (Politeness ??)
(Monk) Then why do you leave ?!??!
(DL) - (Time for a sharp exit)
We were sharing the tour with 9 other travellers (4 Dutch/2 Danish/2 Australians/1 Japanese) so over the 3 days we got to know them reasonably well and it was nice to hang around with a consistant group of people for a change instead of meeting people for 1 day and then going your seperate ways.
The trekking part began with a 1-2 hour grueling climb up the hills and at his point I wondered what I had let myself in for ! However the view when we got towards the top was a reward enough. The 2nd day was mainly trekking and on both the 1st and 2nd days we went to a really pretty waterfall where a welcome swim washed away the sweat of walking. Yesterday we again spent the morning walking and then finnished of with an hour and a half spent bamboo rafting down the river (harder than it looks!). Both nights we spent away were staying in a communal hut in Karen hill tribes villages - this was basic but comfortable and the food was excellent. We also got to try some of the local 'brew' which was rice whiskey - smelling of tequila I was initially suspicious but it turned out to taste like sweet vodka and went down rather too easily.
Arrived back in Chang Mai about 5pm and once again sampled the night bazaar here where Dave had managed to make one of the stallholders angry last time by trying to buy a T-Shirt for a very low price!