The main reason you're supposed to go to Kao Yai is to see wildlife, but that's not very rewarding. You have to get up very early in the morning, and the pickings are still pretty slim. You'll see monkeys everywhere, but then again, you see them all over Thailand anyway, and you'll see lots of variations on deer. (You can see one at the campsite picture if you look carefully. Also, I may be losing my mind, but I'm pretty sure that at that campsite, we met a film crew who was working with Tom Cruise on a movie, and they said Tom had just left before we arrived. That really doesn't make any sense, but a Tom Cruise sighting at Kao Yai would have more than made up for our lack of animal sightings.) The goal is to see elephants and tigers but they're quite rare in this park, especially the tigers, which are an endangered species.

We stayed at the Juldis hotel, which is nondescript but inoffensive. There's a burgeoning leisure industry springing up around the park, including Thailand's first winery, Chateau de Loei, and a relatively new hotel with accomodation in very nice tents, as well as a popular golf course. But none of this was here when we went in '99, so entertainment is pretty much the pool at the hotel (pictured above). Of course there's always the square dancing...

7. Ayudhaya, May '98

Back in Thailand, as you can tell from the washed out colour of the pics due to the hellacious sun. April-May is the hottest time for Thailand, and Ayudhaya is one of the hottest trips you can take, but a definite must-see. It's the second capital of the old Siamese kingdom (as opposed to the Lanna kingdom I'm sure you remember from the Chiang Mai posts). Ayudhaya was the capital for several hundred years before being completely destroyed by the Burmese in the 18th century, whereupon the capital was moved to Bangkok. There are two basic ways to go, first on your own, as it's less than two hours drive from Bangkok. This gives you much more time to see the ruins of Ayudhaya, which are really atmospheric and photogenic. But the drive up is a bore, as central Thailand is pancake flat and the highway you'd drive on is lined with factories and housing developments pretty much the whole way. If you do drive, though, make sure you stop for lunch at one of the seafood restaurants on the outskirts of town. It's just a makeshift shack on stilts in a lake, but locals from Bangkok are always driving up here for the food. A definitely more scenic way to go is by boat, up the Chao Phrya River. The most famous cruise is run by the Oriental Hotel and leaves from the hotel very early in the morning. Taking the boat past the famous temples and palaces of Bangkok is great, and then as the city disappears, its replaced by scenes like in this picture, villages built on the river banks, usually by Muslim communities. (you can generally tell a Muslim town in Thailand from the bright colors they use to paint their houses). The trip is long, I think about 4 hours, but very peaceful and pretty, and there's a good Thai buffet thrown in for lunch as well.

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.

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.