Thailand

A small post to remind we are alive and still riding trains. Today here in Chiang Mai we exchanged "The end of poverty", "Life of Pi" (I hadn't read yet) and "Lonely Planet Mekong River, Cambodia, Laos" against the Paul Theroux's "Riding the iron rooster" (his train adventures in China) and 110bath. Chiang Mai is the Northern capital of Thailand and is more than full of western people. Just second hand bookshops there are maybe ten!

We found Thailand and Bangkok and huge relief (=calm) compared to Cambodia, Vietnam and China. It is a very easy country to travel and while guide books warn about scams and annoying taxis, motos drivers, we may say that here is very quiet.

After a short night in Bangkok we took train for 12hours to here, and the last 3 days we went to a lovely small remote village in a National Park where a french couple developed the tourism with the locals (from a mountain tribe called Karen). So the couple financed a house built by the locals and now the locals receive tourists (up to 8 at a time), show them the village and traditions (we got to see a wedding), cook, do hikes and/or go by bicycle somewhere around. Around the house just rice paddies, no noise of cars, nothing. A real gem. Thanks Anne-Laure for offering us this stay. :-)

Today we rest and tomorrow we will start going back down, direction of Bangkok.

More stories will come soon.