Burning the Bahts in Chiang Mai

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Cooking, dancing, boxing, zipping, trekking, rafting, elephant riding, and saving lives - You can do all that and more in Chaing Mai!

We arrived by train at 8:00 AM and took the first day to get oriented, find a place to stay, find A/C checkpoints, and start looking at tour companies for all the many activities available here. The A/C checkpoints were easy because all the maps show the 7-11 locations and they always have nice cool air and are popular with foreigners, hence why they are on the maps.

After getting settled in and checking out our entertainment options we booked a dinner show at the Old Chiang Mai Cultural Center. They picked us up at our hotel and treated us to a personal buffet, they kept bringing more and more food to us versus us having to get up and get more (great way to add on the pounds!). The dance show and the food were good and we could see lots of similarities to the dance we've seen in neighboring countries.

The next day we took a full day cooking class at Phad Thai Cooking School. They picked us up in the morning and brought us on a tour of the local market, explained some of the mysterious things we've seen in our food, and purchased the produce we would need for the day. Then we headed to school and we each got to pick 6 dishes to learn how to make. There were 9 of us total and they split us up based on which foods we picked so we got to have different classmates and teachers throughout the day. Our teachers were great, most spoke very good english, and a couple of them had a great sense of humor making the day even more enjoyable. After cooking each dish we got to sit down and enjoy them which meant we were stuffing our faces all day long and usually couldn't finish all our food. We turned out to be pretty good Thai chefs, we'll see if we can repeat the performance at home. At the end we each got an official certificate and a cook book and we got to keep our name tags which have our names written in Thai.

Toward the end of class one of our instructors got an urgent phone call about a friend who was in an accident and they were looking for blood donors who had A-negative blood, which apparently is pretty rare in Asians. I was pretty sure that was my type so I volunteered. After class, they took us over to the hospital where we surprisingly found 5-6 "farang" (westerners) sitting and waiting to see if their blood matched. Trevor lucked out and wasn't a match, but at least 3 of us were able to donate. It took a long time and we were a little nervous because the test results of one guy showed that he had changed blood types and he spent a fair amount of time trying to explain why this was a concern. An hour later as the nurse was on the phone with his doctor, they discovered she simply had the wrong patient form! Phew! That made us all feel better, mainly for the poor guy receiving the blood. I got my free soy milk for donating and we hit the streets in search of a booking agent to for the next day.

We stumbled across a Thai Boxing stadium that was hosting a series of fights that evening, only a block from our hotel. We couldn't pass it up as Muay Thai Boxing is a big part of the culture in Thailand, so we quickly went and booked our tour for the next day, then went to the stadium where we had almost ringside seats! The boxing matches were very entertaining. It's one thing to see a 13 year old serving you beer but then to see a 100 pound 13 year old, totally ripped like an ape, going head to head with another one just like him, it's pretty crazy. They had about 8 different matches and the fights were really good. Surprisingly though, the "major" fights (bigger guys, 140 lbs), were not as good as the little guys. One fight was like a vertical wrestling match, not so much punching and kicking, so it was pretty lame. In the other ones, there were a couple knockouts, a few TKOs, and one decision by the judges (the wrestlers). The comedy relief of the evening was when they stuck 6-8 boxers with blindfolds in the ring and let them have a free for all, during which even the ref got wacked upside the head several times. It was hilarious. After the boxing was over, they had a "Free Cabaret Show" which entailed half naked ladyboys strutting their stuff. It wasn't really our cup of tea and we left, along with just about everybody else.

