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Published: February 24th 2010
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Silk Factory
Our first stop on the factory tour. It was interesting to watch them work the silk so fast. Ugh, last night's sleep was about a thousand times worse than the last train ride. They never ended up turning off the main cabin lights, meaning there was a gigantic light just shining on my face all night long. In addition to that and the extra rockiness of the train, I woke up probably every half an hour. This top bunk was tiny and parallell with the train, so that I rolled from side to side and didn't have a bar to keep from falling off. Not the most relaxing experience, but definitely not our worst travel day. 😊
I got out of bed around 7 and we pretty much killed the next few hours on the train by reading and chatting. We'd brought food & coffee with us so that we didn't pay for overpriced, bad train food this time, so that was nice! We were supposed to get into Chiang Mai around 9:45am, but suddenly were stopped on the tracks for about an hour, delaying our arrival until just around 11am.
As we'd booked a package tour through the Elephant Nature Park in Chiang Mai, there was a tour guide with my name on a sign waiting
Traditional Dinner/Show
We sat here for the dinner and performance. for us when we got off the train. As everyone else bargained their way into tuk tuks, we climbed into a fancy air-conditioned SUV with leather seats and breathed a sigh of relief. We'd made it!
The guide took us to our hotel first to check in, shower and just relax for about an hour. We stayed at the 'Star Hotel', a few blocks away from Chiang Mai's leading tourist attraction, the Night Bazaar. More on that another day...
From there, our guide took us on about a 2.5 hour trip to a few different factories/warehouses just outside the city where they make things like silk, silver, umbrellas and gemstones. It was cool, but probably not something we would have necessarily chosen to do on our own had we not done the package tour. Nonetheless, we bought a few trinkets and still enjoyed the time. The guide took us back to the hotel around 3, where we proceeded to nap a little, find some food (Subway) and just walk around the city a little.
Around 7pm, we were picked up in a van at our hotel to go to a dinner/show at the local cultural center, another
The Food
They brought a whole lot of food for us. Since it wasn't vegetarian, they ended up bringing staci her own spread. Martin got to eat like a king! part of our package deal. It was definitely cooler than we expected! As we got there, we were led to our seats on the floor pretty close to the stage area, and they started serving us food...meat, of course. When we inquired about vegetarian food, it worked out to Martin's advantage, as they didn't take any of the meat dishes away and just brought more food for me, giving Martin the equivalent of meals for 2 people! It was all delicious local food and the show that occurred over the next 2 hours was pretty interesting. Lots of hill-tribe dances and such. We got taken back to the hotel around 9pm and ended the night with some beer (Chang) and a video chat with my brother. 😊
Tomorrow, it's off to the Elephant Nature Park, the whole reason we wanted to come to Chiang Mai!
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