Back in Chiang Mai

Very short introduction:
After 3 months of travelling (UK, US and Thailand), i´m now based in Chiang Mai in northern Thailand, and probably gonna stay here for a while. Yeah!

Anyway, just came back here after a 5 day trip to a very remote area in the mountains close to Myanmar (Burma) with some friends. No, this was not the typical commercial backpacker package tour with visiting the hilltribes, smoking weed and bamboo rafting. I get sick of that (this city is crowded with tourist agencys promising "untouched" nature). This was hardcore haha! I went there with Kent who started to work with the hilltribes in the 70´s, and now have 2 shops selling hill tribe handcraft (read more about it on www.sopmoeiarts.com), and his daughter Linnea. They have their home in the djungle, and when they asked me to come along for a week, of course i said yes!

I brought my sketchpad and forgot about almost everything else. Early monday morning we went away in their big SUV and arrived about 10 hours later, much of the ride on non-existing muddy roads. But, there it was, a beatuful place in the middle of nowhere, in a small valley surrounded by sky high cloudy mountains. Home for the Karen people, and also were the hill tribes work together with Kent and Linnea, who are going back and forward between Chiang Mai, Bangkok and this area.

Far away from everything else, this was the perfect place for me at the moment. No electricity or hot water, just focus on my paintings when not fighting huge spiders or snakes. And, when in the mountains, of course i went on a few hours climbing to the top of one of the mountains, with a great view over the valleys and Myanmar. And i also did this sort of Edelweiss thing… you know, in the mountains there is this flower, who only grows in a certain tree on a certain height and so on, and since i went up there with a man from the Karen tribe, he showed me where to find this flower. I collected a few and actually managed to bring them back to Chiang Mai (remember the bumpy road), feeling like ”the old man” struggeling for his giant fish in Hemingways ”the old man and the sea”!

So, now i´m back in my small studio flat just outside the city center, my sketchpad is a mess of ideas so i guess i´ll start working now.