The Chiang Mai Reggae Bar and the Long Neck Tour

Hello again everyone, really struggling to keep up with the posts, but here's the next installment for your viewing pleasure.

After the 3 day tour of the jungle we had become quite close to the people on the trek and so all decided to meet up at the famous Roots Reggae Bar in Chiang Mai. No wonder it was famous, this place was awesome, loads of live reggae bands playing plenty of Bob Marley, wicked. We got on the buckets - standard. I got in a bit of trouble with a Welsh girl who didn't like me challenging the thai kids to do 'the move' but it all went fine in the end and we had a wicked time. I even tried my hand at some bongooing until I broke the drummers drum stick which pretty much got me a black mark next to my name. Anyhoo had an awesome night, until, Locky the aussie turned up at our hotel looking particularly dazed looking for Remy and the key to his room. This didn't look good! He tried to pull himself together and explained how he had been forced to kill a savage dog with a stick! This was not cool! Anyway we hit the sack ridiculously late which was pretty stupid considering our Longneck tour left at stupid o clock in the morning!

Again barely managing to get down any of the 5* garmet breakfast we were bundled into a mini bus for the Longneck tour. Our guide was called Eddie, which quickly got turned into Eddie Murphy for some reason and he found the fact I was seriously hungover very amusing indeed. He especially enjoyed telling us that the tour invovled an enormous amount of minibus riding around stupid winding roads, not ideal at all! It took 4 hours for us to get the The Golden Triangle where we saw where Laos, Thailand and Burma met. We took a boat trip to Laos and sampled the cobra and scorpion whiskey! Nasty stuff, especially when you are feeling pretty bad already. Again there was no boarder control or anything, just a 20Baht fee! We saw a black bear caged and demented which was pretty horrible and then returned to the minibus by nutcase speed boat!

Another 2 hours in the god for saken minibus and we arrived at the Longneck village. Not at all what we expected! It was so tourist-a-fied. The women (and young girls) with the ridiculously heavy rings round there necks just sat around selling scarves to tourists. We weren't impressed but both Adrian and Caroline did get attack by an incontinent child which was amusing. Another 4 hours by minibus, which nearly killed me, and we were back.

We went for a final night at the Reggae Bar and meet up with Locky and Remy again as well as Ronald who was a Dutch guy from the longneck tour. We exchanged details with everyone and plan to meet the aussies in Canberra to shot a Kangaroo and BBQ it! We also found out Ronald is going to buy a tuk tuk and drive it back to Holland, what a hero, I'm going to join him for the Nepal Stretch! The next day we were leaving Chiang Mai much to our dissappointment as there is so much to do there, we will definately have to return. Plus the fact that we had a ridiculous amount of travelling to do before we made it to Koh Tao didn't make leaving any easier!

Ed