So I'm finally up to date with the blog. I've been behind since we left Bangkok the first time. This time I'll try and keep on top of things. For this evening i'll sign off with a picture of Sheena with two of her friends.

A Monkey enjoys the view from Nahargarh fort Jaipur, India.

So we got back to Bangkok on the 14th and applied for our Vietnamese visa the same day. We were told our visa would be ready on the Tuesday evening and made plans to get the train to Aranya Prathet in Thailand and cross the border into Poipet in Cambodia. We just took it easy and didn't do much for a couple of days, going to the cinema and seeing "Nacho Libre" and "Click" (the first being funny and the second being shit), and then collected our visas on the Tuesday as planned. That night, shock horror, there was a military coup in Thailand.

It really was a bit of a shock. Sheena's friend Laura, who we had met in Bangkok that day, texted her that night from Samet Island, 3 hours from Bangkok, asking if she was okay as she had been watching CNN. We switched over from some crap film and saw some tanks driven by Thai guys and the headline "military coup in Bangkok?" The news from CNN wasn't exactly concrete. We just knew that there were definitely tanks on the streets and that all the Thai stations were showing the same thing; an image of the royal emblem and playing military style songs. Me and Sheena went up to let Donna and Steven know the good news and then we settled down for a night of unsure sleep.

















Herons in Keoladeo Ghana National Park, Rajasthan Province, India.

I was confident enough of a peaceful coup, I knew that the prime minister, Taksin Shinawatra wasn't well-liked and I found it hard to imagine easy going Thai people rioting or staging a counter-coup. Possibly a little naive, and my Thai history was a little off. I mistakenly believed Thailand had been a democracy since the 30s, while it had actually been a constitutional monarchy since the 30s. Turns out there have been around 17 military coups since the end of World War II. I'm reading the history of Thailand at the moment but I'm only up to the start of the 19th century, so I'm a little behind.

















Sheena and some guy who asked her for a tip for his stupid pose in the City Palace, Jaipur, India.

Anyway we kept a low profile for a few day and now the coup seems to be settled down a little. We are leaving tomorrow morning for Aranya Prathet. We did a little research and have decided to give Phnom Penh a miss for now and are going to Siem Reap, then back to Thailand and then up to Nong Khai to cross the border into Laos. The Cambodia-Laos border crossing doesn't sound the safest or most convienient route, and it seems we would have to pay a small payment for "overtime" on both sides of the border. The road from Siem Reap to Phnom Penh is also a little dodgy apparently, as is Phnom Penh itself.

Taj Mahal, obviously.

I was taking a picture and an Indian guy came up to me and said, "get down", i.e. to take the picture from a lower angle. I did and it was a better picture. Then he told me to follow him and I did, and he said to take this picture.

He was then trying to get me to follow him more, but I didn't want to stray to far from the others so I walked off, and started looking in my pocket for my other camera. He follow me over and thought I was looking in my pocket for a tip for him. It was kind of funny, I was going to take the pictures he advised anyway, I didn't think he was that much of an expert. I didn't give him a tip.



















This is Humayun's tomb. We got a guide for this sight. Well, a guy came up to us and started telling us loads of shit. I didn't listen to him much because him and the others were going on ahead of me while I stayed back taking pictures. At the end he sort of demanded money off us for the "guide fee". He started saying 50 rupees each but we only gve him 10 each. Might sound scabby, and I guess it is. Only joking, just don't really like giving tips for stuff you didn't want in the first place. If he had discussed it with us in advance we would have been more willing to give, or at least think about it, I think.

Anyway, you can probably see the similarity in architecture of the two pieces, the were both impressive in the sunset. Humayun's Tomb was cool because there were very few people there, whereas the Taj Mahal was absolutely packed.

We also had to queue for about 20 minutes into the Taj, they take their security pretty seriously in India. There were a huge amounts of touts outside it and they just don't give in. I ended up losing my cool with one of them, I said to him, "did you hear what I said? I said 'no'". He took it pretty bad and said, "it's not your fault, it's my fault because I have to do this stupid job". I did feel kind of bad, but I don't think I should have to say no so many times to one guy.

