Saturday 28th October

With our adventurous (well for us in the last few years anyway) tourism suspended for a few days some of you might like to wait till I get on to Tuesday 31st and we resume normal tourist activities. The next few days we run, party and rest in approximately that order. If you'd like to know about the historic city of Chiang Mai check here. Interestingly the rise of this northern power contributed to the decline of the Angkor empire.

Time for some real running at last after a number of days (at least for me). There was a choice of about 20 different running options (from short and sweet to long and hilly) set up by different hash groups, and all has a longer and shorter options. All our crowd picked to do a run set by the Bangkok hash as we know one of their number who lives out east of us when he's in the US. You could not sign up beforehand so we all arrived early at the stadium and staked places on the right bus, even though we had quite a wait and only a short ride to a lakeside park.

The run took us through a lot of scrub and jungle but the shade was a merciful relief from the beating sun. Lots of climbing too. For a while the 200 plus people kept running to a minimum as we were on narrow trails but eventually the crowd thinned out and we could run/ walk/ jog as we liked. Nice views of the lake from a ridge we ascended but the final 2 mile (3km) on the lake shore road to the area where they'd set up the beer and food was very tough and hot. The beer, water and food was plentiful though and the setting on the lakeshore beautiful so we forgave the organizers.

After dark we tried out a local custom setting loose a paper "balloon" with a burner attached below (basically a tiny hot air ballon). It disappeared high in the sky and did go out before starting to fall... so hopefully we did not add to the local smog and deforestation.

The evening was better organized with less wait for food, though the wine line was long. We didn't party too hard though (must be old age) and soon hit the bus home.