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Published: January 31st 2007
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CHIANG MAI…CHIANG MAI!!!
Traveling and Leaving Things Behind As our regular readers know we have been traveling with WAY too much stuff. Our packs have varied in weight depending on books we’ve bought, things we’ve tossed out, and winter weather but they have stayed between 45-60 pounds a piece. This is a ton of weight to carry with you and becomes quite a burden when moving from town to town a lot. Thus, we bought small, cheap packs in downtown Bangkok and really pared our stuff down considerably.
When we checked in for our flight from Bangkok to Chiang Mai (the second largest city in Thailand which is in the north) we checked our bags which weighed less than half of our larger unwieldy packs. As we walked away from the check in counter we managed to leave Kel’s notebook behind. Kel’s “Team Turner on the Road” notebook had been the central repository of travel information that we had used throughout our journey. We only discovered that it was missing after we had eaten lunch and checked into the actual gate. Kel made a dash back through the airport in the final 20 minutes
before our plane boarded but, alas, we were out of luck. It had probably been thrown away by some Air Asia employee.
Thus we started our journey North with a bit of disappointment. It's always hard losing something even if it doesn’t have that much value. It just makes you feel a bit stupid. No matter how hard you try to move on, you inevitably spend at least the next hour thinking of ways you could have kept yourself from forgetting or being careless.
Chiang Mai…a much nicer town We arrived in Chiang Mai at about 2:30 and quickly caught a cab to our hotel/guest house, the Seven Suns. We could immediately tell by the cab ride that even though Chiang Mai is the second largest city in Thailand, it is considerably smaller than Bangkok. We were delighted by its smaller town feel after dealing with the hustle and bustle of Bangkok.
After checking in we scoped out the town as we tend to do in new places. We walked a couple of miles through town and stopped at any sights that seemed worth seeing along the way.
We started at Wat Chedi
Luang which contains the remains of what was once the largest
chedi in Chiang Mai. A
chedi is a large pointed tower that usually towers above its respective temple. In this case the tower was, at one point, 86 m tall.
We walked around the complex and took some pictures of the architecture and of the temples. One temple had a creepy mannequin replica of an old monk. It was so lifelike that we both thought there was an old guy in a glass case staring at us. Very strange.
As we walked out of the temple we saw a sign that we could talk to the monks who were sitting around the picnic tables near the exit - they called it "Monk Chat". The sign pretty much stated that it was disappointing to have tourists come through and view the sights without taking the time to talk to the monks. Thus, we decided to stop and chat.
We sat at a table of about 5 monks who were all in their late teens to late twenties. One monk in particular did most of the talking as he seemed to have the best
grasp of English. He asked us about where we were from and what we planned to do in Thailand. We asked them about the monk school and about his home town. He told us the school was a four year academy that taught a whole range of subjects from Sociology to Math and of course Buddhism. We only talked to them for about 15 minutes but it was really fun. They were all very friendly and seemed to enjoy the chance to practice English and meet new people. As we left, I thanked them in Thai which got a huge laugh from the whole table, they seemed to think it was very cool that I had taken the time to learn a little bit of Thai.
More Wats and Walking From Wat Chedi Luang we walked up the street and visited a few more sites including Wat Phan Tao, Kom Thong, and Wat Phra Bingh. All of these temples are incredibly ornate in their design with decorations that we only see in ethnic restaurants in the US. The monks are all over the temples doing day to day tasks such as watering plants and cleaning. On
Seven Suns Guesthouse
The outside is very nice, the inside is what most of you would call basic at best. It is clean enough for us but would probably disappoint many of you... one occasion in Wat Phra Bingh we caught the site of about a dozen monks moving a giant 32 foot long awning used for covering parties. The concerted effort of the group and their trials and tribulations were rather interesting to watch. It feels kinda dumb to gawk at what would be a common place chore simply because all of the men doing it are wearing orange tunics but you still find yourself awed by the sight of monks simply because they are monks.
Dinner After a couple of hours of walking around we wound up back at our guest house, had a snack and then rested for dinner. We opted to stick in the area for the evening so we headed to a restaurant up the street that served traditional northern Thai food. The restaurant, Huen Phen (pronounced Pen not Fen) was absolutely amazing. We each had traditional Thai dishes, mine being a pork and thorn tree (don’t ask - I still don’t know what thorn tree is but it sounded cool) soup which was spicy but very good. Kel had a pomelo salad and chicken wings which was also delicious. We found out on
Thai Kids at play
Don't know what they were playing but it was cute to watch. the way out that it was one of the best restaurants in town and had been mentioned in Conde Nast Traveler magazine. The total meal price, 15 dollars. It's soooo cheap here!!
After dinner we had dessert in our hotel’s restaurant, pancakes and ice cream. Then we headed off to get some sleep. I started writing the blog and realized I had managed to leave the cable from my camera back with Jack and Diane in Bangkok. This was a major oversight on my part because it potentially meant that I couldn’t download any of my photos which would be a huge bummer. (I managed to buy one for cheap the next day) Once again I was pretty disappointed and it was seeming like the sort of day when all things go wrong. Thankfully, despite the incredibly minor setbacks, we were both happy, healthy and safe. Its' always good to put yourself in a better frame of mind by realizing that little things just shouldn’t matter.
Hope you are all well back home and that you too are happy, healthy and safe.
Quick shout out to Kel’s MBA team and our buddy Brad: CHIANG MAI-CHIANG MAI…our trip
here involved little driving and no karaoke…lucky us!
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JennyInJamaica
non-member comment
lost notebook - argh!
I'm so sorry about the notebook - losing that would have put me in a funk for a week! Are you using a guidebook in Thailand? Happy travels!