Part of being a lecturer at Assumption University is that it is required of you to proctor examinations when mid-terms come around. It comes out to almost two weeks total of examinations of which you only need to proctor about 3 days of. The rest of the time is yours do what you please, like travel. So guess what I did?

That was a lucky guess, but your right. Edwin (writer extraordinaire of Dispatches from B16 – link below) and I fled north to Chiang Mai to escape Bangkok for five days or so. We bought tickets for two berths in the second-class, non-aircon, sleeper car. The train ride alone was exciting. It’s always nice go through a rotation of shirt-on and shirt-off, and losing 5 lbs of body weight in sweat while trying to fall asleep in a human sized steamer. The train leaves at night so the beds are already set, and in the morning they come around and switch them to seats and open the windows. The open windows is exactly why non-aircon is the way to go (and because it’s cheaper), you can pretty much stick your whole body out while snaking through the jungle. However, before you do this you want to be careful- people have been known to get blindsided in the face by tree branches. I may or may not have learned this by first hand experience. A word of caution is all I’m really getting at. The last really cool thing about the train, other than it takes 14+ hours (sarcasm doesn’t translate the best on the internet), is that at one point I was leaning out from the train door when we crossed a bridge. It gave me a good idea of how much it would suck to be caught on a railway bridge when a train was coming- the fall would be really uncool if I had to guess.

Once arriving in Chiang Mai we found ourselves some pretty cheap but livable accommodation and ended up touring around the old city area (the original part of the city that is en-squared by a perfectly 2kmx2km square) and checked out many of the wats (temples). In fact Chiang Mai has just as many wats as Bangkok, making the wat per square mileage (scientific unit of measurement) significantly higher than Bangkok’s. It also meant that it was common to see monks or young monks-in-training walking around in their orange garb. Each of the wats seemed to be different in their own way, mostly though size and the material it was built out of. Other than that, they are all pretty similar. Later that night we decided to go to the Night Bazaar to see if we could do some shopping on the cheap. I managed to pick up two legit neckties complete with cuff links and handkerchiefs for 350 baht ($10), down from 250 per tie. I snagged a couple cool t-shirts as well- I don’t know where they get them from, but markets have some of the best designed t-shirts I have ever seen, they also have some of the most vulgar.

The next day we decided to rent a couple of motorbikes (200 baht/$6 for 24 hours) and ride them out from town up to a wat and waterfall area that overlooked Chiang Mai. Riding a motorbike is probably one of the most exhilarating/terrifying things I have done in Thailand yet. To start with we had to get manual bikes instead of automatic because all of the other white people beat us to them earlier in the day. Taking to the road was a little shaky at first, not so much because we were riding manuals, but because there aren’t exactly rules when driving in Thailand, they’re more like guidelines. We quickly learned the need to pass cars, even in single lane roads, and the need to drive up along the curb or up through the center of cars to get to the front of the line at red lights. This allows all of the motorbikes to get a jump on the competition. I had seen motorbikes do this, passing within inches of our taxis in Bangkok. I now realize how completely useful it is to getting somewhere fast.

We were able to return our motorbikes (and ourselves) in one piece. However, this is where the story begins to turn for the worst. CAUTION:This part is kind of gross. We were planning on going on a two day guided trek into the jungle where we would ride elephants, sleep in huts with a hill tribe, and do some bamboo and white water rafting. But at about 12am that night Ed came down with some serious food poisoning and began to vomit his brains out through the whole night. Sadly, with Ed out of commission I figured I’d go venture on the trek by myself since Ed was still sick and would just be resting all day. Well I left on the trek with a guide who didn’t speak too much English and 4 other people from Holland. We rode about an hour in the back of a covered pick-up truck to the elephant camp. It was here, bumping up and down on the lumbering elephants that I began to feel a bit uncomfortable. After eating lunch at a restaurant across the street we continued on and I began to sweat more than usual, which was strange since I have become somewhat acclimated to the heat.

Bumping along the dirt road can be a bit nauseating and when we reached the area to where we would have marched into the jungle I was feeling so ill that I (thank god) decided not to journey into the jungle, but head back to Chiang Mai with the driver. It seems as if I were to suffer the same fate as Ed, albeit 12 hours later than he did. About 30 seconds after getting back in to the truck I puked off of the back while bumping down the same dirt road. The driver didn’t seem to notice, and I managed to clean off the rice I had for lunch from the back fender with some water I had. In fact we weren’t even going straight back to Chiang Mai, we had to stop nearby and wait for a another group to bring back. Too make a long and extremely miserable story short, I was sick for the next 72 hours with my body rejecting everything I put in, it including water, either from vomiting or the other way- which is probably the most PG rated and understated way I can describe it. The ten hour bus ride home the next day also wasn’t very pleasant, although the police came on the bus while was on the can in the bathroom. They probably would have regretted it if they checked in there.

Eitherway, the trip was cool. But I need to go back when some sort of bacterial infection isn’t going to eat me from the inside out. I figured I would get food poisoning at some point while in Thailand, but this was less than good timing. One good thing about food poisoning though is it’s a great way to loose pounds.

*I might have accidentally emailed myself.