Lastly, we visited the palace of the King's late mother at Doi Tung. She spent much of her life in this palace, where she was instrumental in getting the local farmers to stop growing opium and planting fruits, vegetables and coffee instead. Her palace gardens are open to the public, and are a very popular place for picnicing and paying respects to the very popular former resident.

Well, that's all from Northern Thailand, I'll start up with new posts after the big New Year's Eve celebration here in Sydney. Happy new year everyone!

We also visited Chiang Saen, which calls for a bit more history of Lanna (sorry!). When the Thai tribes first came down from China into modern day Thailand, around 500 AD, Chiang Saen was the first settlement. The Thais quickly fragmented into lots of feuding kingdoms, and Chiang Saen was a bit of a backwater. But around 1200 AD, Chiang Saen's king surprised all his neighbors by annexing all of them to form the kingdom of Lanna. The city of Chiang Saen was rewarded for all this hard work by having the capital of Lanna moved to the new city of Chiang Mai, so Chiang Saen promptly slid back into obscurity. Today, it sits on the Mekhong River, well off the tourist path and well worth a visit. The current town sort of lies on top of the ancient capital, so you have ruined temples jutting out of someone's rice paddy or behind their house, for example. But there are plenty of ruins abandoned in the jungle. They're small but quite atmospheric. As per above, I have lots more and better pics from my recent visit, but it will take me many years to eventually catch up to posting that.

I think I'm going to stop experimenting with multipicture posts. My first attempt turned the text orange in the first Chiang Rai post. And I see that the last Chiang Mai post managed to fit all three pictures in by squeezing my sentences into two letter lines between pics, not really the aesthetic I was going for. We did some sightseeing around the Golden Triangle. Actually, our last trip before we left Thailand to move to Sydney was also to the Golden Triangle, staying at a great new resort, so I'll be brief here since the pics from the latest trip are much better. This is Mae Sai, a border town connected by bridge to the Burmese town of Tachilek, probably misspelled. Both towns are hectic, messy affairs dominated by the business of smuggling Thai and other imported goods into Burma. This is one of the few border crossings, crossing the Mekhong River. It's frequently closed due to border hostilities, but when it's open, it's very bustling.

At night, the whole village came to Somchai's parents' house to have a party. This is khun Yoong, Somchai's best friend from when he was just a kid. Today he and his wife operate a driving/tour guide service for tourists coming to see the Golden Triangle.

For dinner, we feasted on local delicacies like raw pork and pork's blood, delicious! Lessons learned: 1)raw pork apparently doesn't kill you after all, and 2)drinking enough of the local Mekhong whiskey allows you to eat anything.

While Chiang Rai remains an important historical city, its greatest claim to fame is recent. Yes, that's rights, Chiang Rai province is also the birthplace of Somchai! He comes from a tiny town called Ban Mai (which funnily enough means Newtown in Thai. Funny only to my sister, actually, pardon the insider reference.) Ban Mai is on the border with Burma, not a good place to be since there are frequent border skirmishes between Thailand and Burma and the ongoing civil and drug wars in Burma often spill over into the area. Here I am visiting the in-laws, Somchai's father, Tong, and mother, Bujin. The first thing his father did when I met him was to reach into a bamboo tree and offer me a worm to eat. Not sure if that was a good sign.

4. Chiang Rai, Thailand, Nov '97

After our mercifully short flight to Chiang Rai, we stopped in the city for a couple of days, staying at the Dusit hotel. The Dusit is Thailand's main homegrown upscale chain, and is sort of like a Sheraton in the US, reliable but never interesting. At the time of our visit, it was (and I think still is) the only upscale hotel. It's on an island in the middle of a lake, which adds a tiny bit of exoticism to it, but it's basically a generic business hotel. Chiang Rai was something of a rival center to Chiang Mai in the northern Thai kingdom of Lanna, and the kings often moved between the two when one of the cities was burned down by the Burmese or Cambodians. (Capital burning happened with great regularity in those days). Chiang Mai is indisputably the capital of the region nowadays, and Chiang Rai remains a pleasant, small city with unfortunately nothing to see in terms of tourist sights. Backpackers tend to congregate here as a launching pad for trekking the mountains and visiting hill tribes. Until recently, Chiang Rai was too dangerous for trekking since it was the center of the Golden Triangle, an area spread around remote parts of Laos, Burma and Thailand that was once the world's largest opium producer. Opium production in Thailand has more or less stopped, so Chiang Rai is being repositioned as a trekking capital.

