Adventures in Northern Thailand

as promised, thai boxing! basically, this is kicking boxing with really small dudes (like 70~80 pounds) while thai music that adjusted to the intensity of the bout was playing in the background. here they are doing a pre-match warmup. the colors were always red and blue. i'm sorry to say that the 3 bouts i watched all had red victors. i'm sure sarah palin wasn't in the audience, so this won't give the GOP another bump in the polls caused for an asinine reason.

i debated whether or not to include this, but it was kind of a big part of my trip. it's a dead person on the street who just got hit by a tuk tuk (taxi). what was so weird to me is that people just went on their way and no one was gathering around. there seemed to be no real concern that someone just died. the person who hit him took off. my tuk tuk driver stopped briefly and then took off. he just said, "woah!" and laughed a little. lucky for you, i didn't get a close up picture. but the whole thing was a little weird, to say the least.


the next day, i ventured to the town of pai with some bri'ish chicks. while at a bar, some drunk dude was spinning fire. surprisingly, no one got hurt.

can't pass up a chance to get a "dam thai massage" damn it.

a little waterfall in pai.

so the sign reads, "Please Remember - Your drive on the left"... but then they have something else written in thai below it... i'm guessing it's "beware of bad american drivers" or something like that... not to mention, they put this sign 4km outside of town. i wouldn't have made it this far driving on the right side.

pai canyon...

this girl was giving away necklaces and asking for money. (and i don't want to hear about how she's a prostitute in the comment section! she's only 8!!!) i gave her 100 baht ($3) and she pretty much freaked out out of joy. the look on her face was priceless. she ran down the street so happy. $3 well spent. i wish it was this easy to make women happy! i think all you chickies back home can learn something from this girl!!! (and NO, the lesson isn't that i'm cheap! it's like i can hear chickie voices in my head making snide comments! stop it!!!! i'm on vacation!!!)

this picture was supposed to be a sly way to take a picture of the drunk guy behind us (who rode a scooter home). instead, we got a picture of an elephant. (look between our heads.)

here's a better picture of the aforementioned elephant.

took a thai cooking class. it was super fun, but it seems like we could have pretty much followed a cookbook.

we took a quick break from cooking to tour a temple. i don't know if buddhists believe in hell, but these bri'ish chicks are going there for this amusing display of blasphemy!

while in the class, the instructor caught a snake who was rather aggressive. here's him trying to bite me. (don't worry rhonda, leon isn't like this. unless he's hungry, i suppose.)

the next day, i did a 'caving' tour which took us around 30 meters underground. it was pitch black and a few sections had bats. here's a picture of one of them.


stalactites forming before your very eyes!


climbing up....


this got really tiring after a few minutes.



today, i'm flying to laos where i'll be for a few days before i head into vietnam.... miss you all!