Pigeons running riot in the Red Fort, Delhi.



Guys praying at the spot where Gandhi was cremated.



This is Jama Masjid, Delhi, the largest mosque in India. You had to go in in your bare feet and the ground was scorching hot. There were matts in paths around the mosque, but to get this photo I had to go off the matt onto the stone and I burnt my feet. I hope it was worth it.



This is a squirrel in the grounds of the Red Fort. Hope you like it, Emma.

We spent ten days in India.

We spent the first two days seeing different sights in Delhi. The first day we saw the Red Fort, Jama Masjid, Rajghat (where Gandhi was cremated), the National Museum and Humayun's Tomb, which is a picturesque building housing the tomb of Humayum (naturally enough) and it was built by the same chap as built the Taj Mahal. I forget his name but your on the internet so you can look it up. The second day we went to the Lotus Temple, which is a prayer room for all faiths, and the Akshardham Monument which is a monument to some religious guy. There were sculptures of elephants all around the base of the monument signifying elephants and nature, elephants and man and elephants and the divine. There were stories from ancient Indian folklore to go along with some of the sculptures. It's a pretty cool building and afterwards me and Steven spoke to a young American monk about our thoughts on the place. Wק רקאורמקג איקרק איק כםךךם'ןמע 'קקל אם דקק ש פרקאאט ןצפרקדדןהק Mודןבשך F. םומאשןמ דים'ץ Whoopsת איקרק,ד דםצק יקנרק'

Whoops, there's some Hebrew. We returned to Akshardham the following week to see a pretty impressive musical fountain show which depicted the beginning of the world according to Hinduism. Unfortunately we went on the night it was narrated in Hindi (it's in English on alternate nights), but it was still visually stunning and the music was cool.

On the third day we drove for five hours to see the Taj Mahal. It was cool to see and very photogenic, but at the end of the day it's just a big building.

That night we stayed in Agra, where the Taj Mahal is, and the following day we went to Keoladeo national park which is a bird sanctuary. This was great and I got some cool photos.

We then drove on to Jaipur and got a hotel for the night. The next day we saw some of the sights of Jaipur, the City Palace, Hawa Mahal (which means temple of winds) and Nahargarh, a fort with a great view of Jaipur.

Hawa Mahal was a place where women could come and view different parts of the city at a
time when they were expected to stay out of sight at certain times.

The next day we went to Jantar Mantar which is an observatory which boasts the largest sundial in the world, which is accurate to two seconds. We got a guide and he showed us how to calculate the time, and then would say the time, we looked at our watches and lo and behold, it was right.

The last couple of days we didn't do much, just a bit of shopping and relaxation. It was my birthday on the Tuesday and we were in Pizza Hut and the staff all sang an embarrassing song about celebrating with pizza, or something. The also made me stand up and announce my name and that it was my birthday.

We were all glad to fly out of India on the 14th of September.

Bye!



The four of us, tired and sweaty.



Part of the waterfall we stopped at on the second day.

Chiang Rai

For the next few day in Chiang Mai we didn't do much except collect our Indian visas. Then on the 28th of August we took a trip to Chiang Rai. It took about three and a half hours from Chiang Mai and when we got there we were greeted by about ten guesthouse guys, each trying to get us to go to their guesthouse. They were all very insistent, but we decided to ignore the salesmen and asked a songthaew driver to bring us to a guesthouse we looked up in my lonely planet. It turned out to be a bit of a dump and we headed for a different one which we had been recommended at the bus station by one of those guys. There they had no air-conditioned rooms so we headed for a third place, the White House. We loved the name so much that we decided to stay. It was decent enough and clean and it cost 500 baht a night.

