we've succesfully entered myanmar and everything here is great except the internet, so this is a very short message. To let you know what we did: we've visited yangon for almost 1 day, but it's a dirty city except for the shwedagon pagoda, the most impressing pagoda I've ever seen...
now we have spend 2 days at the Inle lake and it's oh so beautiful here! Tomorrow we will leave for Mandalay. more details will follow once the internet gets better...
today (17th of july) we are going to try to get to Myanmar again!
I am now at the airport in Bangkok where I am enjoying the free goodies in the Bangkok airways lounge!
so yesterday we went to doi suthep, a temple on the top of a mountain where acoording to legend the elephant of the king died. It's quite a beautiful temple and there is an extraordinnary view over the city of chiang mai! Climbing the stairs was not really a challenge, acoording to the book you need to be in good shape, but I don't think so. They even built an elevator for less active people :o.
After wandering around at the top of the temple we went back to chiang mai and had a relaxing meal and fruit shake before we took the night bus to Bangkok. The night bus was not that nice and we didn't get a lot of sleep, but we'll manage and we are excited about going to the next country!
the past three days we've spent around chiang mai, the 13th and the 14th in a nature reserve (doi ithanon) in Ban Phra Mon, a small Karen hilltribe. I wrote in my previous post that I had very high expectations, I can tell you now that it was even better than that!
Our guide Surasit (or just Sit) was a great guy, at about 35 years old but he acted as if he just turned 20 so it was great to have someone from my age around. We first went to the top of Thailand: approximately 2565 meter above sea level. He told us that we would have a great view up there, but the weather gods didn't want us to see anything... It was very cloudy, but still the feeling of being on the highest place of a country is pretty nice. So now I can add Thailand to the list (after Belgium, Netherlands, Norway, Great Brittan, ...)
Up on that mountain there is a nice path made for the queen to walk around in the jungle and I have to say it was really nice: a good road and a perfect smell of fresh air while Sit was teaching us the way of the Karen. However again the weather Gods didn't like us and it started to rain pretty heavily so back to the truck. After visiting 2 pagoda's with beautiful gardens, we could enjoy a very nice meal and a walk through a royal project garden. There were all kinds of flowers, verns, flesh-eating plants, fish,... All in perfect condition and I have to say that the greenhouses looked nicer than the 'koninklijke serres in Meise'.
Enough of the touristy visits and towards the pure nature! we followed a small trail amids the jungle and learned about herbs and which plants we could eat as many as we want and which plants that we can only eat once... Sit loosened up a little and he started making a lot of jokes, every time he saw a mango tree, he yelled at me: 'banana tree', he pointed to some strange formations in the rock and told it was because of the tsunami and that he had to glue the rock together again... There are way more jokes, but that could become a little bit boring :D
we started hearing some water and a bit later we came passed a very wide waterfall, it was great as you can see in the pictures. (check introduction post) we went down next to the river and saw some more waterfalls (it almost sounds like it's not special anymore, but I can tell you every waterfall is different and you never stop liking it!) about an hour later we arrived at some rice farms from a hilltribe. If you ever get to see rice fields in the mountains, really do, the view is amazing! The young rice is a little bit flashy green, the mountains make it seem like you are totally away from civilisation but then the houses and the people give some other color to the landscape and then to make it perfect there is a blue sky!
we drunk some hilltribe coffee, damn that was strong and then we took off to Sit's hometown where we would have dinner (prepared on a wooden fire in the middle of the house) and sleep in the house of Sit's sister.
Next day we went mountainbiking, with very steep parts where I even had to get off from my bike. Going up I only had to get off ones since there was a lot of mud but in the way down I walked quite a bit. My rear brake was not working and I am quite afraid when I go downhill without a rear brake...
Today we had a relaxing day here in Chiang Mai and visit some temples, so beautiful but nothing as exciting as the previous days
tomorrow we go back to Bangkok so that we can finally get into myanmar...
we didn't make it to myanmar after all, the border is closed so we booked a plane from Bangkok to Yangon on the 17th. Meanwhile we went to Chiang Mai to do some adventure trekking and visit a non-touristy hilltribe. I am really excited about tomorrow!!!
right now we are staying in a 'hippy' guesthouse, it's great, but I hope we can get some sleep in the middle of the Jamaican music and everything that belongs with it...
good night!
P.S.: since we are sleeping in a homestay in a hilltribe we won't have electricity nor internet tomorrow.
P.P.S: pictures have been added: see 'introduction' post
today a very exciting day, we took some kind of truck taxi: a pickup truck which back has been converted to seats. After getting shaked for a bit more than an hour we arrived in a small town to check out a waterfall. We were totally not impressed by the waterfall itself but the surroundings were soo beautiful! There was a wooden 'skypath' which had rotten so that it was quite frightening to walk there and you had to be careful not to step in a hole. After a while the path became a normal dustpath through the jungle and a little while later the path disappeared. We had a choice to go back or to keep going into the jungle, of course we picked the latter and off we went. It was beautiful! After 20 minutes of pure nature we got stuck and we had to climb up the hill and then we had to go back because it was getting way to difficult to walk. Our first jungle trekking in Thailand, ok I agree a little bit short but it was a good one. After having lunch there we took a dustroad through the fields and got some more magnificent views over the mountains, I really took a lot of pictures there but I am having some difficulties posting them so you'll have to wait... A thai that was working in the fields came to us and said Namtok while pointing somewhere, he understood that we didn't understand him so he let us through his field up the mountain and then pointed to a very small trail going steep downhill. We took the path and we saw a very nice waterfall, at least 50 meter high and it was bathing in the sun so it looked even better!
