Advertisement
Published: December 14th 2011
Edit Blog Post
We walked around the city trying to find a good guest house and finally settled at a quiet place for 300 bhts a night (£6). It had WiFi and a TV too which made a nice change. We had not slept much the previous night so decided to grab some lunch and take a walk around the area we were staying in before having a cat nap later in the afternoon. That evening we found the main area of town where the bars, restaurants, massage (legit) places were and also a night market. Spent a couple of hours wondering around the market but the items on sale were pretty much what we had already seen in Bangkok. We stumbled across an indoor food market selling all kinds of different hot dishes. I tried a yellow curry with chicken and potato which was fantastic and spicy. Terry had a huge bowl of Tom Yung soup all for under £2 – bargain.
Chiang Mai is very touristy with plenty of older white men and their young Thai ladies walking around. We went into one bar where we heard a Thai waitress tell an American man who was boasting he had a Thai
girl and that they were in love and it was nothing to do with the fact he was retired with money but the waitress laughed and said don’t talk such bullsh*t, that fact is no money no honey, I could not stop laughing! To me Chiang Mai felt like a calmer Bangkok.
There are plenty of travel agencies around the town selling all different kinds of trips with the most popular being cooking classes, elephant rides and meeting tigers up close.
One of the days we hired a moped and decided to make our own way to the elephant sanctuary and Tiger Kingdom. They are not far from town and would rather spend our time seeing what we wanted to see. Most of the tours offered elephant rides but the combined this with visits to an orchid farm and a tribal village which we did not want to go to. The road out of town is filled with plenty of tourist attractions such as snake and crocodile shows plus you can even visit the Karen long neck tribe who just so happen to live on this tourist attraction road. What really has happened is a developer has built
them their own village where tourists pay £10 to be able to watch them in their homes, I guess like a human zoo and in return they are receiving money and a place to live.
First stop was at Tiger Kingdom. Rumours are on the net of tigers being drugged to allow tourists to be able to stroke them but the website says the tigers were hand reared and are use to people so we thought we would see for ourselves. We paid around £10 each to go into the enclosure of the medium size tigers and I was in for a fright. The tigers most definitely did not looked drugged and were running around the cage fighting with each other and jumping about. When the guide opened the door I nearly did not go in but he reassured us it was fine and in we went. The tigers calmed down and the guide made a sitting motion with his hand and the tiger closest to us sat down, we then nervously went over and sat next to him. It was unbelievable to be in such close proximity to a tiger but I also felt guilty that this was
a wild animal and was this right. Right or wrong I would be a hypocrite if I did not say I enjoyed the experience and the tigers looked very well looked after in my opinion so we left happily and travelled to the elephant camp.
We purchased some bananas and fed these to the elephants. We had a great time watching and stroking them before they went for a bathe in the river. What we did not enjoy was they had an elephant show where they were made to kick a ball about and even do some painting. Really upset me to see this as I imagine there must be some hard training and maybe even bit of cruelty to ensure the elephants did as they were told. Did not enjoy this one bit and we quickly left the place.
We did like Chiang Mai but really it is like a less hectic Bangkok full of tourists and attractions. We decided then we would leave northern Thailand and decided to skip Pai which is meant to be full of hippy smoking tourists and head over to Laos. We would be coming back to Thailand eventually to head south
but for now we just wanted to get away from the crowds.
Advertisement
Tot: 0.093s; Tpl: 0.011s; cc: 12; qc: 52; dbt: 0.0566s; 1; m:domysql w:travelblog (10.17.0.13); sld: 1;
; mem: 1.2mb
emma
non-member comment
Sounds Amazing!!