More animals?

Day 2 of the jeep tour started with a visit to the Karen hill trip, also called the long neck tribe, the reason for which is pretty obvious from the photo. I felt quite uncomfortable there - it was similar to being at the elephant farm, walking from stall to stall where the women were on display and buying food to hand to the children. I was relieved to leave there and head for the monkeys! I have no idea where I was (again, it was only explained in Hebrew) but I quickly stopped caring as it was a large temple with monkeys running all around it. We bought bananas and peanuts to feed to the monkeys and they came right up to us. I could have stayed there for hours. There were hundreds of them and quite a few babies (who manage to look young and old at the same time) and some of the moms were carrying them around. It is amazing how much like us they are, especially when you see them interact as mother/child.

Driving further north we entered the Golden Triangle (where Laos, Burma and Thailand meet) to gawk at the first large buddha of our few days, but not the last for mine. We topped off the afternoon with a boat trip down the Mekong River (the longest in the world) and stopped at a market on the Laos side, pretty much just so we could say we'd been there. This area used to be a heavy heroin trafficking area, made from the poppy farms. They've cracked down on this with checkpoints everywhere and adding incentives to move the farmers to other occupations.

We spent that night in Chiang Rai, hitting our 3rd market of the trip and the millionth of my last few weeks. I went to my room fairly early, very excited by the BBC and Australia networks on the TV!