Moving to Chiang Mai

Doing the tourist thing at Chiang Mai's biggest temple,
 Wat Chedi Luang.  It means, 'Big Chedi Temple'

OK, time for a different sort of adventure, I am not sure this counts as travelling, although I am certainly going to be a long way from England, just not really moving much - I guess, I want to keep the blog updated, and I'm not going to start a new 'not travels with Timmy'!  Anyway, the plan is to spend six months in the same place, honestly I am still a bit tired of the whole moving about thing, so, I wanted somewhere warm, and somewhere I knew I would like, so out of the various places I have been over the last few years I picked Chiang Mai, Thailand.  Obviously a big advantage here is that it is a pretty cheap place to live, I should be able to rent a flat to live in, and also I can sign up for a language class - I really enjoyed doing that in Tenerife, but could only afford a few weeks of lessons there, whereas in Thailand I can study for the whole six months.

The Three Kings Monument at the heart of the city.
The building behind is the City Arts and Cultural Centre.

In fact, if I'm going to be in Thailand for that long a time, studying the language is a good idea as it makes it easier to get a visa.  With a bit of googling I find a school, who promise to deal with the immigration department for me, they email me a somewhat dubious looking form that seems to have originally been entirely in Thai, but has then had English translations jammed in resulting in a mess of a format.  Still I fill it in, send them various scanned images, and also a bank transfer of around £500, which apparently will cover the whole six months of lessons.  I can't help but wonder if this is some kind of scam, will I see anything for my money?  Still, a large wad of documents, covered in various stamps, arrives by Fedex a couple of weeks later, and on taking this to the Thai embassy in London they happily give me a visa - much easier than the process I went through with the Americans I must say.

By the massive communal pool at my new home.

Largely for price reasons, I fly out to Thailand on New Year's Eve, it turns out to be quite a fun way to spend the day, not least because for much of the way I'm on the top deck of a rather awesome Airbus A380 - I think my seat is economy class, but it seems more luxurious that what you would get in business class on some smaller planes.  Nice not to have any hassle regarding a return flight too - I was hoping to be able to show my visa at checkin and so avoid this, but if need be I was prepared to buy a full price return ticket, with a view to then cancelling it.  But in fact nobody mentions any such requirement, hmmm.  The A380 takes me as far as Doha, with much food provided on the way, pretty good for airline food too, and then after a brief stop a second flight goes straight to Chiang Mai, good not to have to go via Bangkok.

Ceremonial bell at Wat Phan Thao.

I have a few days booked in a hotel, I am expecting to have to extend this a little to give me time to sort out somewhere more permanent - in fact, the only delay in moving into a rented condo comes from the time taken to transfer the deposit from my UK bank, if I'd wanted to pay in cash I could have moved in pretty much at once.  Condo suggests something luxurious, in fact it is basically a one bed flat, not much bigger than my hotel room - on the other hand the communal facilities are excellent, lots of comfy, shaded seating areas complete with wifi, a gym, and a truly vast pool.  There is a rather awesome shopping mall next door, in addition to many hi-so (as they say here) shops and restaurants there is an iMax cinema and even an ice rink!  Only real downside is I am a couple of miles out from the centre of town, but I make a virtue of this by buying a bicycle - from a Decathlon no less, this is for sure a properly civilised place.  I look forward to riding out into the country on my days off from school.

Back to school!

Speaking of which, the school turns out to genuinely exist, and indeed seems very professional - they actually have their own series of textbooks, some eighteen in all, written in house.  I'm in a small group of four to five people, who all seem nice, as does our teacher who is very patient with our intial attempts to speak Thai, which seems to be something of a paradoxical language, really hard to grasp in some respects but absurdly simple in others.  I will write more about the language in the future I am sure, but I can tell pretty much from the start that I am going to struggle with the tone thing - there are five different tones, flat, high, low, falling and rising, and thus far I'm not really able to remember which tone the words should have, let alone correctly pronounce them.  Still, all good fun so far, I think I am going to enjoy it here...

Photos to go with this post can be found here

Pacific Crest Trail : Review

Enjoying myself in southern California.

So, it has now been a few months since I finished the PCT, and the blog has been quiet - for most of that time I didn't do anything very exciting, some time back in England visiting friends and family, a few weeks R and R in Tenerife, then back to the UK for Christmas, all good fun and that rest and relaxation was very much needed.  But there will be more adventure, and more blogging about it, before that though I really need to do a review of the Pacific Crest Trail, here that is then.  I guess I've been putting off doing it in the hopes of getting my thoughts in order regarding what was truly an amazing journey, and also to be honest because whenever I thought of writing a review I knew it wasn't going to be entirely positive, still, it is what it is.