The next day, we went on a zipline tour called the Flight of the Gibbons. We weren't actually swinging with the monkeys, but we felt a bit like monkeys. We got picked up at our hotel and they drove us out of Chiang Mai a little ways and up into the hills, which was an absolutely beautiful area. We joined up with another couple and a mother and daughter and they got us all outfitted in our harnesses and helmets. This whole operation seems pretty new as their equipment is all shiny and in really good shape, which was very comforting. The zipline course was really high up in the trees, the highest line being about 5 stories up and the longest zip being about 250 feet. There were 15 zips in all and two belays (straight down from the platform) and two cable-plank bridges. The zips were really fun, and very fast. They even gave us "brakes" to use on some of them - the brakes were just bamboo in a V shape that we had to hook over top of the line and pull down to slow down. It's not the most effective system, especially when you're turned around backwards or staring at a tree coming right at you, it's a little hard to get the bamboo placed just right. Overall, the scenery was really great, but the zips could have been a little longer each. Good tour though and worth the money, and our guides were great. After zipping, they brought us to a little waterfall hike that was pretty nice, although not much water in it since it's the dry season. I imagine it is really gorgeous in the rainy season as the waterfall had many tiers and it was really high up.

After a full day of zipping and hiking we went back to town. We found a travel agent to book a trekking tour. There are tons of trekking tour options in Chiang Mai so it's a little overwhelming to choose one. We finally settled on a two day, one night, trekking with elephant riding, whitewater rafting, and bamboo rafting.

The next morning the tour people showed up at 8:15 AM an hour early so we told them to come back in a half hour so they came back in an hour. This is typical of a lot of communication in asia, order pork rice get chicken noodle, you just have to smile and say thanks for getting it close enough. Anyway so we headed out of town into the hills for about an hour, the other couple in the truck were going to go to a tribe the tour group forgot to take them on the day before. After dropping them off in what was really just a market area set up for the villagers to come sell stuff to tourists (not the actual village), we continued on. So the truck stopped next to a little dirt road in the middle of no where and one of the guys says in very poor english "you walk now" and "your guide speaks very little english" - we're like, sure but what about our luggage? (we had been told when we booked that they would store our luggage in their office in town) They looked a little confused and then said they'll take it so we hesitently said okay and headed down the dirt road with some guy that had nothing but the clothes on his back.

We hiked for about a half hour through some rice fields and plantations before taking a break at one of the farming break stations. There we realized that there wasn't supplies for our guide so we offered him some of our water and he excitedly accepted. From there we headed through the woods and up a valley to a "village of the scary flee dogs". Our guide didn't speak english so we had to make our own commentary up which was much more entertaining I might add but we still had many unanswered questions. After photographing the freakish dogs and eating some pretty bland noodles for lunch we headed up the mountain in 115 degree weather, and boy was that fun. The hill was kinda like a desert with trees, thankfully we were sweating bucket because this proved to be a good dust surpressant. It took us a hour or so to reach the top when the guide said "sorry." Confused, we looked at each other and the guide said something pointing to a different hill and saying something else, then another "sorry". We were thinking great we just climbed the wrong hill. So we took a break and then started heading down the hill. Going down was actually harder than going up because of all the dry leaves over loose gravel. Our guide was kind enough to find some bamboo walking sticks for us which helped, but it was still rather treacherous. We reached another village, also desserted of people like the last one, except for two boys who kindly gave us some bananas for snacks. We continued on after a short break and the walking was much easier from here. After a long, hot, quiet day, we spotted the village where we would be spending the night. Actually, first we spotted a rushing stream with other westerners bathing in it and we eagerly hoped this is where we'd be stopping, just to have a dip in the drink at the very least.

The bath in the stream was wonderful and refreshing! We met the other tourists, two English guys, two dutch girls, and another American couple (from CA). We figured out from talking with them that we would be joining up with them for the next day's activities, which we were really happy about since finally we'd have other people to talk to. Our quiet guide said good bye and left us there; we then met Roddy who would be our guide the next day. His english was a bit better but still pretty limited, and still we got absolutely no information about the villages or the people who lived there. There were of course little stalls set up for them to sell their handicrafts, which seemed to be the focus of us being there. They did cook us a lovely curry dinner and also had plenty of beer, soda, water, and snacks for us to buy if we pleased (which was our only option if we didn't want to dehydrate). After dinner, the villagers started arriving back from whereever they were working and they started a campfire for us. A group of them played music and did a little dance performance which was really neat, then we all ended up dancing around the fire. After the festivities, we went to our beds which consisted of really really thin mats on bamboo stick flooring with mosquito nets...and we thought the beds at the guesthouses were hard. For camping though, it wasn't too bad and it actually got pretty cool at night so we even ended up using the Carebear sleeping bags that they provided, along with our sleeping cocoons that we brought. The little hut where we slept was not fully enclosed so you could say we had A/C ("air currents")!

