Thailand day 6 – Chiang Mai

New Year brings a long weekend holiday and most shops and some bars and restaurants are shut and shuttered until Monday.  It gives the town an eerie, deserted feel.  We book our flights from New Zealand to Singapore leaving on 5^th February and arriving on 6^th in Auckland. Now all we need to do is arrange our overland travel from here to Bangkok, Koh Samui and onward to Singapore.   Not forgetting the flights for the boys!  We take a tut-tut to the railway station and purchase sleeper tickets for the next leg of our journey  – Chiang Mai to Bangkok.  The earliest available train is on Tuesday 6th, so we are here for a few more days yet.  Booking the rest is tomorrow’s task!  Days here seem to disappear in the blink of an eye.  By the time we get out it is usually almost lunchtime, and then in no time at all it’s dusk is falling and we head back to apply the mozzie repellent.  This is the worse place so far for those little devils – we’ve had more bites here than in the rest of south-east Asia put together.  Fortunately, according to the reports at least, there isn’t any malaria here (but then, there wasn’t supposed to be any dengue fever in China!).  We go down to the night bazaar again with the intention in eating in one of the food court cafes, but they are all so popular there isn’t a seat to be had anywhere.  So we settle for a rather ordinary place catering to tourists.  The night bazaar’s attractions don’t stand revisiting – it’s tawdry ambience, seedy bars and western men in search of Thai girls give it a rather depressing air.  But as Andy points out, this is Thailand.