Fight the Feeling

After the one month marker had passed, I had been counting myself lucky; and just starting to believe that I had a stomach lined with steel. Though things caught up with me and I went down with my first 'belly full of delights' of the trip. So the couple of days following the elephant riding, I was out of action and feeling pretty dead to the world.

Alas I still took advantage of my surroundings, and went for a full recovery program consisting of 2 days by the pool side (with frequent trips to the bathroom!), Thai massage and generally taking it easy. The time by the pool allowed us both to work on neglected suntans, and the time under the Thai womans hands just allowed me to say "ahhhh", "mmm" and the occasional "ouch!"

Last night I got in my first beers for several days whilst watching Muai Thai kickboxing. There was a British guy in action which added to the interest.

After shaking off my bout of food poison, we set off out today; our last day in Chaing Mai. We checked out the nearby Snake park. Not much to write home about - typical Thai animal keeping standards ie. not particularly great. We'd hoped to get in some Thai cooking lessons but now we were out of time - just enough left to get our very own Muai Thai lesson! The cost was 200baht for 2hours tuition - I'm glad it didn't cost very much since I spent the entire time out of breath. 20mins skipping, 10mins jumping on an old tractor tyre, then some round house kick practice before finally getting the gloves on and getting in the ring. I got to learn some quick fire punch combo's along with Muai Thai blocking, kneeing and kicking techniques. I couldn't say I managed to perfect any of them - but I felt like someone out of Streetfighter for an hour or so which was good enough for me.

With freshly blistered toes I hobbled on down to the Chiang Mai night bazaar for a bit of a shop before getting the bags packed again to move on again.