After eating and showering we decided to head for the night market and first stop off at the Hilltribe Museum. Unfortunately the Hilltribe Museum was closing about 20 minutes after we got there so we decided to wait until the next day so we wouldn't have to rush. Across the street from the museum there were basketball courts and loads of Thai teenagers seemed to be warming up for a game. Sheena has uploaded a few of my pictures on her blog. We didn't get to see them playing any actual games but it was cool to see. Then we walked the rest of the way to the night bazaar. It was cool there, same auld shite as any other night market on sale, but they are usually interesting to walk around. This one also had a big food section where you could get french fries, spring rolls, shrimp rolls, chicken drumsticks, squid and a just about anything else. There were loads of seats and a stage with acoustic guitarists singing songs in English and Thai.

The next day we went back to the Hilltribe Museum, which was interesting, but there was an awful lot of writing, particularly on the history of opium, it would be better in the form of a leaflet than having to read it all on a wall. At the tourist office in the hilltribe museum we booked a driver to take us on a trip to hot springs which were outside Chiang Rai. First we had lunch in the restaurant downstairs called Cabbages and Condoms which aims to make condoms as easy to find as cabbages, apparently. I had beautiful shrimp spring rolls there.

http://www.pda.or.th/eng/

The Population and Community Development Association runs the Hilltribe Museum and Cabbages and Condoms and runs other programmes to aid rural Thai communities.

The Hot Springs were not very exciting. There are a few different spas around, which we didn't realise and we got there at first and just saw a big swimming pool with no one in it. It cost 20 baht to take a dip, so in we hopped. It was quite strange being in there. The water felt denser than ordinary water and if you rubbed your legs or arms they felt very soft and silky. It was also very hot (I think about 26 or 27 degrees, we can't remember exactly). It made us feel a little sick also, like it was taking your energy away, but we sat out a bit and felt okay. After we left that spa we drove to another hot spring area, which was really scenic. We didn't get into the hot springs there but the views were great so we just looked around for awhile.

The follwing day we were going back to Chiang Mai so we arranged a trip around the Golden Triangle, informing our driver that we had to be back by four in order to get our bus. This trip was great.

We started by heading to Chiang Saen where we looked at a few temple. Then we went to the Golden Triangle itself. This is where the borders of Myanmar (Burma), Laos and Thailand intersect. First we stopped and just enjoyed the view, which was great, then we took a boat trip on the Mekong river which forms the border. First we drove towards Burma where there is a very large casino, then we went back towards Laos and stopped on an Island which is part of Laos, there there is a market set up to cater to tourists like us, and you pay 20 baht and can shop to your hearts' content. I didn't buy anything, but there were alcoholic drinks with snakes and gekkos inside the bottles. They looked tempting but I managed to resist the temptation.

Then we drove to the opium museum nearby which details the history of opium production and has many old opium pipes and other artifacts such as weighing scales and weights used for measurements of opium. After this we drove to Mae Nam (I think) and had lunch. The border crossing with Myanmar is in this town and there were a lot of police checkpoint on the road to there. After this we went back to our hotel and collected our bags, before getting a lift back to the bus station.

The next day was Sheenas birthday and it plummetted rain all day long. We had intended going quadding or something but the rain was a deterrent and we ended up just posting our photo albums home and relaxing in the hotel. Then we went to a big fancy hotel for Sheena's birthday meal. It was good fun.

The following day we went for dinner with Noo, the travel agent who had booked all our activities in Chiang Mai. She was very nice to us and very friendly so we decided to take her out for dinner, and we also bought her a photo frame with a picture of us with her which we had taken a day or two beforehand.

On the Saturday we stayed in the hotel where we'd had dinner for Sheena as it was our last night before India so we wanted to splash out.

The Trek

Our trek was good fun, but did not live up to the high standards set by last year.

We were trekking with four Canadian boys, who seemed about 18-21, two English guys in there early 20s and a Dutch man named Robert, with the four of us there were 11 altogether. Our guides name was Bon.

