Now this is really getting interesting....

Wow. I thought this was cool before, but the longer we're here, the more I'm getting to know the place, meeting some great Thai folks, not to mention the great people from New Zealand, Australia, Germany, Austria, England, and god knows where else that we've been chilling with. We finally left Southern Thailand and headed north up into the hills to Chiang Mai. Great town, lots of cool temples, including one on the top of a very large mountain (complete with a 400 step staircase, which, incidentally, sucks in weather this hot). Chiang Mai has a neat thing called the Sunday Walking Street, which pretty much amounts to a 3 mile long Shakedown - good stuff... Don't ask me how, but I managed to impale my foot with a chopstick.. Here's hoping that's the only injury of the trip...

Got to Pai yesterday, which is a neat little hippie town of a couple thousand up in the Himalayan foothills. This place is great - veggie restaurants, chill reggae bars, mountain peaks, and weirdos all over (kind of reminds me of home). Upon arriving in town we visited a small wat (temple) that was tucked back into the forest. Had a very cool Burmese/Shan-style pagoda, which is a big departure from anything we've seen so far. A very friendly monk showed us around the whole complex (though the only English he knew was "USA" and "airplane"). They had a bunch of great Buddha relics, and quite strangely, a box full of old Japanese WWII rifles and helmets. I was able to speak a little Thai to him, but it was basically a half hour of him rattling off Thai quite rapidly, while I nodded in puzzled agreement. When we were getting ready to leave, a very cool thing happened - the monk went into his robe and produced a sacred Buddha amulet, which he proceeded to give to us - you just can't buy something that cool anywhere - a very heartfelt and meaningful gift...

Funny thing - my Thai is getting better, but my English seems to be degrading. I find myself speaking to someone from England, for example, and I catch myself waving my hands around a lot, dropping extraneous words and conjunctions, etc. I figure by the time I get back, I should be speaking at a kindergarten level.

Anyway, I'll leave you with a few pics... Take it easy...

Monkeys!

Monkey eating the can of Pringles it swiped from Lacy

More pics soon, assuming I can find some fucking decent bandwidth somewhere in this country...