Chiang Rai

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When we finally dragged ourselves away from Pai for the second time we travelled 6 hours East back through Chiang Mai all the way to Chiang Rai. Our first night here we went exploring the local markets.

The day market was just food and it was crazy! The raw meat and sweet cakes meant there was an abundance of wasps and flys mixed in with the many humans crowding the streets. Despite selling only food, nothing looked ediable to either of us, although some of it looked fairly interesting, like the bright turquiose mussels.

We left in search of the Night Bazaar but ended up walking round in circles and should have gone back to the main point of reference for making your way round the city which was a huge and very ornate golden clock tower which I failed to get a picture of! We dragged ourselves to a restaurant, starving by this point, which was really close to where the Night Bazaar was just setting up. We Later regretted eating here as the Night Bazaar offered a massive range of tasty looking food for a 1/3 of the price. The Market, all in all, was a good one. More laid back then others we've been too and there was two stages with lady boy cabaret entertainment!

On our second day here we went to visit the White Temple. It was probably our favourite Temple so far despite only being built in 1997. The local artist who designed it had an incredible gallery of his work there which had Jordan and I gawping. The temple itself was brilliant white and the art work surrounding it like skull traffic cones and heads hanging from trees really set it off as a work of art.
When we got back into town we hired bikes and cycled to some more traditional temples followed by a buddah in a cave. Im pretty sure we didn't make it to the one signposted as the one we got to was basically redundant and we had to crawl through bushes to get to it. We couldn't see a thing inside and I was scared of treading on snakes 😊

Dinner at the Night Bazaar that night was a treat. I had a soup that came in a little terracotta bowl with charcoal buring underneath which you had to add your own veg too. Jordan had a plate of deep fried everything that wasn't so nice!

We left for Chiang Khong the next day!

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