Let The Adventure Begin

Hello all,

I’m glad you have tuned in for the first instalment of my blog. For followers of my brothers’ blog, you know what this is all about, but please don’t compare mine to his because my English is far worse than his and I’m not sure if mine will be as exciting! To all you newcomers, welcome to the world of blogging and in particular welcome to my blog. The purpose of my blog is just to give you all a small insight into what I’m doing on the other side of the world...

I’m currently sitting in my Bangkok hotel room wasting my only day in Bangkok but I’ll get to that later. My adventure started on June 29th with a journey to Heathrow airport with mum and dad and the usual check-in chaos of Terminal 3. Now, this may not sound exciting at all and I’m not going to lie, it wasn’t until I looked to my left to see Adam Gilchrist (former Australian Wicket-keeper) standing in the queue next to us (because he was obviously in the business class queue). I asked him why he wasn’t staying in England to watch the Aussies lose the Ashes and he simply replied; “No chance you guys are winning it mate”. After meeting one of the greatest wicket-keepers ever, I said my good-byes to mum and dad and boarded the plane. Once again, I don’t find talking about aeroplane journeys very exciting but everyone seems to ask; “how was the flight?” and/or “did you watch any films?” so to save me having to answer these questions several times, yes I did watch a film called 12 Rounds starring WWE’s John Cena – the film is a load of unrealistic rubbish, don’t bother with it! The rest of the flight was great because I slept for pretty much all of it, only to be woken up by the large German man next to me elbowing me in the head so that the air-stewardess could give me a goody-bag. I was initially annoyed until I saw the contents of this ‘snack-pack’ and it had a Dairy-milk, a bag of peanuts and some soft-mints!

My flight arrived in Bangkok and I was meant to have a four hour wait until my connecting flight to Chiang Mai (North Thailand) but that wait was doubled to 8hours due to delays and as you can imagine I was sick of the sight of BK airport by the end of it! I sat on the plane expecting to go to sleep for the hour journey but was tapped on the shoulder by someone who I hadn’t seen in 3years! It was a fellow Habs Boy who I would later bump into on my visit to Thailand. I reached Chiang Mai exhausted from my marathon journey to be greeted by an Asian guy a bit smaller than me, unshaven, wearing green linen trousers and a brown t-shirt with a Buddha around his neck and dread-locked hair. Yes this Asian guy is my brother who has become a bit of a hippy in his 5months of travelling; God only knows what is going to happen to me!

The next day, 1st July (yes I had spent almost two days travelling) Nihal informed me that I had to be up and ready by 8am to go on a Thai cooking course. Now I had mixed emotions about this because in a year at uni I think I must have woken up that early about 5 times, and so waking up that early after two days of travelling I thought would be impossible! However I was also excited to learn how to cook Thai due to my new found love for cooking. I managed to wake up and the cooking course was awesome! We were picked up and then taken to a local market and told about all the ingredients we would be using and we got to see some of the most disgusting meat I’ve ever seen! From the market we went onto the organic farm where we would be taught how to cook Thai food. We initially cooked three dishes each and then ate them for lunch before making two more dishes which would make our dinner! The first three dishes that I chose to made were; a Thai green curry, a Thai vegetable soup and the best dish although it doesn’t sound very interesting was a cashew-nut and vegetable dish that you have with rice. Nihal made a Thai red curry and we were disappointed to find out that the only difference to a red and green curry is the chillies that go into them! After lunch I learnt how to make Pad Thai which has become one of my favourite dishes in my week in Thailand and a dessert of banana in coconut milk which really does “exactly what it says on the tin”!

The Dishes I made.

After the cooking course, we went for an hour long Thai massage which cost just £2 and was pretty damn good! They seem to relieve tension in your body that you never knew you had! We had our dinner after the massage and then went to watch a night of Thai boxing. This was really quite amazing, the atmosphere wasn’t great probably because it was mainly tourists there but the skills these fighters have is extremely impressive! Before the fight begins the fighters have to perform some sort of ritual for about 3minutes which is almost like a dance routine. On the line-up was 7 fights with some of the fighters only 10years old! The fights begin and there is music playing in the background which sounds like people have just recorded themselves playing instruments wrong! The music is actually quite hypnotizing despite how weird it is and when you watch the fight, you notice that the fighters actually fight to the music (the timings of their kicks and punches and the way they move around the ring). Even after watching the fight its quite hard to tell who won until they announce it and we were pretty confused by the scoring system with the fighters who we thought should have won ending up losing!

