Mrs. Columbus and I have allocated a week or so here in Chiang Mai and are in no particular rush, but our new friend Thomas has a limited amount of time here and wants to see as much as he can before he goes back to Ireland so we decide to start out straight away with some activities.

After we check into our hotel it is right back out and onto the streets to walk down to Ginny Cafe for some dinner and to say hi to our local friends Tee and Ian. The food is fantastic as usual (Khao soy gai you sweet bowl of yumminess) and catching up with friends makes for a great evening.

For our first full day here we have decided to go for a zip line adventure.  We did this back in 2009 when we were here with the kids and it was a lot of fun.  It has become quite popular here in the north, and there are now about 7 or 8 different companies that offer zip line packages.  This gives us the opportunity to try somewhere different than last time and we end up selecting the Eagle Track zipline.

Our afternoon in the jungle is perfect – there is a bit of cloud in the sky, so it is not too hot, and the zipline provides for excellent entertainment. The track we are on has 35 platforms with a combination of different types of bridges and climbing, and 16 zips so we cover a lot of ground during the afternoon.

After a full afternoon on the mountain they drive us back to the city where we are meeting up again at the cafe for dinner and then a bit of a night out on the town.  Me, Ian and Thomas are meeting up with Richard (who we met last year) and Landon (who is a a friend of Ian and Richard) to go out to a few pubs and Mrs. Columbus is going to avoid the rooster party and go for a massage and an early night – probably the smart money bet, but what fun would that be!

For dinner I had to have the ‘Steve Special’ – penang curry served with garlic bread – it sounds like an odd paring, but it is a small piece of heaven, and the night is off to a good start!  After dinner and a few beers it is time to venture out into the city. Our first stop is a bar that has dozens and dozens of different beers from around the world – the menu is huge and selecting something is mostly a crap shoot, but that is part of the adventure I guess.

The next stop on the tour is down towards the night market and there is a side street (soi) with dozens of small bars one after another.  There is a Thai boxing ring in the central plaza and there are some ‘demonstration’ Muay Thai fights being put on for the tourists / bar patrons. Landon is studying Muay Thai and is pretty quick to point out that these fights are fairly staged to bring in the crowd and not nearly as intense as the real thing which leads to a plan to take in a real match another night at the Chiang Mai boxing stadium.

As midnight approaches Thomas decides to call it a night as he has booked a full day of mountain biking tomorrow, but the rest of us push on to what will be our last stop – the Crazy German Bar – owned in fact by a somewhat crazy german!  It is a great night, having a few drinks, visiting, people watching and just generally carrying on, but as it turns out 3am in Thailand is just as late as 3am everywhere else and I am glad that I have just an open day planed for tomorrow! I guess that even without the influence of the people back in the neighborhood I can still get into some mischief 😉

After about a week in the islands it is time to move north onto Chiang Mai.  I like some time at the beach and the ocean, but after a while ‘many beaches look alike sir’ and I can sense that for Mrs. Columbus and I it is time to move on.

We had dinner with Erica last night to say goodbye and wish her luck with her rock climbing and whatever other adventures she seeks out, but this morning it is back onto the ferry to return to Koh Samui to catch our flight up to northern Thailand.

I must give a shout out to the airport at Koh Samui, it is without a doubt one of the nicest airports I have ever been in.  It is all open air and even the seating areas are remarkably comfortable.  Free WiFi with complimentary drinks and snacks while you wait for your flight makes the couple hour wait for our flight quite civilized.

The flight back to Bangkok is about an hour, and then we have a short 1 hour layover to switch planes and finally another 1 hour flight into Chiang Mai.  As the last flight starts to descend into Chiang Mai, Mrs. Columbus starts to vibrate with excitement over the comfortable feeling of a place that we enjoy returning to and seeing some friends we have made here.  She is drumming her fingers together in that way she does when she is giddy, and the look on her face as we land is what vacations are all about.

It is our last full day in Koh Tao and we began with a lazy start to the day.  We had a bit of a late breakfast and spent a couple of hours talking it easy by the pool.  We are starting to rough out some ideas of what we are going to do with our time in Chiang Mai so poolside seemed like a good place to do that.

As they often do our plans here have changed a bit – our travel buddy Erica has decided that she wants to stay longer in Koh Tao to take in the island vibe and to do some rock climbing.  It does not come as a huge surprise to us as everyone has different things that they gravitate to, but we had thought it would be a bit farther into the trip before she ‘ditched the olds’ 😉 All is not lost though and we are not fully relegated to the ‘boring people’ designation because we have added a new person to our traveling group.  There is an Irish chap named Thomas that is staying at the same hotel as us, and he and Erica had started chatting a couple of days back.  While sitting about we started talking about traveling, photography and the typical topic of where everyone was going next came up.  Thomas was thinking about going to another island but had not made any firm plans, and when we started talking about Chiang Mai he got quite interested in the place.  He booked a ticket straight away, and wants to take in some of the sights with us up north.  It is always fun to meet interesting people and seeing the sights with friends just adds to the adventure, so like we did last year with Jackie, Bruce and Stephanie we have banded together for a few days before Thomas heads back to Ireland.

We the day now half gone Mrs. Columbus and I decide that we should take the rest of the afternoon and go for a walk/hike up to a viewpoint that is noted on the map.  The island is not that big, and we can see the place where the viewpoint is from our hotel so it does not look like it is all that far, and according to the people at the hotel it is about a couple hour walk, so off we go to conquer the wilds.

As often happens when we go out exploring we find that we have overlooked some details or need to deal with the unexpected, this trip is no exception.  The first thing we did not really spend much time thinking about is how high up the viewpoint is.  After setting out on the walk we look on the map and see that the vertical rise is about 350 meters (about 1200 feet), which would not be so bad if it was gradual over a distance, but the jungle does not build things that way, and the road ahead is uphill, uphill, uphill, and to really make you feel the burn throw in some downhill so that you can walk back uphill again before the next rise.  Mother Nature throws in her bit as well because it is hot, humid, and because the road goes through the jungle, you can’t even catch a breeze 🙁

However this is not our first rodeo and we like a challenge so we press ever forward on our way to the top.  There are a few times when I wonder if we should not just walk back to town and rent a quad for this, but we push through to the end knowing that the reward at the end will offset the effort.  Finally we make it to the top and from here we can see almost the entire island and the view is spectacular.  We sit on top of a big boulder at the edge of the viewpoint and take in the breeze and the vista for a few minutes enjoying the surroundings before starting the trek back down to the beach.

The good news is that the downhill is much easier than the uphill and aside from having to stop for the occasional snake crossing the road we make pretty good time and are back in town in time for a refreshing dip in the pool before meeting up with Erica for dinner and to say farewell before we head off in the morning.