Chiang Mai

I spent the last 5 days in Chiang Mai and it was the highlight of my trip so far. The city is fun, lots of markets and shopping but there are also a lot of things to do in the surrounding country side. Because it is farther north, everyone was complaining how very cold it is there at night. I thought it was perfect - it was cool enough in the evening to need a long sleeved shirt on, but that was about it, perfect for sleeping !

The hotel I stayed at was what really made my visit here amazing. The best part about it are the owners. I'm not going to go into all the details here, but they were the most fantastic hosts AND I ate the best Thai food there I have had while in Thailand (well actually the best Thai food ever). The photo to the right is of my breakfast every day. I did not eat all of that food but they just bring it out to you.

I'm trying to keep this post shorter since my others were maybe a bit long for easy reading so... While in Chiang Mai I:


Took a cooking class from the woman who runs the hotel I stayed at (Pepe) I also went to visit an orphanage with Pepe and helped her feed them a special dinner of Tom Yum (Seafood soup). That was a really wonderful thing to get to take part in.


Visited the many day & night markets in the city (Those are crickets in the photo)



Went to the "Royal Flora" horticultural show



Went to an elephant sanctuary. I think this was probably one of the most amazing experiences of my life. You got to feed the elephants and walk down to the river with them and give them a bath !! (I'm a bit guilty about my earlier elephant ride now though) Of course my camera batteries died about an hour into the day so I didn't get any photos of the elephants having their bath !

I took the overnight bus from Chiang Mai to Bangkok last night and I have a flight later today to Siem Reap so I'm just killing time here in Bangkok. Because my time in Chiang Mai was so great, it was bound to take down turn and it did so pretty much as soon as the bus got out of Chiang Mai. Very challenging trip which included being forced to watch a Jackie Chan movie in Thai (The lights were turned out and it was 9PM so I didn't have much choice but to watch. The bright spot is that I didn't really need to understand the dialogue to pretty much follow along with the movie) and being woken up regularly throughout the night by Thai music videos for one pitstop or another. Then while settled in having some coffee after arriving in Bangkok this morning, I realized my sunscreen had come open in my pack and got on pretty much everything. Not much I can do about it till I get to my hotel in Cambodia though so I just moped up as best I could without unpacking and am ignoring the problem for now :)