as you can read, an incredible day with a lot of unexpected events so up to Myanmar for more of this!
what should have been a quite travelday with a small trekking into some great nature in the afternoon, turned out completely different. It started in the morning, we had to get up at 7 to catch the first bus, however the monks decided different: at 5 am they started their music which woke me up and I couldn't get to sleep again. Luckily we had a nice guesthouse with a very pretty garden, so I could walk around a bit and catch up with some e-mails. Then after an almost perfect breakfast of pineaple pancake we left for the bus. To our surprise we had a very good busdriver, he drove fast without always accelerating and breaking. In less than an hour we reached Tak for our transfer to the next bus. The next driver was a bit less good, but the road was going through the mountains, a hell of a view. We had booked an hotel that should have been in the middle of these mountains, but turned out to be in the outer parts of a big city :( . The hotel itself is nice though, it's a 4 star ranking :D, they have a swimming pool which is great! Tomorrow we are going to a different one located in the center where they don't speak a word of english.
it is possible that I won't have time to update this blog in the comming days since we are going to Myanmar and people say it's completely different there and internet is not that wide spread.
Vannacht toch een beetje gejet-lagged zodat
we van 1 tot 2.30 maar wat lectuur hebben gesoupeerd, toch waren we deze morgen
fit genoeg om aan een nieuwe dag te beginnen. Bij gebrek aan eetruimte was het
ontbijt aan bed. We bezichtigden een prachtige gouden pagode op het topje van
een kunstmatige berg net buiten het oude stadscentrum: golden mountain. Daar
kregen we telefoon van Patchara dat ze toch niet mee mogen naar Sukhothai. Dus
zijn we onze treintickets gaan halen om morgenavond te vertrekken. Hierdoor
hebben we dus morgen nog een ganse dag tegoed in Bangkok! Toon had een afspraak
om te gaan zwemmen met Patchara in het Athenée Plaza hotel en onderweg naar
daar hebben we lekker gegeten in een visrestaurantje. We moesten nog rap zijn
en kwamen net te laat aan met de taxi. Een heel chique hotel en we waren al
direct beschaamd in onze outfit: korte broek en T-shirt waren hier niet gepast,
ik denk dat als we geen blanken waren, we ter plekke buitengestuurd werden.
Terwijl ik ging zwemmen zijn moeke en voke een wandeling gaan maken in het
grote park met visjes, vliegende visjes, grote vissen, varanen, eekhoorntje met
wit buikje en schildpadden. Om 4 uur wachtten zij mij terug op in het hotel
terwijl ze een heerlijke ananaspunch aan het verorberen waren. Even omkleden en
we vertrokken met de taxi naar huize Piampongsant. We kregen mijn kamer te zien
voor begin augustus, een heel appartement met prachtig uitzicht op een groot
meer! Ik mag wel niet in het meer zwemmen want er zit nogal wat gedierte in dat
niet zo lief is als ik. We kregen er ook onze eerste frisse kokosmelk van het
jaar aangeboden en hij was lekker! We zijn dan gaan eten in een visrestaurant
waar we zeer lekkere dingen hebben gegeten, maar vergeten zijn fotos te
nemen...
We zijn net aangekomen in ons hotel in Bangkok:
Boonsiri Palace, het bed heeft alleszins de grootte van een paleis. De sterren
moeten we echter nog gaan zoeken.We
hebben een turbulente vlucht achter de rug, je kan het vergelijken met een rit
over een hobbelig zandpad, maar dan voor 11 uur lang... Dan namen we de nieuwe skytrain
richting centrum bangkok, tot onze verbazing was deze gratis: een promotiestunt
voor 2 maanden. Door een lieve Thaise werden we verder begeleid en aan een taxi
geholpen richting traffic jam. Na 20 minuten stilstaan, besloten we de laatste
kilometer te voet af te leggen.
hier zal je binnenkort mijn belevenissen kunnen lezen. Ieder avontuur dat ik beleef tijdens een reis doorheen enkele vreemde landen.
Je leest dit natuurlijk enkel als je zin hebt en je mag altijd een reactie achterlaten.
deze kaart zal gebruikt worden voor een visuele weergave van de reis, je moet wel even uitzoomen voor je alles kan zien. Hoe dit te verhelpen wordt aan gewerkt, als je suggesties hebt zijn deze altijd welkom: kaart
dit webalbum zal gebruikt worden voor een andere manier van visualisatie van de reis, dit webalbum is vol. Over een paar weken volgt een nieuw album, ondertussen moet je het doen met de foto's die hier te vinden zijn: foto's
veel plezier
Toon
Hi all,
soon you'll find here the stories of my trip troughout some foreign countries. You don't have to read this and you are always allowed to leave a comment.
this map will be used for a visual representation of the trip, right now I have some problems with initializing this map so you will have to zoom out yourself. If anyone knows how to solve this problem please let me know: map
pictures will be available here, this album is full, currently I am not uploading any picturs but a new album will come soon: pictures
omachupe,
hi all,
hi all,
hi all,
nog steeds technische problemen dus het verslag in bijlage
wegens technische problemen, de tekst in bijlage
