I fled for the hills of Chiang Mai after 1.5 days in Bangkok. Go ahead and laugh (I did). The smog and the traffic was just too much after clean, orderly New Zealand. There's a lot more I want to see there - I'll try again a few days before my flight to India. Maybe the tourist ghetto will be more familiar...

Chiang Mai (in the north) is a nice, small city - I almost know where I am most of the time. So far I've only really had two days here - the other three I spent "trekking" through the jungle. There wasn't really that much hiking (but we cover ground at a high rate when we did) mostly we rode in the back of pickup trucks and ate. The guides do all the cooking and cleaning up so our other major responsibility is sitting and politely refusing to buy souvenirs. Also, applying insect repellent. It was interesting though - our guide , "Rambo," grew up in a village in the area we visited and runs this tour pretty regularly so he knew a lot of the people we passed and quite a bit about the history of the region and the plant and animal life. The first day/night we were grouped with a Dutch couple and an Israeli family doing the two day version of our tour. I know most people get annoyed about having kids on tours but it just cracks me up. The little boy was just running everywhere, climbing trees, chasing puppies - it's better than television. we split after breakfast leaving me and three guys to trudge through the jungle to the next village. The last day we went bamboo rafting and elephant riding before barreling back to Chiang Mai in the back of a (substantially more comfortable) pick up truck.

I spent today trying to get my bearings and looking at temples. There are quite a few in the 1Km square old town and even more in the surrounding new city. I don't know much about the significance of the architecture or the poses of Buddha but the temples are still nice to visit. They're just so much more shiny (actually tiled in bits of mirror) and colorful than other religious sites I've seen. And sometimes it's almost peaceful on the grounds. "Nancy" (every guide at her agency is called Nancy), my tour guide through Bangkok did point out the different Khmer (embroidered robes), Indian (slim, crown of snakes), and Chinese (fat) representations of Buddha and how sitting Buddha has something to do with calm while standing Buddha has to do with peace but I was pretty jet-lagged so the details are a bit fuzzy. Maybe I'll take the tour again when I get back to Bangkok.