We left our hotel at about 09:15 and headed up to our tourist office in a songthaew with a few bits and pieces to leave in their storage area and then headed towards the market to get supplies for the three days. At the market I met our guide from last year, who we had emailed earlier. We had been hoping to get him to be our guide again, but he told me he didn't have time to email me back. I only got to say hello to him and shake his hand because his songthaew of trekkers was driving off just as he saw me. It was cool to see Dyo anyway and its a pity we didn't get him to be our guide.

The first day was the toughest, with a long uphill slog. We took a lot of breaks though and I found the second day last year a lot tougher. Sheena found it tougher this year though. It took about four hours to reach the top. For the last 40 minutes or so we were trekking with a couple of other groups because they caught up with us. We reached the village eventually anyway and everywhere was coated in a thick fog. It kind of spoiled the view, but was also quite scenic in its own way. It was very damp up there with the fog and everything, so I knew there was no chance of my sweat soaked clothes being dried out for the morning. All 11 of us stayed in a big room together. There were no mosquito nets, which surprised and annoyed me and Sheena as there had been last year.

There were horrible tribal kids running around our room and battering each other with two plastic baseball bats the Canadians had bought. They were cheeky little feckers and stole some sweets from one of the Canadians bags also. Thankfully the disappeared somewhere after a while. There was also a deaf and dumb man there, named Bye, who lived in the home we were staying in. When I first came out of the room after changing clothes he was swinging around a baseball bat and making noises. I didn't realise he couldn't talk at first and thought he was just unable to speak English, but it became obvious soon enough. At first I din't like him because he was being kind of rude, gesturing that Sheena was fat and one of the English guys, James, was smelly. I didn't like the first village much at all, with the rude cheeky kids and a woman trying to sell Sheena stuff who just wouldn't take no for an answer. The food was also not nice, we got a chicken stew, but there were big bones in the chicken. The four of us were unable to drink because we take our malaria tablets on Monday nights, which was a bit annoying, but we had a bit of a laugh that night anyway.

The next morning we had time to look around the village a bit, and I took some decent photos. In another part of the village from where we were staying, I was photographing a wild piglet and a kid, who was playing nearby, came over and stuck out his hand and said something. At first I thought he said "tabla" which is the Karen word for thank you, but he repeated himself and he was actually saying "ten baht". The cheeky fecker was demanding money off me. It pissed me off a lot and I told him there was no way I was giving him money (knowing he wouldn't understand me anyway) and walked off. Sheena told me later that when she was walking back past the same kids one of the girls had tried, unsuccessfully to spit on her. That village was horrible.

We set off at around 11 and the deaf and dumb chap, Bye, was coming with us. He was good fun, it was enjoyable trying to communicate with him and just having a laugh with him. When we first met him he would point to himself and flex his muscles, and then point at someone else and shake his head. So sometimes I would point at him and then give him the thumbs down, and the thumbs up to myself. You probably had to be there.

The second day was not as strenuous as the first but I sweated my head off anyway. We stopped half way through at a massive waterfall which we took a brief dip in. The current was incredibly powerful and it was very rejuvenating. For lunch we had some sort of noodles which were very tasty.

That night we didn't stay in a village, we were staying in a river camp. There were mosquito nets there and I skilfully choose the only bed which didn't have a net over it. It turned out that it didn't really matter. Our guide told us that the next day there was no trekking at all because we were just walking as far as the start of the white water rafting. So that night we got really drunk. It was great craic and we had a bit of a sing song with our guide and another guide who was with a different group.

The next day we did the white water rafting which was fantastic and bamboo rafting which was nice and relaxing. Last year I had had to steer the raft, which was not relaxing at all, so it was nice to be able to just sit there and enjoy the view. That was the end of our trek. We spent the next day just relaxing in the hotel.

Long Neck Karen woman weaving.



Lahu man demonstrating his hunting skills. The Thai word for Lahu, musser, means hunter. In the background is our guide for the day, Jack.



Red Karen woman who was weaving while smoking her pipe.

