Golden House Guesthouse, Chiang Mai

After 11 days we left Bangkok. This was the longest time we had spent in one place. Two more fewer pages left blank in the passports. But at least we may now enter Vietnam and India with our shiny new visas. During that time we completed most of the things on our to do list for Bangkok. I had to admit that I quite enjoyed reading and relaxing in the air conditioned hotel room for a change. Although for Kaarel it was not that relaxing, since he also had some work to do.

The highlight was meeting my friend Sumpun. It was great to catch up with him and spend some time together around his home place. We visited the floating markets with him that is located an hour drive away from Bangkok. The small town has many channels that were built for the irrigation of the fruit tree plantations and now are used by the locals as a mean of transportation. It was quite interesting with the many boats, although very touristy with many souvenir stalls instead of local products. At one place we even fed some fish in a canal. There were tons of them fighting over the food, but still that did not distract them enough to make it easy to catch them. Even though the water was literally boiling with fish, they still escaped our hands very fast. Quite disappointing for Kaarel...
We also visited Phutthamonthon where there is a huge Buddha statue (with 15.87 m it is he highest free-standing Buddha statue of the world) in the middle of a beautifully kept large park. There were many very very old bonsai trees (I was very impressed and jealous when I saw these masterpieces!!) and bushes pruned in the shape of different animals, e.g. elephants, deers, horses.

In Bangkok we visited some more Buddhist temples, a few IT malls, where interestingly small boutique-like private shops are clustered, offering more or less the same things for differing prices including a lot of pirated DVDs and software. We also managed to get up early and give alms to a monk who passed by around our hotel. It was a nice gesture, although I am not quite convinced that all the monks are respectable beings, as is the case with the priests. We saw many monks in shopping malls enjoying fruit shakes, buying sweets and one we caught even smoking. Hanging on their cellphones seemed just to be a very normal thing... We skipped the Thai boxing match in Bangkok, because it was quite expensive and the Segway tour for the same reason. Other than Kaarel teasing the tuk-tuk drives, we avoided interaction with them, so we walked quite a lot.

Yesterday we had a very long busride to Chiang Mai, located in Northern Thailand. It took a little bit longer than the planned 12h, because the bus was driving 40 km/h at the beginning and broke down eventually. So we had to wait for hours for an other vehicle.

What shall we do next? Possible activities in and around Chiang Mai include:

• Flight of the Gibbon:  flying fox zip lines and hanging bridges in the jungle canopy (www.treetopasia.com)
  
• elephant rides in the jungle
• trekking and visiting the hilltribes, including the Kayan where the women twist copper wires around their necks to make it grow longer
• Thai boxing match (Petsiam, presumingly the Thai champion vs. Tsubasa, a Japanese fighter)
• pet tigers at the Tiger Kingdom (www.tigerkingdom.com/Home.htm)
  
• visit Immigration Office for a re-entry permit to Thailand
• visit Sunday market or night bazaar
• visit more Buddhist temples