Earning our stripes.

We are back in our hotel in Chiang Mai, its almost 1700. We are very tired.

Yesterday morning, we left the hotel first thing to drive out to our village for the homestay. On the way we stopped at a cave that the Burmese used over 300 years ago as a temple that has loads of Buddha images inside. We arrived at one village, but that was not the one we were staying at, no, our one was an hour and a half's walk away! About 5 minutes in, it started raining. Real rain. Walking for one and a half hours through the jungle in heavy rain: Awesome. Also all the bridges over the streams had been washed away, but we made it in the end.

The tribe we were staying with was a Lasi tribe. The other main ones are Karen and Hmong. The karen tribe people are the ones who wear brass rings round their neck to stretch it and protect themselves from tiger bites! (Although it doesn't elongate their necks, it just pushes down their collar and shoulder bones.) You can go and see the "long neck" tribes but it isn't very ethical. They originate from Burma and sought asylum in Thailand when they were being persecuted by their government. They were granted asylum but are forced to live in a walled village where they are basically a zoo attraction.

Our tribe people were very friendly. They made us dinner and sold us some local handicrafts. We invested in a set of gutties and whiled away the evening shooting cans. Our tour guide Sunny is a wicked shot with the gutty and can hit a moving chicken at 30 yards!

We all slept on the floor in one big hut under mozzy nets. It was very difficult to sleep with the insects, birds and monkeys all fighting to be heard over one another! Its noisier than Bangkok!

This morning after breakfast we met our first elephants!!! We rode on them for an hour through the jungle. It was really cool, but prtty bumpy. Our elephant seemed more interested in stealing corn from fields than sticking to the path, there were a couple of times we thought we were going to get thrown off!

After this we went on the Bamboo rafts down the river. this was alot safer than the tubing. It went pretty fast, but our driver waspretty good. I also had a shot of steering and I thought I was a natural. Charlotte's face said different! The scariest part was going down the waterfall...

On the way back to Chiang Mai we made a couple of amazing stops. The first was a butterfly and orchid farm, it was OK, butterflies and orchids you know.

Next we stopped at the King Cobra show. This is a place where they keep all manner of snakes and take poison from the poisonous ones to make anti-venom. We got to hold a little python and the people that work there seem to think its funny to creep up behind people and grab their legs when looking at snakes!

They also do a show, enhanced by bizzarre commentary which is quite funny actually. "Don wurree ladee and gentah mun, onlee free pee-pole die yestuday" The show itself was quite cool but mainly consisted of the guys narrowly avoiding being bitten and pretending to throw snakes into the crowd or pretending to get cobras to bite people. They put one snake to sleep by turning it on its back and put it alarmingly near my crotch. At onepoint they threw a bit of rope from one of the cages into the crowd which resulted in much screaming.

The last stop was the best yet! We stopped at a place called Tiger Kingdom, where they have a breeding programme for Tigers. It is very big and very clean and the tigers are well cared for and fed and clean. They are geared towards conservation as opposed to being like a zoo. The best bit is, you get to go in with the tigers!!! We went in with the smallest tigers and the biggest tigers. We got loads of ace pictures cuddling in with the tigers, who were sleepy but were very friendly when they were awake. We both had a great time.

Tomorrow we are going to an Elephant park where we will get to see them being trained and get to wash and feed them! It is illegal to use elephants for logging now, so around 20% are used in farming and the rest are used for tourism. It is quite sad but this seems to be a nice place that we are going to tomorrow.

Hope everyone is ok and you're not missing us too much.

Mum you put your card in a cash machine, it will ask you withdraw cash, display balance, mobile top-up etc. You just put in my mobile number twice, when prompted and it does it automatically. Thanks.