Lights on

Mae Hong Son, "the city of three mists" is a small town next to the border with Myanmar and although it is a capital of this mountainous region, it is very slow and quiet. You can easily walk everywhere and you will always end up in the natural center of the town, the Jong Kham lake with the wats Jong Klam and Jong Kham rising above it.

Technical upgrade

A small upgrade to help some of our few readers: on top of the right column you will now find a "Translate" menu which uses Google Translate to convert the blog to the language of your choice. The translation is far from perfect, but can still be useful if you are uncertain about some phrases.

Sometimes it's just not meant to be

It took almost seven hours instead of the official five, but we made it to Soppong. Very peculiar ride in a super old bus with seats so small that it is impossible for a regular-size European to fit, people sitting and standing everywhere, bags of rice on the floor reducing even more the space available for the legs... But it was cheap and slow which is an advantage in the winding roads here, there was just no way we could possibly get a sick stomach going 10km/h and with the first gear all the time. 

Elephant heaven

We've read about Elephant Nature Park long before starting the trip and were very anxious to go. We spent three days in Chiang Mai waiting before two places on a tour opened up (we originally had a reservation but it turns out that 'somebody' made the booking for the 22nd of December instead of November, oops... That somebody surprisingly not being me!).

Sawasdee สวัสดี

Wonder what a VIP class bus is? We were curious about it ourselves and it turned out to be very similar to buses we took in Argentina several years ago - 24 huge seats that remind of the 1st class on an airplane and can be almost completely reclined, a steward that gives out snacks and breakfast in the morning, a stop in the middle of the night for dinner (people aactualy got out of the bus and went to eat at 1.30am!), movie in Thai with no subtitles and with full volume ...