Chiang Dao continued...

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Originally uploaded by theslaad.

We mostly spent the day after the party/festival/rave relaxing at Chiang Dao Nest. They’ve got a nice shady open sided hut that you can sit in. We spent the day in there, reading and playing games. We walked up the road in the evening to Nest 2, which is run by Wicha’s sister, for some Thai food. Surprisingly, Joseph wanted to play Uno with us when we got back! It was cool though, when we told him it was 9 o’clock and time to go to bed he shot off, without so much as a ‘Good Night’!

For our last day in Chiang Dao we hired a couple of bicycles and went exploring armed with a packed lunch and Wicha’s hand drawn map. We rode the 7km into town and walked around the weekly market. Thee were quite a lot of minority people there who come down from the hills once a week to do their shopping. After that we stopped in at the Internet cafe for a quick email to worried parents. The next part of our ride was quite tricky – a bit uphill and not really a proper road. We stopped for some lunch by the side of the road and then continued to the village on our map. Chris got looked at by a pig!
Eventually we got back to the main road and enjoyed some downhill bits! Cycling is more fun when you don’t have to pedal. Feeling quite tired we cycled back to the Nest for a beer and a snooze before setting off again in the cooler part of the afternoon. We visited a nice temple/monastery which is built into a cave. Unlike the monastery that we climbed up to on Sunday, this temple in through a door and actually in the cave rather than just at the entrance, it was quite cool. Check out the photo of the golden statue though – it was really freaky in the semi darkness of the cave – it looked like a monk had been turned to gold. We treated ourselves to another one of Wicha’s slap up meals in the evening and spent a nice time chatting to Stuart and giving Joseph a final few games of Uno.

We left Chiang Dao this morning. We were sad to leave and will almost certainly go back there again one day. We caught the bus back into Chiang Mai. As we were going along we spotted some elephants out of the window – very cool! Taking a cookery class tomorrow, then traveling south to Ayuthaya before we catch our flight to Sydney on the 3rd.