Chiang Mai - Northern Thailand
April 28, 2007 - May 6, 2007

While my visit to Thailand has been covered in a couple of blog entries, I thought I would include a few pictures as well.  After spending a night on a bench at Bangkok's brand new airport, we were both exhausted and excited to when our Air Asia flight landed in Chiang Mai.  Yuka is here standing in front of the Ping River, which runs through Chiang Mai.	This is also from the Ping River, on which we took a two hour lunch cruise and visited a small fruit farm.  In Chiang Mai, we stayed at the fabulous D2 Hotel, which at the time had the highest rating in Tripadvisor.com.  The breakfast and business center at the hotel are great, and we were upgraded to a suite the size of a small city.

Thai cuisine is among the best in the world, and with the prices in Thailand one can other whatever is on the menu.  To provide some social commentary, some time ago I read about Scandinavians that are living in Thailand on welfare or unemployment benefits from their home countries.  Due to the low level of prices in Thailand, they can live as kings.  For someone that has grown up in Thailand, it must seem unfair that these individuals can spend months on end in Thailand without any concern. Losers in their own country, kings in another.

Chiang Mai offers lots of traditional stores and shops that sell handcrafts, but it is hard to find anything that might be useful in Tokyo.  The Central Airport Plaza offers perhaps the best opportunities for shopping, and I was able to buy some worms as souvenirs for the office.  For some odd reason, the worms did not prove very popular, though I personally thought the bamboo worms were rather tasty.  The silk worms, however, were nasty.

On our most interesting trip from Chiang Mai, we went to the Golden Triangle.  The tourist guides in Thailand will tell you that the Golden Triangle is named after a tiny island in the Mekong river on the border between Thailand, Laos, and Myanmar.  This is obviously not true, as the Golden Triangle in fact is an area of around 350,000 square kilometers that overlaps the mountains of four countries of Southeast Asia: Myanmar (Burma), Laos, Vietnam, and Thailand.  On the way to the Golden Triangle, we stopped at some hot springs.

Visiting the Golden Triangle is a very touristy affair, though it is somewhat exciting to be on the border of Laos, Myanmar, and Thailand.  The guided tour included a trip on the Mekong river, and we stopped off at the Lao village of Don Sao.  The village is located on an island and consists solely of souvenir shops.

Yuka standing in front of one of the Don Sao souvenir shops.	I actually bought a bottle of snake whiskey to bring home.  They allowed me to taste a little, and it really is not bad.

More Pictures From Thailand
Click Here for Part 2

	Web www.janhoo.com

Presented By Boots 4 You, Sherman's Travel, and Janhoo.com.