Advertisement
Published: February 18th 2009
Edit Blog Post
First day getting into Bangkok, I tipped 100 Baht (just under $3) for a 450 B massage. (Which I thought was incredibly cheap given that it was 2 hours and they really crack your spine and so far no dissection symptoms).
Today, I walked a mile to save 40 B (just over $1). And went to several different shops to save 5 B on ice cream.
Didn't take long for the conversion by 35 times to not really matter, and 100 B, instead of being less than $3, seem like 100 again. So those brochures of pretty little fusion restaurants lie scattered around the room, and lunch and dinner consisted mostly of 25 B noodle soups, 10 B sausages, and 5 B fried bananas. But I do love this grazing kind of eating, a bit here and there all throughout the day.
I took a cooking class with Baan Thai cooking school. It's an all day affair with a market trip introducing the different ingredients and then 5 courses, including making curry paste from scratch. Cooking Thai food was much easier than I thought. I made shrimp stir fried in curry, tom yum, papaya salad, green curry with
eggplant and water chestnut in coconut milk for dessert. Other people in the group made different dishes and we all tried each other's dishes until I poisoned them with my much-too-spicy papaya salad.
Chiang Mai is more touristy than Bangkok, but in a very convenient way. I live in a corner of the inner city, not even on a busy street, but 2 steps outside the hotel are 3 cute little restaurant/bars, an internet cafe, and 2 massage places, with so many more just around the corner. Makes the constant grazing easy too. The little bar just across the street apparently is an expat bar, filled with the French and the German that can easily sing along Thai pop and speaking much better Thai than English. The only weird thing about Chiang Mai is the lack of true public transportation. Everyone gets around either in tuk-tuks, or the cheaper pick-up trucks that you sit in the back, somewhat like farm animals being carted in America.
Chiang Mai is the base for "trekking" around Northern Thai hill country. I booked with a guesthouse around the corner. Wanted to do the 3 night 2 days trip, but not enough people
signed up for it so I ended up going with the 2 day 1 night, which really isn't so much a "trek" but rather a hike. We were a girls only trip - eight 21-30 year olds from Germany, Canada and Australia. The first morning started easy, a stop at a water fall (too cold to swim in the morning) and a hot spring (of course, now too hot at noon to swim again). Then the "trekking" part starts. By not really being a trek by no means meant it was an easy hike. Only 9 km, but there was very little flat, and only up or down hill. We stopped at a couple villages along the way, reported being a Karen and then a Lahu one. But everyone now wears T-shirts and I suppose it's the more authenic experience that they did not dress up just for us popping in. The villages are much the same, with bamboo and wood houses on stilts (keeps out snakes?) and pigs, dogs, chickens, cows in various stages of sleep. After 5 hours, finally we reached the overnight Lahu village, just by the river. And this time, it was almost too cold in
the evening to swim again. We all jumped in anyways, trying to bathe off the dirt and sweat just before the sun goes down while the villagers and our two guides (who grew up in the first village that we stopped by) made dinner. Post-dinner entertainment was suppose to consist of fireside sing-alongs, but since the guitar-playing boys only knew Thai pop and we only knew English songs, it turned out more like the eight of us sitting for a show of Asian boyband performance. The night was remarkably cold and I slept completely tucked inside the blanket, not too badly with some help from vitamin "A" despite the early-riser roosters screaming just under our stilted hut. The morning was beautifully misty. Our elephants walked up to camp as the guides made bamboo rafts freshly from scratch. In the mean time all the girls were entranced by the two tiny puppies frolicking around the dirt. The cool morning scenary was gorgeous during the elephant ride and bamboo rafting. I brought my disposable camera so pics are yet to come.
And yes I did see a snake! Not on land but at the very end of rafting, a brightly yellow
and red small python swam along the shore about 10 feet away. It was quite pretty actually and I survived our encounter but not at all wishing for more. Otherwise there were surprisingly little visible animals, except a bunch of brightly colored butterflies and dragonflies. It's hard to imagine that elephants live in these hilly forests.
Tonight is the last night in Chiang Mai. Booked a Khantoke dinner, which is suppose to be a Northern Thailand (Lanna kingdom) style dinner served on a bamboo platter that you eat with your hands. A touristy sing and dance performance comes along with it too.
Very early bus trip to Lampang for the Elephant Conservatory, which I hope would be a much closer encounter than the brief ride on the trekking trip. More to come then...
Advertisement
Tot: 0.062s; Tpl: 0.012s; cc: 7; qc: 44; dbt: 0.0384s; 1; m:domysql w:travelblog (10.17.0.13); sld: 1;
; mem: 1.1mb