Saturated

Peterpan Internet, Bangkok

The closing paragraph of my last post may have been premature. That evening army helicopters began circling the Redshirts' stronghold, and unleashing teargas bombs on the protestors. The last estimate I saw said 18 people died and 800 were hospitalised. All this we found out later from CNN, at the time we were instructed by our hotel manager to stay in our rooms, advice we gladly accepted.

The next day we had planned to catch a bus to the out-of-town weekend market, but all buses were understandably cancelled so we amused ourselves until the evening when we caught the overnight train (the best and most comfortable such transport we've taken in Asia) to Chiang Mai. The only irritation was the constant, slobbering canoodling of the young couple next to us whom I have assumed to be German.

Chiang Mai at Thai new year becomes essentially a giant city-shaped water park, with all locals and hordes of tourists spending a full week engaged in a mass water fight. Huge vats of aquatic ammunition line the streets for the easy refilling of the participant's Super Soaker or bucket, and pick-up trucks crammed with kids drive around the city centre soaking everything in sight.

This includes even those tourists looking to quietly explore Thailand's second city who naively thought that if clearly unarmed they would be granted amnesty, as we found out to our cost through incessant drenchings over the course of the next few days. I was quite spectacularly unimpressed.

After a long and less than inspiring day-trip to see the Longneck tribes of Chiang Rai (the women have artificially lengthened necks, all a bit odd), we set off on a three-day trek through the hills surrounding Chiang Mai, which was the main reason we had come to northern Thailand and about which we were frankly not optimistic after the disappointments and irritations of the last couple of days. We needn't have worried, for the trek was a taste of a different kind of Thailand. Not that it isn't a well-worn route trodden by many tour groups every week, and neither was it a trek as Ray Mears might understand the term, but we did four or five hours proper hill-walking every day, swam in waterfalls and stayed in hilltribe villages with communal dinners and campfire evenings. We also did bamboo rafting, elephant riding and made some friends - of our group of eleven I was one of three who had lived in Hampshire and a further two were from South London. Like I say, not very Ray Mears, but fun nonetheless.

After the trek we returned to Chiang Mai city and had a day walking round a becalmed and immeasurably drier place than the one we had left, festivities having ended in the intervening time. The city acquired a new attractiveness in this new atmosphere, and I began to understand the description of the place as an "overgrown village" which abounds in guidebooks. In a day of pampering Tweedie got a pedicure and we both had a foot massage and a fish spa, which is where you dangle your feet in a fish tank and the hungry minnows nibble the dead skin off. This confers a strange tingle halfway between pleasure and panic, and is not altogether unpleasant.

Last night we caught an overnight bus back to Bangkok and this evening, in a slight change of plan, we fly to Sydney. We have brought forward and extended the Antipodean leg of our trip due to a growing feeling of Asia inertia, and as such this will be my last post from the world's most populous continent. We have spent five weeks in South East Asia of which I would say the three spent in Vietnam were easily the best. We have spent roughly a week in each of Cambodia and Thailand, during which time I have rarely felt like we were in control of what we were doing, and perhaps consequently I do not think we've gathered much in the way of unique experiences. That said, there have definitely been some high points and I think my enthusiasm for this particular variety of temple-fort-palace-bar-hostel holidaying is waning after eleven weeks, which is hardly Thailand's fault.

I realise this is my third post from this particular internet cafe, and second in succession. It's just we've had three different stops in Thailand and this place has the best air-conditioning we can find. I promise I haven't just been sat here all week. Although if I had done my bottom could scarcely be less sore than it is after a night's semi-sleep on a bus with chairs not designed for being slept in. Bring on Australia.

Over.