Thailand

I have arrived in Northern Thailand after a nasty 10 hour speed (torture) boat from Laos, spent 1 day in Chiang Rai and then moved onto Chiang Mai where we have been for about 5 days now. It is so much more westernised here, which is not really a good thing and its very touristy. There is great night market, which I have managed to spend far too much money in, but do have lots of cool stuff. Yesterday we did a tour which took us to some hilltribe villages and a waterfall, but the highlight was defiantly the elephant riding, it was so wired being so close to loads of elephants and they were so beautiful..... But the ride was a bit bumpy and scary on the downhill bits. In my usually style I had the interesting elephant who liked to stop and eat everything and hold everyone else up! In the afternoon we went bamboo rafting which was good fun, but got very wet especially when the local kids splashed us.

Today I saw more Pandas, which was amazing there were actually doing something.... Lots of play fighting and eating bamboo. Their pad was very 5star, especially compare to the other animals, but it was good to get really close to the animals... Although being 5 inches away from a hippos mouth is quite scary.

I am hopefully flying to Bangkok tomorrow and then to the islands to top up the tan.

There are some more photos on www.bugbitten.com/browny_j

love to all
jenxxx