Went to Chiang Mai yesterday afternoon with the intention of fixing my visa which was unnecessarily shortened after my hour long Lao trip the other weekend. We drove my Honda Dream 125 which is basically a scooter but is really a good bike. I am really starting to like it as it is very versatile and can go from Pai to Chiang Mai (134km) on 1 tank of gas which is about 1gallon.
Had a blast in Chiang Mai as usual and got up early to fix my visa at the consulate. Apparently I needed to go to the Thai Immigration office instead, I used the opportunity to get extra pages added to my passport because there were only 2 pages left. I also got the necessary paperwork to get a Thai Driver's license which will be totally sweet as a souvenir. I decided to not bother with the visa since that took half the day anyways and I will be leaving the country to go to Cambodia soon so when I get back from there I will have enough days and it will be fine.
Tuesday, February 26, 2008
Sunday, February 24, 2008
Off Road Scooters
Jeff and I decided to take a morning scooter ride with no destination. I looked at our bikes and realized they had relatively knobby tires and said we should find a nice dirt road to check out. So off we went towards the Chinese Village, past the Chinese Village and up into the hills. We found an awesome dirt track that led up out of the valley and onto a ridge. The scooters here actually are really versatile and the locals drive them everywhere, so why not us! We ended up going up the road for about 30 minutes until we got to a part that was so steep Jeff's bike was floored and he still had to help walk it up the dirt grade. We paused there and hiked around worried that getting down from there would be a challenge. Getting up there was tons of fun, fortunately getting down proved to be easier than we thought and next time we will go up that road even further. Once we were up at the top we saw a couple of ponds or lakes that we had never known about, so the next step was to find those once we got down. We found a great pond surrounded by cows and fisherman, a really nice spot we intend to return to often.
Fluid
Saturday a bunch of us went to yoga for abt 2 hours and then played in the pool there at a place called 'Fluid'. They have a pool and gym and massages/yoga. Turns out trying to juggle 2 frisbees and 2 soccer balls between 3 people is harder than you would think.
Monday, February 18, 2008
Chiang Rai Loop
We just got back from an amazing 600km motorcycle journey around northern Thailand all the way up to the borders of Burma and Laos an area known as the Golden Triangle. We rented 4 Honda Phantoms and 7 of us headed out from Chiang Mai on Friday morning until Sunday night. It was an amazing trip and we rode some fabulous roads through small villages and twisty mountain passes. See here for the basic route we followed: http://www.gt-rider.com/loops_files/chrailoop.jpg. We added a bunch to the north east to go to the Laos border for a visa run. 3 of us ended up going into Laos for a few hours and having a Beer Lao and returning. One of us extended our visa by 4 days, the other a week and I managed to shorten mine by 3 weeks! Oops. If you leave and come back you get 30 days, where as before I left I was on my 90 day Type 'O' visa. So I guess I will have to do another border run before March 16th. Oh well there are a bunch of us that all need to go around then so it should be fun.
One night on the trip we were searching for hot springs up in the mountains and ended up in a National Park on some dirt road in the middle of no where, it ended up working out great, we managed to arrange to stay up there in a camp and had a great time and awoke in a beautiful orange grove with luke warm springs and ponds surrounding us. At night hiked up the spring to see if it got hotter at the source and found a pool surrounded by glow worms, I had never heard of them before but they are like lightning bugs without wings. They looked so neat as the moved slowly around us in the dark, like a night sky on the ground all around us.
In this picture we stopped to regroup and look at the map and were attacked by hill tribe ladies hawking all kinds of handicrafts. Most sales people in Thailand are not very pushy, but these women were not interested in taking no for an answer while putting bracelets and necklaces on us whether we wanted or not. It was quite a sight and we ended up with a few trinkets in the end.
One night on the trip we were searching for hot springs up in the mountains and ended up in a National Park on some dirt road in the middle of no where, it ended up working out great, we managed to arrange to stay up there in a camp and had a great time and awoke in a beautiful orange grove with luke warm springs and ponds surrounding us. At night hiked up the spring to see if it got hotter at the source and found a pool surrounded by glow worms, I had never heard of them before but they are like lightning bugs without wings. They looked so neat as the moved slowly around us in the dark, like a night sky on the ground all around us.
In this picture we stopped to regroup and look at the map and were attacked by hill tribe ladies hawking all kinds of handicrafts. Most sales people in Thailand are not very pushy, but these women were not interested in taking no for an answer while putting bracelets and necklaces on us whether we wanted or not. It was quite a sight and we ended up with a few trinkets in the end.
Caving
A couple of weekends ago we went to a really cool and huge cave about an hour outside Pai. I uploaded a few pictures but was going to write a big blog entry about it and never did. So a short blog entry is better than nothing! The caves were really huge and the coolest thing was a little river that goes through the biggest part of the cave has bamboo rafts that go down it and for a few baht you can ride on them. We also toured all over the insides of the caverns for a few hours, they were really spectacular.
Reggae Fest
I tried to upload this picture like a week ago but the flick upload tool keeps failing for me. Fortunately it looks like the web form uploader works much more reliably with a really slow connection (like I have). So last weekend we went to the Pai Reggae Fest for 2 nights which was great fun! Nice laid back festival outdoors with good music, a big bonfire and people lighting lanterns off into the sky all night. I also took a ton of pictures and even got to go up on stage to take pics!!
Wednesday, February 6, 2008
Making Didgeridoos
Last night we all learned how to and made our own Didgeridoos! Turns out it is pretty easy to make and play. Not that I can play it well but at least I can make some noise with it now. As probably the oldest wind instrument in the world they are traditionally made of termite hollowed wood or something similar. We used PVC pipe which makes it very easy and more durable, the differences in humidity etc when traveling can easily crack a wooden one so this is a good choice if we want to take them home with us. The basic idea is to cut the pipe to the right length based on what pitch you want, (usually pretty low). Then add a beeswax mouthpiece to make it smaller and seal on your mouth. We are still working on decorating them so they don't just look like PVC.
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