We also took a day trip to Lamphun, which I would recommend. It's only an hour's drive, but is totally off the tourist track. It's a separate province, amazingly little Thailand has almost 70 provinces, so it's easy to breeze through a bunch in a day if that turns you on. Lamphun actually predates Thailand, as it was the capital of the Mon kingdom. The Mons lived in Thailand before the Thai tribes moved down from China. The defeated Mons took off to the hills after the Thais moved in, and are still around today as one of the many colourful hill tribes in northern Thailand. (wow I sound just like a tourist brochure, this has got to stop). Lamphun became part of Lanna, and then ultimately Thailand (which as you all recall from the King and I was called Siam). These are two different temples from the Mon period, and as you can see are quite different from the typical Thai temple.

The next day we took the very short flight to Chiang Rai, the northernmost province in Thailand. This is probably as good a time as any to say that Thai Airways is awful. You can't really avoid them when flying domestically, and actually they're no worse than other domestic flights and Thailand is so small you're never stuck for more than an hour. But please avoid taking them long-distance. The food isn't bad, but the business class used to seat 8 across! That's worse than economy in most countries. They rarely have personal tv's and the main movie is always a cartoon. It constantly gets rated one of the best in Conde Nast Traveler surveys, but anyone over here knows that the poll is somehow rigged. Avoid.

This is Doi Suthep, Chiang Mai's most important temple. It's outside the city atop a mountain (Doi is mountain in the Northern language still spoken in Northern Thailand). The temple is reached by a long staircase, with nagas, which as everyone knows are giant snakes with lots of heads, as decorative handrails. As you can see, despite the steep climb, it's very, very, popular. Once you get to the top, there are lots of prayer wheels to spin and bells to ring, and you can go off on a picnic nearby. There are good views of the city below, although these days the pollution interferes a bit. As you can see from my pose near the prayer wheels, I'm trying to be very respectful of the religious traditions, but don't worry, the atmosphere is nothing like a Western cathedral. It's a market, town hall and entertainment center too.

Here's a pic of Wat Pra Sing, another temple complex in the old town. After you've seen hundreds of temples (and when you come to Thailand, you will) you'll be able to tell the different architectural styles of the temples. This temple is a good example of a Lanna temple. One easy way of telling them apart from temples in central Thailand is that these are traditionally made of teak wood. Of course these also burned down all the time, so there aren't that many examples of the traditional building style left.

Here are some more photos of Wat Changlom. As you can probably see, the temple was rocked by an earthquake a long time ago, so I don't think there's a straight line in the whole place. But there are lots of atmospheric ruins to walk around.

Thailand's new year falls in April, and is called Songkran. Chiang Mai is considered ground zero for the celebration, and it's something everyone should do once, and only once. Songkran celebrations used to revolve around pouring water on your elders' hands as a mark of respect, but it has deteriorated into an all out water war, with groups riding around on pickup trucks with barrels of water to pour on passers by, and everyone has a water rifle to attack all comers with. The party (and it is a party, as everyone is drunk the whole week) is attended with gusto by foreign visitors, and popular backpacker hangouts like Khao San Road in Bangkok, or pretty much all of Chiang Mai, are crazy.

This is Wat Changlom, in the heart of the old city. It's an amazing old temple complex (wat is Thai for temple), named after the elephants you see here (chang is Thai for elephant). Chiang Mai used to be the capital of an independent Thai kingdom called Lanna, which was taken over by the Thai kingdom to the South in (I think) the 17th century. The Lanna royal family moved to Bangkok, and their descendants are still treated as very high ranking nobility. The last holder of the title died last year. In addition to being quite a high society party woman, she was famous for her purple hair, which always stood out in a crowd. (She married a commoner, so her children don't inherit the title).

