Thailand - Bangkok and Chiang Mai

We stayed in a pleasant enough little guesthouse near the Siam skytrain station (great for transport and absolutely perfectly placed for shopping!). The first day we were there it happened that an old friend from Bombay, Divya, was in Bangkok and we met her for lunch after a quick browse through the Siam Paragon shopping centre (D&G, Gucci, Chanel, Porsche showroom on the 3rd floor, etc!!). We had a really nice catch-up and Divya invited us out for drinks with some of her friends who were in town for work. We had a fantastic evening, starting with an amazing dinner in the best Italian restaurant in town, followed by a trip to one of Bangkok's most difficult to get into nightclub! The next day we spent hours trawling the markets, including the fabulous MBK shopping centre in Siam, where there is also a great sushi place that does all you can eat for £4.50! John left me there for an hour while he went shopping. There are also endless barbecue stalls all over town, and one afternoon I probably ate what amounted to an entire pigchicken. I just can't help it – when you're walking past a barbecue every few yards, who could!? We also spent one long day sightseeing, walking all over the city, which was really good fun. We went to Khao San road, which is supposed to be the 'fun backpackery' area, but which turned out to be TACKY and revolting, expensive and full of rip-off merchants!

We took a river taxi to the temple area and walked around the beautiful complexes until the good old rain started, hid for a bit, then tried to get into the palace – unfortunately we were turned away for wearing three-quarter length trousers. You can borrow trousers and shirts from the office in front of the palace but we couldn't be bothered so we've left that for another day. We also took a jaunt down the famous Soi Cowboy, home of the original ping-pong show (offers for which I was offered constantly all over the city, at all times of day – do I look like that kind of gir?!?). It was gaudy and neon, packed with sweaty, alternately defensive and sneering white men in gangs or arm-in-arm with tiny Thai girls. Sex-tourist watching for a beer or two is one of Bangkok's great free entertainment shows, but then we found a guy leading a small elephant down the road, which topped the tourists – you could buy bags of bamboo to feed it and it would trumpet at you. It seemed in really good health and the trainer guys were nice to it, so aside from the incongruity of an elephant in downtown Bangkok, it was happy enough.

Trying to work out a schedule for northern Thailand, Cambodia and Laos that didn't involve too many internal flights, doubling back on ourselves or 12-hour bus journeys was proving impossible and driving us mad, so in a fit of stroppiness we booked a flight to Chiangmai in the north and set ourselves the task of working it out from there. It's the second biggest city in Thailand, but it doesn't feel that big, especially if you stay in the old town inside the moat, which is a maze of windy little sois that don't all appear on maps or have names. There are a million guesthouses to choose from, and the first night we picked a Lonely Planet one (for that LAST time!!). As usual prices had gone up and standards had gone down. We booked me a cookery course for the next day and headed out to a bar to play pool with a mix of locals and Westerners, which was great fun. The next morning at an unfun 9am I was struggling down the (unsigned) streets (without my glasses) and it took me about 40 minutes to make it 500m to my cookery course. It wasn't quite as good as Pum's – no minions to do my chopping for me, and I seemed to have stumbled on the new activity du jour for Olivers and Annabels, so the entire day was conducted to the braying of 20 gap-year kids. On the plus side, our teacher was a very sweet giggler whose English was full of jokes, and I learned a good prawn curry and a banana thing though, so my repertoire of Asian food expanded nicely. Plus they gave you a cute little recipe book with handy notes in it, for next time.

After two nights in the crappest guesthouse ever, we moved to a guesthouse run by a Thai-Aussie couple (sometimes it really just is about two people liking each other!) which was worlds away. We left the cockroach under the ashtray at the previous place and installed ourselves in cheaper, cleaner, brighter, friendlier surroundings! The guy who owned it with his wife was a keen biker, and had motorcyles to rent as well as running tours of the country in groups on motorbikes. Chiangmai was tour-group city, with every single restaurant, bar or massage parlour doubling as a travel agent, and people being shovelled through these tours on a conveyor belt. We'd initially intended to do a trek/elephant tour of the area from Chiangmai but it was all so fake and regimented we decided to give it a miss and do it independently. We rented scooters for two days and on the first day headed up into the hills to nearby Doi Suthep, an area with a large and beautiful wat you can climb 300 stairs to go and have a look at. It was riotously gold and ornate, like all Thai temples, and the view from the hill over the Chiangmai plain was great. The Rose Palace of the queen of Thailand is also on the same hill, but aside from the mad-factor of kilometres of rose gardens in Thailand in 40 degree heat it was pretty sterile and underwhelming.

On the second day we took a map and a route from the guesthouse and set off on a little 120k loop through the nearby mountains. We passed all the 'authentic hilltribe villages' on the way, where the people have seen more tourists in one day than the British Museum does, and the elephant camps where they pop you on an elephant, it walks for 30 yards then you get off and pay a lot of money. We started to see real communities on the way to our half-way point, the town of Samoeng, rather than staged 'cultural shows,' and the landscape was lovely. Unfortunately, it is the rainy season, and halfway down a mountain the heavens opened and within seconds we couldn't see anymore to drive, and the water was rushing down the hill like a river. We huddled under a tree together howling 'the camera!' 'the wallets!' at each other periodically and trying to keep those things in plastic until the rain stopped. About half a drenching hour later it lightened up enough for us to scoot to a little concrete shelter just round the corner (isn't that always the way?) and check out our papers an electronics. Luckily everything survived, and we headed to Samoeng in the sunshine (we both got sunburned) for lunch. It was a funny kind of community, alternately wooden handcarts and 4x4s on the road, with a big covered food market selling traditional barbecued eggs and sticky rice next to air-conditioned shops selling coke in fridges. Using the always accurate pointing and miming method we got hold of several skewers of meat (chicken, we thought?), some rice, a kebab of eggs in their shells that had been roasted, and some American apples. The meat turned out not to be chicken. And not to be pork. Final bets were laid on some kind of reptile. The flesh was all...globular.

Scooted home without event, and then had to brave the one-way traffic system of central Chiangmai, which had the day before turned me into a shaky, sweaty knot of cursing. Luckily it gets easier once you learn the pecking order of traffic (and also handy tips such as that in Thailand when they flash their headlights at you it means 'get out of my way, coming through at speed!' not 'no no, I insist, after you old chap') and it can even be quite good fun zipping through traffic like that!

There are only three ways from Chiangmai to Luang Prabang in Laos, or so we thought...one is a combination of bus and slow boat up the Mekong which takes 3 days and according to all travellers who have done it, is utter hell; two is a bus then speedboat up he Mekong which according to everyone is about as close as a boat can get to suicide; three is a £200 flight door to door. None of these appealed, so we set about scouring travel agents and the net for alternatives. We finally worked out that a bus to Huay Xai, the border of Laos, a little ferry and then a flight from Huay Xai to LP was by far the quickest, and almost the cheapest way of doing it.