4.5 months and finally we've been robbed!

It nowhere near as dramatic as it might seem though, there was no desperate struggle in a dodgy Bangkok backstreet or anything like that, Colm and I just got a little careless on the bus! But I'll tell the story in order. We got the boat across the Mekong to Thailand, my first border crossing by boat, it only took a few minutes and it was all done. Free Thai visa for 15 days aswell which was nice. From the border we took a minibus to Chiang Mai in the north of thailand. We got to Chiang Mai and decided to have a nice productive few days. The evening we arrived we got dinner and then went to a travel agents and booked two things, we decided on a days cooking course which was something I'd been wanting to do since I left home and for one reason or another we just never got round to it. For the second day we booked a trek to see a waterfall which also involved elephant riding and also a ride on a bamboo raft. We also went to see some minority villages but we've done this quite a few times in different places so that wasn't too exciting. Anyway, first day first, we set off to do our cooking course, none of us really knew what to expect from it really. It cost us about 15 pounds and was well worth the money. The first thing they did was get us to choose the 5 things that we wanted to cook and then they took us to the market to buy the ingredients for the dishes. The 3 of us were with a small group of people on an intrepid tour of thailand for 2 weeks. I chose to cook chicken and cashew nuts, Chiang Mai noodles with red curry paste, mango sticky rice and a coconut curry. We spent all day cooking the different things, and obviously once you've cooked it you've got to eat it aswell, we were all stuffed by the end of the day. The following day was an early start and we all pretty much went back to sleep in the bus that took us to the trek. The first thing on the itinery was the elephant trekking. We were on them for about an hour and I don't think I'd have wanted to be on for much longer than that, it was quite uncomfortable but really cool at the same time. They weren't as big as I expected them to be but Asian elephants are supposed to be quite a bit smaller than their African cousins. Colm was put on quite a cheeky little elephant, ended up spraying people on the backs of other elephants when we got to the water. After the elpehants the bus took us to a minority village where they tried and failed to sell us their handicrafts. Then from there it was the trek itself, 40mins later and we were at our destination. wasn't the hardest trek we've ever done. We messed about in the waterfall we'd reached though, no rope swings this time, it was quite shallow which meant it had some power behind it and it became a bit of a challenge for us to get to the fall. After this we were taken for lunch and then it was onto the bamboo rafting. We half jokingly told our guide that we wanted to do the rafting on our own without the guide to steer the boat and we were somewhat suprised when we got to the river and they sent the 3 of us off with a pole on our own. It was fairly easy on the slow parts of the river, you use the pole to punt along and also to push the front from side to side, the back just sort of follws the front. The rapids we went down however were a little trickier, some of them were easy enough but both Kris and I managed to bounce off a rock or 2 a few times! We got to the end of the river and that was our day done, we were dropped off back at Chiang Mai, we had a bus booked to get to Bangkok and we were being picked up by the taxi 15 minutes after we were dropped off by our trek bus so we made use of the first McDonalds we'd seen since China and ran back to the guesthouse. The taxi turned up just as we finished eating. We got to the bus and were pleasantly suprised, had plent of leg room, comfortable chairs and blankets provided, couple of films were played aswell rather then the usual karaoke rubbish. We got to Bangkok at 6am and went to sleep for a few hours. When we woke up Colm realised that he had $50 missing from his bag, I checked mine and I was down $65. The only place we can think of it going missing was when we were on the bus and the bags were down in the luggage hold. The way the money was hidden in our bags suggests that someone was sat down there going through all the bags on the off chance. We probably weren't the only people who had a problem and it has taught us a bit of a lesson and nothing important was taken so its not all so bad. Will talk about Bangkok and the Bridge over the river Kwai in the next blog!

Talk to you all soon

Paul, Colm and Kris