Street art in Khao San Road.

Schools in Thailand end their second academic term

It's the last Sunday of December 2012 and I'm hurrying out of my dark apartment at quarter to four in the morning. I'm wearing whatever I hustled out the wardrobe in my bleary-eyed state and hopping on the back of a certain hoodrat motorbike.

We're off to give a mass of strangers anything that can last, from candles to toothpaste, packs of Mama's noodles, bags of rice, sachets of over-sweetened coffee mixes, to boxes of milk drinks aimed at kindergarten kids. And by mass I mean 12,999 of them, according to the posters in Thai around town. And by strangers, I mean monks, from all over Chiang Mai and the surrounding areas, who return to their own temples after the ceremony.

Once we'd taken our cross-legged positions on the massive red and white banner which lined the entire length of this usually busy road, we began to wait. We had been in Chiang Mai about four months at that time, and we were already used to drifting off while the background static of monotonous Thai failed to snatch us back into reality. We almost regretted arriving so early, because we had no idea what was being said or chanted for almost 3 hours, and it was only when the sky became light that the monks slowly started floating in.

And then it was all worth it, because they floated in one by one, orange figure trailing behind another orange figure, until there were thousands. Up and down the entire road, monks ambled on in a silent tiptoe. It was a spectacular sight, and a moving ceremony to be a part of - you could almost say it was one of those many moments I realised I was in love with the world, and I was addicted to exploring it.

Here are my photos of the ceremony:

Military cadets keeping the road warm for the monks.

One weekend near the end of 2012, my boyfriend and I grew restless (as we often do in the city) and decided to take an aimless drive to see if we could get lost in some nature. In a place like Chiang Mai, that's very easy to do, and before we knew it, we were winding through breezy roads around Doi Saket, where we found a little waterfall in the jungle, a temple near the mountain, and a sprawling scene of fields just as the sun started sinking.

Here are the photos from our day-trip through Doi Saket: 

Welcome to Doi Saket.

The road up to the temple.

Wat Phra Tat in Doi Saket.

There's a mountain I can see from the roof of my apartment building. Sometimes it looks grey, washed out, and rain clouds cloak it with their misty pillows. Sometimes it looks dark and moody, while the sky blares orange behind its back. During the smog season, it's barely visible (we'll get to that later). Mostly it just looks like a big old mountain with bits of city scattered in front of it.

Once in a while, I'll take the trip up the mountain on my bike, and these are the sights I'll usually see:

A great place to get hollered at by people trying to sell you things.