Thailand Day 5

Early start on Friday, 6:45, to get picked up for "flight of the gibbon." This is basically a treetop zipline operation, where you go from platform to platform high in the canopy by clipping in to a steel wire with a pulley and sliding along (I guess to mimic a gibbon, which is a brachiating monkey). There were a few unique twists, including some tandem ziplines and "abseiling," where they lower you from one platform to another. This particular operation was even highlighted in an episode of "the amazing race." We made friends with an American named Brian, who lives in Hong Kong. We met Brian when I accidently slammed his foot in a car seat recliner, for which he was kind enough to forgive me. That was fortunate, because we ended up seeing Brian (and the rest of our group, which was a Dutch tour) throughout the rest of our trip. After the ziplining and lunch, we took a nice little hike to a pretty waterfall before piling in the car back to Chiang Mai.

It was mid-afternoon when we got back to town, so Nikki and I walked over to "Miguels" where there is supposedly great Mexican food. Nikki's taco wasn't half bad, though it was no San Diego quality. I had a margarita of course, since I'm on vacation. We passed a place that advertised "California style" burritos, so Nikki is going to check it out later and see if it's up to snuff.

Later that evening, we headed over to a local arena to see some Muay Thai boxing. There were something like 10 fights planned, ranging from pretty little kids up to a 70 kg weight class where an American and Thai fighter were scheduled to go at it. All in all it was pretty impressive and I felt like we were in the video game street fighter. The crowd was going nuts with locals cheering for fighters from their gym and the farangs (white tourists) having no idea what was going on and basically cheering at anything. There were a couple of brutal KOs, and I developed a lot of respect for these guys, who fought 4-5 three minute rounds. The much anticipated American/Thai fight lasted about 2 minutes, with the beefy American guy totally pummeling the Thai guy. Definitely an interesting scene.