Sorry for the Group Email

After our memorable but not-so-enjoyable experience finding bus tickets in Bangkok, we decided on taking a taxi from Mo Chit, at the end of the Skytrain line, to Bangkok’s northern bus station.

Our taxi driver introduced himself as David Beckham, and instantly named me Petah Crou.

“You like Liverpool, then?”

“Yes, yes! Liverpool! England number one! Thailand football very bad! Where you going?”

“Chiang Mai.”

“Chiang Mai! Oh! You have lots tourists there. Italians, French, English. You have lots tourists, Petah Crou.”

David Beckham was right. We’d noticed the incidence of Europeans going up since Hong Kong. In Bangkok we noticed either lots of elderly folk on retirement tours, or semi-elderly men with Thai women half their age with twice their looks. Once we got to Chiang Mai it became clear why Thailand is so firmly on the backpacker trail.

Chiang Mai is full of them. Or, I suppose, us.

Every restaurant we visited in the 24 hours we were there had an English menu. Unlike in China, this specialist menu didn’t need to be found, dusted off and updated while we waited.

The bus from Bangkok was an experience. It was a VIP (or 999, for some reason) bus. It was the only coach I’d ever been on which had its own road hostess, who lurched from row to row distributing bottles of chilled water and little cardboard boxes filled with sandwiches and little cakes. It was so nice, in fact, that I started to doubt that the 850 baht we’d spent (about £15) had been worth it. How bad can first class be, I thought, if one class up is like this?

The journey was supposed to take ten hours, which would have deposited us in Chiang Mai at a not-entirely-unreasonable seven in the morning.

Inexplicably, though, it was fast. We arrived in under nine hours, which put us, weighed down, sleep-deprived and confused, in a Thai bus station well before six in the morning. It was still dark.

We sat for a long time under the canopy, dully watching people waiting for, getting on, and leaving on their buses.

Eventually, we found a man with a taxi. Less a taxi, I suppose, than a pick-up truck with a door-less back end and a roof on the back, but still, wheels. We drove into Chiang Mai and found ourselves the first hostel since Xian to actually feature the twin benefits of being both a) cockroach-free and b) otherwise desirable. The Smile guesthouse, you see, has a swimming pool. And a big fan in the room. And an en-suite toilet. We even forgave it the fact that there was a sign over the toilet that said “No toilet paper in the toilet bowl.” We forgave it doubly when we found out that you could get away with just a little bit of paper.

Thrilled with ourselves, we slept for hours.

There’s not much to do in Chiang Mai but go on treks. A trek, you see, is basically a hip, backpacker-friendly way of saying “tour”. It’s not called a tour, of course, because that conjures up images of busloads of silver-haired folks pottering around Bath, but that’s what it is. We’d heard that the trekking was better up the road in Pai, though, and found that we needed to go back to the bus station the next morning to pick up tickets. In the meantime we lounged around our hotel, alternately dipping our feet in the pool, finishing our books, and generally enjoying an afternoon that didn’t involve buying tickets, waiting for a train, bus or plane, or walking for bloody miles in the hunt for a bus station. We visited the night market, which between authentic tribal headgear and little Buddhas, has a nice line in clothes and, to our delight, lots of DVD stands.

We had massages. We asked for half an hours’ worth of head and shoulder work, but the next thing I knew I was on my front while a small but astonishingly strong Thai lady buried her elbows in my calf. It was extraordinarily painful, but by the time we were finished, neither of us could remember what it was like to lift a backpack. We tottered home on pairs of jelly legs.

Dave is going to spend long enough in a place to write something coherent about it, promise. Roll on Pai. More in the Flickr set.