So Chiang Mai is full of dogs, and no, not the kind that descend on Cardiff on a Saturday night in search of a ‘fishbowl’ cocktail – I mean real dogs. Hundreds of them, and worse than that they all seem to have surrounded our hotel.

I don’t think it helps that I took a pellet gun to this one in the picture for making too much noise (not really – I have to add this bit because some people who read this believe everything I write).

It seems that everyone in Chiang Mai owns a dog, and those that aren’t owned anymore - well we all lose our looks in time - the monks take in. Chiang Mai has over 300 temples, that’s a lot of monks, and as all the monks seem to want their own pack of dogs, that’s a lot of dogs!

On the plus side, it means that the dogs are all well fed, so they are not running the streets looking for food – they seem to be just doing it for fun. And now I’ve at last realised that they are not going to bite me, I’ve stopped crossing the street every time I meet one, and I've stopped screaming ‘arrrr! It’s rabid!’ too!

Because of the dogs we didn’t get any sleep last night, plus we still seem to have jet lag, so we just lie there trying to sleep from 11pm till 2am, then we got up and did some practice for our Thai course. Then went back to bed at 3am and got dragged back into the waking world by our alarm at 7:30am. I'd set the alarm for our language course an hour earlier than I should have – oops!

It’s funny that the ‘Rough Guide to Thailand’ mentions the apartment building at the side of the one we are in. It says that they are down a nice quiet lane off the main drag. The latter part is right, but you would have to be deaf if you thought dogs barking all night could ever count as quiet.

Still, we beat a new room out of the nice Thai lady downstairs and now we’re on the other side of the apartments, so hopefully we’ll get a better night’s sleep tonight.

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