just finished a great week in northern thailand! from Chiang Mai we took a 3-day trek through the jungle, staying overnight at hill tribe villages, that was wonderful (ok, a bit touristy) but a bit more grueling than expected. my legs are still sore from all the up-and-down climbing -- i suppose they don't call'em HILL tribes for nothin'. also, did some touristy things like riding elephants, and riding bamboo rafts. so check those off the list.
then we caught a boat down from Tha Ton (2km from the burmese border) to Chiang Rai, which is a much smaller city in the "Golden Triangle" region where Burma, Laos, and Thailand meet.
there's not much to do here, so we made a day trip of visiting Mae Salong, a village settled by Chinese Kuomintang (KMT) soldiers fleeing China after the civil war. people speak yunnanese, mandarin, and thai there -- so i got to use my mandarin, which was exciting, and have a bowl of yunnanese noodle soup, which was even more exciting. apparently when the town was a bit more remote, it grew poppies (in kahoots with Burmese opium warlords), but now that's all been replaced by tea; so i picked up a few hundred grams of their finest wulong.
traveling to Mae Salong involves taking a bus north along the highway to Burma, getting dropped off at an intersection in the middle of nowhere, then getting a pickup truck to take you an hour west along the windy road up the hill. stupidly, on our way back, we waited on the highway for 45 minutes, only to miss the last bus to Chiang Rai while ducking into a store to use the bathroom.
what ensued was a semi-desperate, but mostly silly, series of events involving us learning the culturally-correct hitchhiking gesture for Thailand; flagging down a ride to a fruit stand in the next town down the road (Mae Chan); learning that there were no sawngthaews likely to be going our way at this hour; and then being saved by a computer salesman who dropped by for some apples. thank god (that is, buddha) for him, as we were pretty screwed by then.
so now it's time to fly to the beach -- ko samui, ko pha-ngan, and ko tao. yay!
Posted by cce at January 11, 2005 01:26 AM | TrackBackThe Golden Triangle, you say, eh? I hope that refers to the sunshine and the general lightness-of-spirit one feels in the region.
Where you from? "Right by da beeetch, mon."
Posted by: Mă Níng at January 11, 2005 05:55 PMBy the way, you (and everyone reading this) should visit my new blog for my China adventure and make all sorts of comments and what not. It's at http://china.notspecial.org/.
Posted by: Mă Níng at January 11, 2005 06:23 PM