Chiang Mai

We are finally in CHiang Mai! took us about 2 days to finally get here (its pretty high north and we were way down south). The journey started with a 2 hr boat ride from Koh Phangan to SUrat Thani (mainland) where we caugh a bus to go to BKK...that was 12 hrs...after that bus we arrived at BKK at 5am and had to wait till 830am to leave by train for CHiang Mai. After that it was another 12 hrs. We got to Chiang Mai at 930pm and found a hostel. This morning we switched to a hsotel we liked better and is cheaper, its called Malak Guest House. We really really like Chiang Mai, it is a lot quieter than BKK and has more of a thai feeling than the islands (which are incerdibly touristy), its also quite a bit cheaper. TOday we rented bicycles and biked around the little markets, alleyways, and visited several temples. At one of the temples, there was something called a Monk Chat which we had read about. the point is to go and sit with monks and ask them questions (and they ask you) to help better their english. It was funny causeour designated monks' name was "Chat". He was 22 and he was very good at speaking english. We wer wanting to upload a bunch of pictures from our hostel (casue the computers are free) but turns out they are incredibly slow and they have blocked the usb access so that people cant download antyhging onto the computers. Oh well! we will try somewhere else maybe later. tomorrow we aer going on a day trip to do anelephant trek, bamboo rafting, visiting a few tribal villages (long neck villages they aer called, where people put large rings over their necks so that overtime their neck becomes quite elongated). Should be cool! we are going to try and leave for Laos on the4th or 5th, and then hopefully do the Gibbon Experience in Bokeo Province(we are just waiting to hear back from them). anyways, thats all folks!
xox
Nomes