The first few days

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Starting out in Chiang Mai

Sorry it has taken a while for us to start this blog. We are writing this for family and friends back home as a way to keep track of what we are doing for the next few months. Hopefully everyone will enjoy reading about our little adventure.

We left Calgary Friday, April 30th at 10:30 pm and after a long few days of travel we arrived in Chiang Mai at 7:00pm Sunday. All in all we ended up taking 4 flights and including layovers we were on the road for roughly 35 hours...needless to say we were exhausted by the time we got here.

Our first night was interesting to say the least.. we definitely threw ourselves into the deep end by deciding to come to Thailands second larges city. First of all we had to get used to the fact that know one understood a word we were saying.. not even the cab driver. He ended up dropping us off at the night market which consisted of thousands of people wandering around in 40 degree heat. We had all of our luggage and we were stumbling around, stepping over homeless people who were begging for money. We stopped numerous times to ask where the Small Hotel was but we soon realized most people in Thailand are out to make money so they tried luring us into their more expensive hotels. We also didn't realize almost all the hotels in Chiang Mai are small in size so this really didn't help the situation.. people just pointed us in the direction of every hotel they could think of. Eventually after stumbling around for half an hour we found a lovely English speaking woman who told us we were on the wrong road. We ventured off in the other direction looking for numbers on the buildings which made no sense at all. Finally we came across our hotel and we were able to drop off our heavy bags. Then we decided we should make the most of our first night by heading back to the zoo that was the night market.

The night market was interesting and we ended up buying a few things but we realized we had work to do on our ability to barter with the locals. We didn't stay long as we were exhausted so we went back to the hotel and along the way I almost lost Ashley in a collision with a motor bike.

Touring the City

Our first day in Chiang Mai we wanted to tour the city so we spent the majority of the day walking around from temple to temple. Apparently there are over 300 temples in the city but we only managed to see about 15 of them. The most interesting ones were Wat Chedi which was a beautiful temple in the heart of the city, and Wat Doi Suthep which is a temple on the top of a mountain. We took a ride out to the base of the temple in the back of a truck and climbed 400 stairs to the top. It was a beautiful view of the city but unfortunately we were unable to go inside the temple as we were not wearing pants (it was hard to wear anything but shorts in 40 degree heat). At the top of the temple there were some beautiful little Thai girls
performing a dance to collect money.. its sad but the people are amazingly happy here despite having very little money. Later that day we had a Thai massage and went out for some curry and spring rolls.. the food here is amazing.

The next day we wandered around and found some good restuarants and we moved to a new guesthouse called Mandala which was a steal at only $15 a night with A/C. breakfast and free wi-fi. The rest of the day was pretty lazy..we toured around the city.. had some more delicious food and tested out a yoga class. Tomorrow we will try cooking Thai food at the Thai Farm Cooking School and later in the week we are thinking about doing a zip line trek called Flight of the Gibbon and Friday we leave for an overnight hill tribe trek. We will keep the updates coming.

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