Oh, hello.

Well, Katharina is still too busy to update el Blog, so it looks like I’m up again whether you like it or not.

We’ve been doing a few day trips lately. We went to a nearby town called Chiang Dao which was beautiful. It was very small, just a couple of roads in a valley surrounded by beautiful jungley mountains. Hmm…spell checker says that ‘jungley’ is not a word… The largest mountain in the area is called Doi Chiang Dao, and is the highest limestone mountain in Thailand at 2195 meters above sea level. Unfortunately, it had been raining for a few days before, and the clouds still hadn’t cleared up, so we couldn’t get a really good view of it. We found out later that that storm was the tail end of the storm that hit Myanmar so hard. Chiang Dao was beautiful and we had a good time there. The town is also popular among spelunkers because of a huge cave system in the mountain, which goes on for somewhere between 10-14 kilometers. About the first ½ km was lit by overhead lights and open to the general public. It was very interesting to walk around in, especially because they had many Buddha statues and carvings the entire way. Another little trip we went on was to Doi Suthep, the highest mountain surrounding Chiang Mai. There’s a beautiful temple on the top of the peak, but you have to walk up 306 steps after driving up a winding road to the top of the mountain. The view of the city from the top is amazing.

Karen and Teancum will be here (in Chiang Mai) tomorrow. We got an email this afternoon that they sent from Bangkok saying they had arrived, but that there was no room on the night train, so they are taking a night bus (which has to be miserable). We’re very excited to see them, and we most likely won’t be updating the blog for a couple of weeks while we’re sightseeing with them.

And Rachel’s going to have a baby soon…