Ok ok. Everyone relax. We are ok. We are still alive. Yesterday morning we checked out of our hostel and into a new one without finding out the WiFi codes. We had the shakes for a little bit today but the internet itch has now been well and truly scratched. Ahhh.

Bit of a long one today as it covers two days.

So as I just said we are no longer in our usual hostel. We have moved to within the city walls to a place with a much softer bed and our own bathroom. Fancy.

Yesterday we finally visited Doi Suthep on the third day of trying. We walked across the entire city to the north gate where these red pick up truck type taxi things wait to take groups up the mountain to the temple. We went up with a couple of Chinese and 3 boys from Italy (they were actually from Finland but I was trying to be clever in front of Soph earlier by saying “they were 100% Italian. I can recognise that accent anywhere”, and I don’t want her to know I was wrong. Again).

Once there we were given 90 minutes to walk up a ton of elaborate steps to the temple before the driver would leave. We had to make sure our shoulders were covered otherwise they wouldn’t let us in, so sadly we had to say goodbye to the vest for the afternoon.

Doi Suthep is the most famous of all the temples and is plastered all over tourist boards and leaflets around the city. And it is pretty cool to be fair. Like most temples in Thailand there is a hell of a lot of gold and quite the array of monks walking about, but the main reason people visit is for the view.

The temple hosts a view of the entire city of Chiang Mai. Something worth the 60 baht (£1.20) entrance fee alone. Not that we paid. We just snuck in with a tour group. Proper traveller like.

After realising we had probably enough photos of gold temples on the camera, we decided to head back to the taxi. Luckily for us the driver wasn’t quite ready for us yet so we grabbed a quick snack from one of the market stalls near by. Now when I say quick, I mean really quick. And when I say snack I mean….uhm….well I don’t know what I mean really. It was a creepy crawly of some description. Not nice. Not nice at all.

Before I move on I need to mention one other thing that happened on the steps down from the temple. I was standing there, minding my own business, waiting for Soph to finish taking photo of something. Probably a puppy. When 3 Asian girls stopped directly in front of me, giggled, took a photo of me on their phone and ran off. But not before looking at Soph and saying “he gorgeous”…….

Now one of two things has happened here. Either the word gorgeous means something totally different out here. Or, and more likely, the women out here know true beauty when they see it. I’ll probably be on some Thai advertising boarding by tomorrow. Probably.

With Doi Suthep ticked off the list it was time to start looking for our next adventure within Chiang Mai. There are so many excursions and trips to go on here. Every other shop is selling something, usually the same thing. But we plucked for one that looked half respectable and chose our next trip for the very next day.

So this morning we woke up early after our first really solid sleep this week to be ready for an 8:30am pick up from directly outside our hostel. We jumped in the back of another pick up truck and headed on a tour around the city, picking up a couple from Finland, an older lady from Canada and two girls from the States. Today we were going to ride elephants.

After a 2 hour journey into the jungle talking about how London has ‘so’ much history and a quick lesson on how a quid the pound are the same thing, we arrived at the elephant camp. Now it wasn’t a camp like you may expect. This was literally in the jungle. There were no staged shows where an abused elephant paints a picture for you or shoots a ball through a basketball hoop while being whipped to smithereens. Just native people with pet elephants.

We were taught how they eat a ridiculous amount of bananas and how they love a juicy bamboo leaf before heading over to try and ride the beasts for ourselves. It wasn’t too bad. We had 7 commandments which we had down to tee, and the 6 year old elephant was loving every second of it.

After lunch however, we would ride a much larger elephant who, for some reason, wasn’t as keen to have two people sitting on his head. The elephant, let’s call it Nelly, was more interested in all the leaves and sticks around than taking us in the direction we were instructing it too. I mean it lives in the jungle for Christ sake. It was acting like it had never seen a leaf before.

If we’re honest it was pretty scary stuff but awesome at the same time. We jumped into a lake with a waterfall and washed the elephants while they sprayed us with their trunks before heading back up to the car and going home.

It was a pretty good day although not particularly cheap. Cheaper than buying your own elephant though I guess. In fact if anybody hears of anything, we’re in the market.

Tomorrow we hope to visit Chiang Mai zoo. We think we will be up here until Friday before heading back to Bangkok and the rest of our stuff. I mean there are only a limited number of ways you can wear the same underwear before it gets a little too much.

Thanks for following x