Chiang Rai Loop

Chiang Rai Loop
Originally uploaded by Andy & Laurie's Photo Extravaganza

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.