Chiang Mai is a hugely popular tourist spot in Thailand, although I'm not a big fan of the place today. Thais like to go there because it's cold (for Thailand anyway) in the winter, and foreigners like to go there because it's vaguely hippy and laid back compared to the urban sprawl of Bangkok. But Chiang Mai today is pretty sprawl-y, lots of tourist kitsch, very bad traffic etc. But it also has a much better hotel and restaurant selection than when we first visited on this trip. We stayed at the Westin Hotel, which is hopefully out of business by now. It's an ugly tower block, with no views and really nothing to recommend it. Best bets today are clearly the Mandarin Oriental or the Four Seasons, but there are loads of cheaper options that are far superior to the Westin as well. In this photo, Somchai is standing in front of the moat that surrounds the old city of Chiang Mai and separates it from the ugliness of the new city.

3. Chiang Mai, Thailand Nov '97

Well, I haven't really gotten the hang of this yet. Posting pics is a bit of an ordeal, and that's really the main point of this. If I want to put a bunch of pics into a post, they all just sit at the top of the post and it looks terrible. So my inelegant solution was to break each trip into a number of posts, with each post having one pic. That doesn't look that bad, but it's a confusing read since we're doing this chronologically from a long time ago. So, if there's anyone still reading, you probably figured out that the Singapore post is actually several posts. You should read the first one, with the Singapore title, first, and then scroll up to the next post without a title, and so on, so it's like reading a newspaper upside down. (Actually that was a bad analogy as any of you trying to read a newspaper upside down can attest, but you get the idea).

Our next trip was to Northern Thailand for a week, my first time there. We spent about a week in Chiang Mai and Chiang Rai provinces. I'll break it up into separate trips just to try to fight the reverse chronological order, but really it was one trip. Like you care.

I don't know what this photo's about, looks like a lunch break. What interests me is that I still have that shirt.

So apart from the crap weather and the lack of things to do, it's still probably worth a quick visit (definitely less than four days!). If you're a veteran of Asian travel, you'll be amazed at how clean and organized the place is, and how hassle free the whole experience is. Everyone speaks English (especially the taxi drivers, who love to talk and talk and talk) The superefficient airport gets you into your hotel about 30 minutes after your plane has landed. And all the stuff about it being boring may be changing soon. They recently opened a big arts complex along the river which is pretty stunning, and two mega-casinos are on the drawing board. So it may become more interesting, although probably not in the way most tourists come to Asia to experience. Well, there's always shopping...

We were in Singapore for about 4 days, which honestly is a couple days too long. There's a decent collection of colonial buildings just across from Boat Quay, and Little India is a colourful walk, although much of the colour comes from the disneyfication of the area in the same vein as Boat Quay. Really the main action here is shopping, with Orchard Road the main shopping strip, but really I'm pretty sure you can walk the entire island without ever leaving a mall. They're all interconnected via a web of passages themselves lined with shops, so it's pretty disorienting but if your goal is to shop until you drop without breaking a sweat, this is the place for you.

This pic looks interesting, no? Unfortunately it doesn't mean there are ancient walled villages for you to discover in Singapore, it's a tourist trap named Tang Dynasty Village I think. It subsequently went bankrupt, as you could have predicted from the large expanse of empty parking lot in the photo. Inside is a mini-disney of ancient China, with some lame historical recreations. I think we were the only visitors that day, and only went as a last resort as we couldn't think of a thing to do by day four in Singapore.

This is Somchai in front of Boat Quay. It's probably the main tourist attraction in Singapore, basically a long row of shophouses converted into bars and restaurants. It's best as a background to a photo op, since up close it's just a row of very average restaurants, but it can be fun in a frat house sort of way at night. The main competition as the iconic tourist sight is the Merlion, which is really pathetic. It's a cross between a mermaid and a lion, made of plastic and sitting forlornly in the water spouting a bit of water out of it's head. Very unimpressive, but tourists dutifully line up to take its picture. The real reason I included this photo was to show you Somchai's groovy denim shorts. Very '80s, although this was taken in the '90s.

2. Singapore, Oct '97

Well, the fact that Singapore is boring is probably not news to anybody, but over the years I've visited the city state often and have grown to like it more and more each time. But these pictures bring back memories of my first impressions, and all the things I don't like about the place.

First, it rains all the time, throughout the year, but remains incredibly hot. So you get the grey overcast skies combined with the bleached colours of overheated locales, such as in this photo of the CBD. The bridge is a pedestrian only bridge, and in back is what I believe was an empty building at the time. It used to be the colonial post office, and subsequent to this pic was converted into the Fullerton Hotel, which is probably my favourite in the city now, although definitely not without its faults.