The following day we applied for our visas in the Indian consulate and were told to come back the Friday week. The day after that we went to the cinema to see You, Me and Dupree, which was pretty funny. There were loads of camera shops in the shopping centre and I was thinking about buying the 18-200mm Nikon VR lens, but decided to wait and see if I could sell my 18-200mm Sigma one first. The next day we went on a one day tour and I met a chap from Singapore who told me Singapore was a lot cheaper for camera stuff so I'm going to wait until then and blow all my money.

The one day tour was a trip to an eco-tourism village, where there are various hill tribes living together in one village so that people can learn abour their culture. There were four tribes there in total; Lahu, Red Karen, Long Neck Karen, and Akha. The long neck Karens looked really strange, and we learned that they don't actually have long necks, it is their shoulders which have become more slender, and the brass rings sit down on their shoulders. They start wearing the rings at 5 and can choose to stop wearing them when they are 22 or something. I don't really remember exactly but you can look it all up on the 'net I'm sure.

The trip also started with a visit to the Orchid farm and Butterfly farm which were both okay too.

After the eco-tourism village we went to a "real" village. The guide said it was a real village but it was only real in the sense that there were people living there, it was still kind of commercial, when we got out of the minibus we were surrounded by akha women trying to sell us crap. It was grand anyway.

The next day Sheena and Donna went on a cooking course and I wandered around Chiang Mai a little bit looking for laces for my boots. It took me ages but I got them eventually. (My boot laces had dissapeared in mysterious circumstances back in Bangkok).

Then on Monday the 21st of August we started our three day trek in the mountains. I was really looking forward to it after the great time we'd had last year.

The trip to the floating market and all was on the ninth of August. We spent the next couple of days in Bangkok, including a trip to Chinatown, and on the 13th we got the train to Chiang Mai, arriving on the 14th. We also bought our one way tickets to Delhi, India on the 13th and we got our Indian visas in Chiang Mai. First we tried going on the 15th, but that was Indian independence day and after paying for a taxi we arrived at the consulate only to see a sign saying closed on the 15th and 16th. I had read in the Bangkok post the day before that it was an Indian national holiday but I hadn't had the cop on to realise that it would mean the consulate was closed.

So the next day was Donna's birthday and we decided to do the bungy jump. We were all very nervous and at first I wasn't going to do it but I decided at breakfast that I might as well.

On the journey there we were all really quiet and our driver was doing all the talking, trying to encourage us and telling us he had never done it because he always chickened out at the last minute.

We got there and they convinced us to pay an extra 100baht for a roll of film which would give us nine photos each. Stephen went first and made it much more difficult for the rest of us because it took him ages to work up the courage to do it. He kept leaning out but stayed holding on and every time he leaned out we all thought he was going to go. Donna went next and also took a while to work up the courage but she was a bit braver than Stephen. Then Sheena went and we were all very worried for her. I thought she was going to back out and I knew she would have regretted it a lot and we were all shouting up to her and trying to encourage her. She told us to shut up. I really though she was going to go back down and then next thing she was jumping. I missed taking a picture of her because I was waiting too long and it was lashing rain down on my camera. Then it was my turn and I jumped off straight away, just because I'm an all round legend. It was a great buzz, but I was really uncomfortable hanging upside down while I was lowered, it was a strange sensation, and I also felt my head filling up with blood. Then we waited for another girl, who had driven our there herself on a scooter, to make her jump because she was all alone and we wanted to offer some support.

It was a great experience and I'm glad we all did it.

That night we had dinner in a really expensive restaurant. It was so expensive that the four of us at a starter, soup and main course and a beer, soft drink and water for the equivilent of 70 euros between us all. That's under 18 euros each. Very cheap at home but it was the most we'd spent on food since we got here and more than we spend on an average day in total.

Floating Market



Bridge over the River Kwai



Snake Show man catching a snake in his mouth. He caught two snakes, one around each arm and one in his mouth. I thinnk they were baby cobras he was catching. They were the young of some species of snake anyway.




Me and my new tiger friend.