After a busy day the day before I was hoping for a bit more of a relaxing day the following day with a later start, but this wasn’t the case! We woke up early to go on a one day treck outside Chiang Mai. Our day started with a visit to an orchid farm which after two days of travelling followed by a busy day and little sleep wasn’t the best way to start off the day for me but looking back at the pictures I took, some of the orchids are really quite beautiful! From here on, the day only got better! We were taken by a mini bus up the hills and to get back down we white water rafted down the stream which was awesome! It’s extremely hard work and if your thinking u just sit on a raft and let the rapids take you down the stream, good luck to you if you ever decide to do it! The white water rafting was followed by something a lot less work but equally exciting. We went on an elephant ride which is something I had never done before. I realised how amazing elephants are and not just because their poos are the size of footballs! After the excitement of the elephant rides, we were taken to a beautiful waterfall where we just chilled out for an hour. It had been raining pretty much all day but the hour we were there, the sun was shining! However, this sunshine tricked our guide into deciding to ‘treck’ back to the base camp! We had been walking for about 5minutes when the heavens opened and we were absolutely drenched! The final adventure of the day was a chilled out bamboo rafting experience. If the weather had been good, this would have been great. You literally just sit on a bamboo raft down the stream while the locals raft you down the stream.

Another hectic day was followed by you guessed it, another early start the next morning (3rd July)! Again we were up at what I call silly o’ clock to catch a bus to a small town further north of Chiang Mai called Pai. We got to Pai and just walked around the town for a few hours before heading to what Nihal soon became obsessed with, “The Pub”. This place was some British guy’s house who went to Pai on a 1 week holiday 3 years ago and ended up staying there all this time! The town is so chilled out and small enough so that you would know the majority of the locals if you lived there long enough and you can’t really blame this guy for staying there (although I think I would get bored of doing nothing all day everyday). We watched the Wimbledon men’s semi-finals before heading out to some bars and ending up at another one of Nihal's favourites, an outdoor bar called Ting Tong. It was here that I bumped into the Habs mate who I had met a few days earlier on the aeroplane! The night was extremely random and full of alcohol largely due to the workers at the bar taking an immediate loving to the Nihal, Khilna and I!
The following day we got to have a small but much needed lie in before going tubing on the river in Pai (the suspected reason that I’m wasting today in my Bangkok hotel room). Tubing is the most relaxing activity you could imagine. You literally sit on a large rubber ring and let the gentle current of the river take you downstream. However, I think we may have gone a month too early with parts of the river very shallow so you would occasionally get stuck on rocks. Although relaxed by the end of it, I had one of the worst head-aches ever due to sun stroke and a sun-burnt neck. In the evening we once again went barring and inevitably ended up at Ting Tong again! The owner of Ting Tong seemed to love Nihal because of the many free shots of whisky he gave Nihal!

On Sunday (5th June) we headed to some hot springs just outside Pai. By hot springs, they mean RIDICULOUSLY HOT. In some of the springs temperatures were above 80degrees C, obviously you couldn’t go into these ones but the ones that you could go into were still about 40degrees which becomes unbearable after a few minutes in the springs! From the springs we headed home for showers and then got trapped in our guest house because of monsoon like rain! Eventually the rain slowed down (a little) and we went to the Pub to go and watch the epic Wimbledon final! Commiserations to Andy Roddick but Roger Federer fully deserves the title of the greatest tennis player ever!

On he 6th June we headed back to Chiang Mai on the most uncomfortable bus journey ever! We were given seats where there was not room to move at all and we had to deal with this for about 3hours! We arrived back in Chiang Mai and didn’t really do much all day. I got a much needed early night because I was pretty ill and had to get up at 5:45am to get my flight to BK!
I woke up early today (7th June) exhausted and feeling awful. I got a horrible skin infection on my arm, probably from the tubing in the river which had also given me a really bad temperature. I arrived in Bangkok found the hotel nearest to the airport and I’ve been in bed more or less ever since writing this blog and watching CNN news for so long that I can tell you the order of the days headline news without having to watch it!

I’m flying to Perth tomorrow to my home for the next four months before I travel around Australia and New Zealand for two months.

Apologies if I rambled on a bit but it’s the only way I could kill time in this boring hotel room!

Until next time,
Much love,
Mihir