We stayed at the Shangri-La, an enormous hotel complex in the shopping mecca of Orchard Road, although inconveniently located up a side street. The lobby has all the charm of an airport terminal, the main restaurant is an enormous buffet style place that manages to be constantly bustling and tired looking at the same time. The rooms are fine corporate style accomodations, and the gym is ok (and had a major upgrade several years ago). In fact the entire hotel had a major facelift a few years ago. I remember their advertising campaign, which showed their royal suites as the preferred home of royalty and presidents when visiting Singapore, and the photo came complete with a crown and sceptre plopped on the desk, as though the Queen had just taken them off to hop into the shower! Very stupid. Anyway, no amount of facelifting will hide the fact that the hotel is just way too big. We usually took pictures of the hotel we stayed at, but I guess that tradition hadn't been formed at the time of this trip. I've stayed at most of the top hotels here, but I think Singapore pops up again later and if I babble too much here I won't have much to say later.

1. Hong Kong, Sept '97

Well, we're off to a rocky start. In the interest of completeness, I remember that our first trip was to Hong Kong, just a week after we met each other for the first time at the Grand Hyatt Erawan in Bangkok. I was on a business trip, and continuing on to Hong Kong, so Somchai came along for the weekend. You may be surprised that we were traveling together a week after we met, but I was very charming at the time. (a smiley face would be a good insert here but I'm trying to stay away from those so I'll just note I was kidding) The bad news is that we didn't have a camera or a journal, so not much of a historical record here. The good news is a business trip to Hong Kong isn't exactly riveting reading, so I'll be mercifully short. We've subsequently been to HK quite a few times, so I assume it will be popping up again in future entries. I do remember quite a bit about Hong Kong, but I think a lot of it comes from subsequent trips, plus the fact that I lived there in 1998, so I'm going to go out on a limb and say that anything I tell you about this first trip almost certainly took place some other time. Moving on (and hopefully improving)...

Completing Our New Years Resolution Early

Well, I have no idea how long we'll be keeping this up, but last week we (Somchai and Brian) decided to start a blog for our family and friends to keep track of our travels, share some pictures and generally bore you with our comings and goings. Since I don't think this blog will zoom to the top of the popularity charts, I'm pretty sure if you're reading this you already know us and are doing so out of a sense of obligation. Therefore I'll skip the personal intros and just get into introducing the blog, after which you can decide if you want to keep reading.

As you know, we've been together for almost ten years now, and have traveled all over the place. In the early days, I (Brian) started keeping a travel diary, and Somchai was always a keen photographer. As the years passed, we got progressively more into it, and with better technology, we ended up with a pretty massive collection of photos as well as a couple books of pretty boring travel writing along the lines of what we had for dinner and similar stuff that would only appeal to ...well, basically noone. But we've shared some photos with the family and people seem to like them, and I do have all these words and I really wouldn't have a job if this became a photo only exercise, so I forced myself into the project and our travel blog is born, marrying somchai's great photos with my written drivel.

Not really sure how this will progress, or how long we'll keep it up. I'll try to begin at the beginning with our first trips. Unfortunately, I think Somchai had a disposable camera or something because the photos aren't very good, and of course aren't digital. But we'll probably scan a few of each place to liven up the deadly dull text. Also I didn't really write that much in the early years; in fact I first got the idea in a gift shop in Tokyo where I bought a few cute diaries and just started to write. So anything before the Tokyo trip will probably be made up, or at the very least heavily embellished. Also I haven't really read these things since I wrote them, and I'm sure there's a world of difference in writing to myself vs. sharing with the world (theoretically) so I assume I'll be editing heavily as I go along. Also we have two whole closets full of pictures, probably 100 photo albums. For all of our sakes, we'll be editing the selection severely so we don't bring the internet crashing down. And lastly, we're only including places that we went together. On our own we've been to lots of other destinations, especially in Europe and Asia, so if you're planning a visit somewhere, there's a good chance we've been and are happy to give you our opinions/suggestions. I'm sort of stalling for time because the photo guy aka Somchai isn't here and I wanted to try adding a photo or two in our maiden post to see if it works, but I think I'm gonna go ahead and post this and see what happens. Thanks for stopping by, and let me know what you think! (once a few real posts are up of course)