Chiang May is a very nice city with the water moat encircling (“ensquaring” actually ;-)) it and with many many temples you can visit. And even though very touristy it is still much much better than similarly touristy Phuket in Malaysia. I was quite looking forward to see it today. Also planned was a trip to see some real mountains about 70km north of here and the 22km distant Doi Suthep temple. However, it was quite cloudy so I decided to stay and do some work today and go to see all those things tomorrow.

At around noon I started to feel not very well and by the evening I had quite a headache, stomach on water, felt dizzy and had runs. Because of this and because it was raining heavily since early afternoon I was really happy I didn’t go sightseeing today.

In the evening I talked to Franta (Frank) some more about him. He calls himself the odd child as he’s been a drug addict for most of his life. Thanks to that he gets some disability money from the US government and since it is the minimum rate for him (for which he apparently had to fight for a few years anyway), it is not enough to live from in the US and that seems to be one of the main reasons he lives here in Thailand now. He still has to be on Methadon to not slip back to the hard drugs and he says he will always be dependent on it.

Franta is a second person who I met backpacking in Asia who is a drug addict. The first one was Martin – a Dutch guy smoking a lot and drinking a bottle of Whisky every night since otherwise he wouldn’t be able to sleep at all. So he says. He apparently gets nightmares every night since childhood and this is what helps him. Amazingly, he never seemed drunk to me, even after finishing the bottle at 4AM when I might have gone to the toilet, seeing him still sitting there. In Holland he apparently smokes marihuana the whole day and since it was not possible here (this was in Melaka, Malaysia) he drinks and smokes normal cigarettes. He was a really interesting guy. I saw him reading books all day and you could tell… He never ran out of topics to talk to and to every matter a conversation could be about he had quite interesting things to say.