Chiang Mai - The Adventure Begins!

---

In true Asian style, our train pulled into the station almost an hour late, but our hotel pick-up was waiting for us and took us straight to our hotel. Normally we would not have the luxury of this service and would spend the next 30 minutes dodging tuktuk drivers, bartering prices and scanning maps to gain our sense of direction. While this is all part of the great Asian experience, I must say, it was sorta nice to avoid the hassle for once.

We stayed at the Winner Inn Hotel for 2 nights, as it was part of our "tour" that we booked in Bangkok. The woman who took care of us at the hotel was very nice and accommodating, even giving us the wifi password that was supposed to be hotel staff use only! She went way out of her way to help us in every way and the hotel was fairly nice, a little more than we were used to on our budget!

After getting settled in, we start exploring the amazing city of Chiang Mai. After the hustle and bustle of Bangkok, the relaxed atmosphere of CM was a welcome feeling. We walked along the moat and entered the core, noticing how few tourists there seemed to be, yet how many restaurants were geared to tourists. It took a bit of searching before we found what we believed to be a reasonably authentic Thai restaurant. We both eat Khao Sawy for lunch, a spicy coconut/curry based soup. It was so delicious and became one of our most favourite foods from the whole trip! Of course, we also get our daily dose of mango in shake form.

The rest of the afternoon is spent absorbing the calm ambiance of this amazing city and checking out a few temples. We first visit Wat Pra Sing which is a great Lanna style temple filled with saffron-clad monks and gold decor. Inside the main hall, we were admiring some Buddha statues when Kyle pointed out that one of the "statues" was actually a real monk, meditating among the statues. He was so incredibly still, it was creepy! We also check out a small Emerald Buddha, which is very similar to the one in Bangkok (maybe a replica?) so Meg and I were glad we didn't pay to see it with the guys in Bangkok!

Later we see the famous Sunday market starting to materialize in the streets, so we stop in a jungle-like bar for a drink to watch the empty street fill with colour and crowds. Back at the hotel, we meet with our trek group to get info, and while we were promised our group would be mostly young people, our group consisted of one other young couple, a family with two children (aged 3 and 5) and a couple of retired Quebecois. We had a moment of skepticism of how this trek would go, but the excitement for bamboo rafting and elephant riding quickly took over, and our excitement for the trek returned!!

That evening, we spent hourssss touring the Sunday market. We ate all kinds of food and desserts, checked out traditional souvenirs, handicrafts, dancing, singing and more! Wherever all the people were during the day, they all came out this evening! The streets were packed with people and it was an incredible market experience! Many locals come from all over northern Thailand to peddle their handicrafts to the tourists and there was a great array of tribal gear and spices available.

A few days later, after our two-day trek and full day cooking course, we were back in Chiang Mai city and ready to explore the town a little more. Mike and I spent the entire day exploring the city on foot while Kyle nursed Meg back to help after a scary, but short jaunt to the local hospital. We have to change hotels at this point because our tour package is officially over and we can't afford to stay in this nicer hotel! After moving the luggage around, we have another delicious Thai lunch, where our love affair with coconut curry grows even more!

We head to the Warorot Day Market which is a very fresh and different experience from what we'd been used to seeing. Finally, we had managed to stumble upon a piece of Thailand that was NOT geared to tourists! This market was authentic, cramped and filled with anything and everything you could imagine! There were no other foreigners there and it was quite refreshing! We found a street selling supplies for restaurants and checked out all the stores to find just the right deal on the big Asian soup spoons (8Baht each, roughly 25 cents) and matching chopsticks.

Next we stumble upon a temple that we fall in love with called Wat Bupparam. It's a small temple but the entire exterior of the main building is hand carved wood scenes and it is stunning! Inside there is an emerald Buddha and shine dragon heads on all the rail banisters. All over the temple grounds are various animal statues, including a statue of Donald Duck eating a bowl of noodles with chopsticks! Assah!

Later on, we meet up with Kyle and Meg and visit CM's oldest temple, Wat Chiang Man. It features a quartz Buddha and some nice paintings, but we still can't get Wat Bupparam out of our heads! It was definitely one of the most memorable temples for us. We have feast for dinner including chicken satay, indian curry, northern thai curry, pumpkin curry and rice - yum! If it was all about the food, i would never leave Thailand!

November 5 is our last day in Chiang Mai, but we felt we'd seen most of the city itself, so we rent motorbikes and hit the road to check out some of the smaller villages surrounding the area. This was the first time we (I should say Mike) drove a motorbike where we had to drive on the wrong side of the road (according to our norm!). Our trip out of the city miiiiight have involved a couple (cough, cough) veers into the wrong lane, but we emerged unscathed.

We drive to Bo Sang village, 9km from CM. Here, they specialize in making paper umbrellas. We had expected to see a traditional village, but when we got there, it was just the same as the rest of Thailand - souvenir shops everywhere and more English than Thai. Since we were there, we visited the umbrella-making show room where you walk around and observe locals in various stages of the umbrella making process. It involved such intricate work and is very impressive! As a souvenir, we get a gecco painted on the side of my backpack which is so cute!

We continue on further to another village, San Kamphaeng, which specializes in silk weaving, only when we arrive, we find out that this is no longer a village - it's a rather large city, not exactly what we had in mind! We rode and walked around but failed to find any silk weaving. Fail. We decide to find a nearby hot spring to relieve our sore muscles but also fail to find that one as well. Fail. We later find out that the hot spring was 10 km outside of that village. In all, the day was a little disappointing but we did get some fresh country air and some beautiful scenery.

We arrive back in Chiang Mai just in time to catch sunset at a temple filled with white and gold stuppas. What an awesome sight and a great way to end our journey through Chiang Mai! Later that night we meet up with our friend Ben, who we met in Shanghai and again in Vietnam. We have dinner at a restaurant claiming to have the "best curry in town", and while it doesn't even begin to compare to the curry we had the previous night at Ratana's, it was cheap and still very good! Unfortunately the portions here aren't very big so we end up at McDonald's a short while later to fill the guys' appetites. It's hard to beat a Deluxe Cheeseburger for 39 Baht (about $1.15). While there, we see a local man on an evening stroll with his pet. Elephant. That's right, he was walking his pet elephant through town! What an outrageous sight!

And with that, we end out time in Chiang Mai. We have bus tickets to Soppong at 6am the next morning so we pack and get ready for a winding, bumpy ride to the northern thai countryside. Chaing Mai did not disappoint and was high on our list of great places we visited.

---