After being woken quite early by a rooster that positioned itself right under our sleeping platform, we drug ourselves out of bed and had a nice breakfast of scrambled eggs, tons of toast, and fruit. Then we set out for the day's activities. We walked for about an hour to the Elephant camp where we rode on the elephants for about 30 minutes. They are really amazing animals and while it was incredible to be so up close to them, it was also rather sad because it doesn't seem like they treat these elephants very well. Many of them had purplish spots on their heads where you could see they'd been beaten and some had tumors or just looked like they were in poor health. Our "driver" was particularly fond of playing the drums on our elephant's head, luckily not with the part of his stick that had the nail sticking out of it. So yeah, somewhat mixed feelings on the elephant riding. Some of them did look in better shape than others, but overall, they seemed pretty sad. We bought a bunch of bananas to feed ours which was pretty fun because they reach up and feel around for the bananas with their trunks and sort of sniff at you.

Next we had lunch then a dusty ride to yet another market where locals were selling their handicrafts - picture about 20 stalls all selling the same things and all of them telling us, "you come in, you look here". A little further down the road, we stopped at a waterfall (well it would have been more of an actual waterfall in the rainy season, but it was still nice) where we enjoyed swimming and playing in the water for a while, again a welcome relief from the heat of the day. From there, we got a ride further up the river to the place where we started our whitewater rafting. We were a bit skeptical since we got in these big rubber rafts but the river was really low and there were places where it didn't appear that the rafts would actually fit through between the large boulders sticking up out of the water. To our surprise, there were actually some rapids, but we were right about having trouble getting through. Of the two boats, we were in the smaller one and it was not as fully inflated - this turned out to be key in getting through some of the rapids because we could squeeze and fold more easily than the other boat. Even still our guide had to get out and push a few times, then frantically jump back in. It was actually pretty fun and there were a couple very exciting drops with good size rapids that were made even more interesting when we went into them backwards!

After the rapids were over, we got out and switched to the traditional bamboo rafts, which were basically a bunch of bamboo logs tied together with a few tied crosswise for stability. The tricky part is that the rafts were very long so the guy steering in the front had his work cut out for him and the tail end of the boat (where I was sitting) did swing through a couple rough areas. I think our raft had seen better days as it was somewhat falling apart and sat pretty much 2 inches underwater, but it made the ride refreshingly cool. The bamboo rafting section was pretty short and where we pulled out, there was an ice cream stand waiting for us which we excitedly took advantage of.

On the way back to town, the american couple told us about their 150 baht guesthouse so we decided to try that out. It wasn't too bad, so we ended up staying there, a place called Lanna Guesthouse. We had dinner two doors over at a place called The Buri. We highly recommend this place, the food was cheap but excellent and the staff is incredibly friendly, plus they have an A/C area to sit in. Turns out this is also a guesthouse (a very fancy one), and spa.

This morning we went back to the Buri for breakfast, also very good, and again were impressed by the very helpful staff. They invited us to come back over after we checked out (our guesthouse checkout time was really early) and use the internet for free while we figured out what to do next. We took a look at their rooms out of curiosity and they were very nice. Despite the 1200 baht price, we were actually tempted - it included A/C, refrigerator, TV, free breakfast, free internet, and a free massage (well not free really but included in the price). After discussion though we decided to move on to the next town and maybe find a nice place there that wasn't quite so expensive but was still a splurge. The lady was still super nice even when we told her we wouldn't be staying and she helped us figure out how to get to the bus station to catch a bus to Sukkhothai.

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