We returned to Brother Wind in the early hours of Friday the 13th, after two weeks of 'land travels'. Three nights in Bangkok staying in luxury with Patti Moore, and being treated to a wonderful dinner watching the sun set from the second highest building in Bangkok 59 floors up, must rate as a highlight! The restaurant of the Banyan Tree Hotel is not only on the 60th floor, but outside! With little more than a waist high rail around the roof terrace. Wonderful for catching the evening breeze it must be somewhat more alarming in high winds.

We did the normal tourist things in Bangkok, a river trip, Wats Po, Arun, Phra Kaew, the Grand Palace, and Jim Thompson's House, as well as a very tempting trip to the Jim Thompson Warehouse, where I am still regretting the roll of bargain silk that I didn't buy for curtains in the new house.

We then set off in huge luxury, all organized by Patti's secretary with driver Sirichai, and his wonderful Bangkok air conditioned taxi, painted in Norwich Canary colours of green and yellow, for a four day trip north to Chiang Mai, via Ayuthaya and Sukhothai, and a diversion to the Myanmar (Burmese) border at Mae Sot, where we walked across the bridge into Burma for a couple of hours, in order to renew our visa by two weeks.

It turned out to be a fascinating experience, from sophisticated Thailand straight across the bridge to the third world, no shiny cars here or women in tight jeans and designer t-shirts, it was men in sarongs and bicycle rickshaws, but still with smiley faces. We sat and had a meal in a very local place, and watched the world go by, then took a trip on a rickshaw to see the gold encrusted 'stupa' of their ancient 'wat', and admire the millionth Buddha image that we had seen on this trip! Our rickshaw peddler then decided to take us to one of the weirdest wats we have seen, an enormous crocodile probably 50 metres long, and men only allowed the dubious privilege of going into the temple in its bowels!

We spent a night in Mae Sot in a lovely old stilted wooden house set in a beautiful garden, where we met an Austrian couple our sort of age, who were driving a camper van around the world. We thought boating a more testing but also more relaxing option, at least we have the option of just stopping somewhere at a lonely anchorage and getting away from the world, on land it can't be so easy.

On we went to Chiang Mai, where we said our farewells to Sirichai, and clocked into a guest house in the old walled bit of town.

Another day of 'wats' and we felt we were ready to never see another Buddha! We had wanted to do a serious trek somewhere north of Chiang Mai, and to visit some hill tribes, but we decided that the packaged up trips might not be for us, so we arranged to hire a car the next day and do our own thing! Just as well, as I could scarcely move my back was so bad, and getting me into a car was effort enough. The journey north was torture, every bump and lurch exacerbating my back troubles, so it was a great relief to get to Chiang Dao, and eventually find 'The Nest' a haven of bamboo bungalows set overlooking rice paddies, forest and hills in a lovely flowery garden, and a bed that seemed to promise a bit more comfort!

It did indeed, and nest day we did a lovely elephant ride through burnt forest, on our own with elephant Da, and his mahout Dang. It was nice to know that he was late arriving with us because free range Da was unwilling to be caught.

Dang took us for about an hour up to his hill tribe village, and it was lovely to see how he and the elephant related to each other. At one moment Da decided to stop and wouldn't budge, he had spotted an orchid growing high up on a tree, and until Dang had climbed off the elephant, leaving us somewhat worried, and collected the orchid, there was no moving Da. When we finally got to the village Dang planted it on a tree stump.

The scenery all around Chiang Mai was a disappointment, mostly because we were there in the wrong season. The rice was being cropped, and the paddies burnt off, which meant that there was continuous haze in the air. Much of the jungle seemed to be burning too, but we were assured that the trees would survive, it just meant that the landscape looked scorched and black, and where we assumed there were mountains we simply couldn't see them.

Thailand certainly grows rice on a far more commercial agrarian way than any other Asian country we've seen, its flat lands north of Bangkok are almost rice prairies, and the south east Asian landscape that we have grown accustomed to, a landscape never without people working the land wherever they can, and taking three or four crops of rice a year from a paddy, has been largely mechanized in this part of Thailand.

Our journey back to Chiang Mai took us to the Queen Sirokit Botanic Gardens, just north of the city. They are vast, but well done, and wonderful to see so many familiar plants from home, which obviously must have originated here. Laburnham, jasmine, cherry blossom, spiraea, philidelphus, all kinds of azaleas, as well as lots of annuals that we think of as quintessentially English, candytufts, antirrhinum, and lots more. Sadly there was too much to see, and we had a flight to catch, so on we went, for a late flight back to Brother Wind in Phuket.