Even the snow was fun at first.

What an adventure then, truly an utterly insane experience, way beyond anything I imagined.  It ran the gamut of emotions, excitement, wonder, the sheer good fun of a long walk in beautiful surroundings, but also misery, stark terror, and the mounting frustration of dealing with the bizarrely tyrannical federal bureaucracy that reigns over the United States.  Strange to recall that I thought it would just be a long walk, and indeed that during the first few days in the desert, I was thinking it would if anything not be much of a challenge.  Those days, and indeed the whole desert section, up to Kennedy Meadows, were great, a fine, carefree walk.

Not so much fun now.

Of course the Sierras brought the whole thing crashing down, trying to get through the snow at a sufficient pace, both to avoid running out of food and to get to Oregon in time for the eclipse, became more and more unpleasant as time went by.  Not merely the constant hard physical work, but more the continual worry that I would run out of food, or injure myself or worse - and lets not mistake this, people did get injured, several people died this year in fact, and it could have been me.  Yes I made it through, but after that I was playing catch up pretty much all the way to Detroit, and while it wasn't too bad once I left the snow behind, the days were always just a bit too long.  The eclipse itself was pretty awesome and I'm glad I was there for it, and yes, after that there was some good walking and I was able to slow down, has to be said that the fat ranger and his ticket still leave a nasty taste in the mouth though.

Seriously, look how thin I am here.

The rangers and other uniformed types weren't the only annoyances either, another issue was just how expensive America is.  It became increasingly wearing that not only could I not really afford to stay in motels, I couldn't even afford to stay in campsites - to be sure, in large part because nowhere in the country seems to be set up for a single hiker with a tent on his back, this did not however make me feel better.  At least after I worked out how to order food from Walmart I was able to eat reasonably cheaply.  One more complaint, and I hate to say this but it is true, some of the people I was sharing the trail with - which was a lot of people - were simply kind of annoying.  Specifically the young Americans tended to be loud, immature, and were treating the whole thing as a some sort of extended party - I mean, great for them I am sure.  But as I was struggling along with my pack weighed down by a heavy tent and seven days of food, I really did not need a bunch of kids passing me, with their tiny packs, almost weightless and hugely expensive gear, yelling to each other about what they did in the last town they hitched to, or how they were 'crushing' the miles, or where the next package from their mother was going to be waiting for them.

I did at least get to see a total eclipse, and it was pretty cool.

So yeah, I did enjoy a lot of the trip, the scenery was often breathtaking and for sure I have to feel proud of the achievement.  But given I was looking forward to doing this for years, perhaps it was not quite as awesome as I'd hoped, there were just too many bad things that still stick in the memory.  I don't exactly regret doing it, but honestly if I could go back in time and advise myself, I think I would say, do something different.  While there may not be a chance to see an eclipse as part of a PCT through hike again in my lifetime, nonetheless, maybe waiting for a year with less snow would have been the thing to do.  And for this year, maybe one of the other American long trails, though honestly America is simply not very nice in many ways, so perhaps somewhere else in the world.  Frankly, having done two 'official' long distance trails, I am wondering if a better idea would not be to come up with my own route, as I have of course done for shorter trips.  It would make for a less crowded trail, but also both the long trails I've done have suffered seriously from an insistence on keeping to 'wilderness'.  Unimproved forest is all well and good, but I'm not sure about walking through it for thousands of miles, honestly I prefer to walk a moor, or a grazed meadow or hilltop, with grass underfoot and a view unencumbered by trees.  Perhaps I simply want to stick to the old world rather than the new?

St. Johns, Canada - civilisation!

I can at least say that while this was a bad year to do the PCT, or perhaps it just wasn't the trail for me after all, I did at least do a good job of it, I kept walking, and the organisational side held up pretty well too.  My gear, in particular boots, held up well - Decathlon, I love you so much.  I guess I really should have sorted out the Canada permit before flying to LA but there is always something.  As it turns out I was very glad to have managed to get that done by the end of the walk, not because I needed it, of course nobody so much as looked at it, but because otherwise I would have changed plans and gone to Seattle - which might be nice I guess, but certainly Vancouver was a lovely place, well worth a visit, as was St. Johns on the other side of the country, which I spent a day at on the way back to London.  So, there was that at least, maybe not worth the trials of the massive walk but a point in favour of the whole thing.  But anyway - I got through it all somehow, in one piece even, and now, as has been said, for something completely different.

Photos from my time in Canada can be found here