Oh, James talk Thai. James talk Thai real well

Hello from Chang Mai, a city of 1.5 million in Northern Thailand. Chang Mai was/is a large trading post for Northern Thailand. It features a lot of Buddhist temples, which are slightly different than the ones in Bangkok due to the Burmese influence. Chang Mai is also popular because it offers treks into the Thai jungle. I opted to go on a 3 day/2 night trek, which was great. The first day started with a 1.5 hr elephant ride. Yep, I was riding elephants. How it works is they put this little bench seat that holds 2 people on top of numerous mats on top of the elephant's back. The elephants are somewhere around 25 yrs old, and then you have a Thai boy, around 15-20 sitting on the neck and guiding the elephant. The riding was fun, and I even threw out "You cheat, Docta Jones" twice, but it was a stick 'em both times as no one got the joke. As you ride around, you stop at these huts and they sell you bananas to feed your elephant. I named my elephant Babaar, and hooked him up with two bunches of bananas for giving us (there was a girl from California with me) a smooth ride. After the ride, we hiked for several hours to this waterfall, where we had a welcome dip since it was so humid.
About the humidity, it's been humid everywhere so far and you realy give your sweat glands a workout. Now, I have no problem with sweating, and I could even stand to lose a couple pounds after Oz, BUT, the level of B.O. on the tour buses and especially from the English guys on the hike is unreal. I had to stay upwind of those two blokes the entire time, otherwise I would have passed out. The cure of course would be for them to discover the brilliance of roll-on deoderant, but apparantly that phenomenon is found only among Americans.
Back to the trek. We stayed at night in these small little villages, inhabited by Thais, who speak their own language and were Christian as opposed to Buddhist. The people were very friendly, and some of them knew a little bit of English. The next day we did more hiking, swam in more waterfalls, and stayed in a different village. The scenery was very nice, as was the food, which was mainly curry and noodles. The last day, I was introduced to the Thai shower, which isn't to be confused with the Italian and Irish showers which Grellan has mastered. The Thai shower involves bringing your own soap and shampoo and using the waterfall as the showerhead. Quite nice. To finish up the trip, we did bamboo rafting. The raft was made up of about 6-8 bamboo poles tied together. There was the guide in the front with a pole, which is used to steer and speed up the raft, a girl sitting in the middle for a free ride, and then me and my pole in the back, pretending to paddle only when the guide turned around to see why we were going so slow. The trip lasted about an hour, then we were brought back into town. All in all a great experience.
So, tomorrow I head off to the Thailand/Laos border, where I will catch a slow boat into Luang Prabang. I have my visas and everything in order, and am looking forward to Laos from all the good things I've heard from travellers, especially James C.
Finally, about Bangkok. It's huge, humid, there's tons of people hustlin' trying to get you to do this and that, it's pretty dirty (they might want to at least think about garbage cans) and it's kind of smelly as well. But, with all that said, I still liked it. Wouldn't want to live there, but it's pretty convenient having all these shops, tourism agencies, food vendors etc at every turn. Oh yeah, and it's really cheap. You know you're in BKK, when the restaurant in your guest house is playing the Da Vinci Code. With that said, if anyone needs any CD's, DVD's, Adidos or anything else let me know. I fly out of BKK and can pick some things up.
Well, that's it for now.
Say hello, to everyone in Ireland.

James