Our Year of Wonder: Chiang Mai

Chiang Mai was one of the locations that we had decided a long time ago to make one of our rest areas/pit stops. So we did get a lot of school work done and got caught up on bookings, but still had a few activities to enjoy during the almost 2 weeks that we were here.

The AirBnb we stayed at wasn’t available the first two nights after we arrived so we spent those nights in a hotel right in the old city. In looking at online reviews for a place to eat the first night, we stumbled on this highly rated restaurant called “Its Good Kitchen” one block over from our hotel. I was a bit hesitant thinking the name was a little strange but it ended up being our favourite place to eat the whole time we were there. Turns out that names like that are common in Chiang Mai. A coffee shop we went to was called “Brain Awake”.

They had the best Pad Thai in town in our opinion and almost everything else we tried there was excellent as well. We could get four meals for about $8-$10 USD.

After a number of trips there we even got to know the staff a bit which is always kind of fun.

The old city of Chiang Mai is still surrounded by a moat and parts of its old wall still exists. However, the most prevalent features are temples; they are everywhere in the city (old and new). You could have spent a whole week just touring all the temples if you were so inclined. We walked around one or two of them and walked by or drove by a lot more.

Wat Phrasingh was one of the main ones by our hotel, and quite stunning at night.

The golden buddha by our AirBnb and one of the many temples we stumbled upon.

This is actually the view from the 2nd floor of the Brain Awake Cafe and from here you can see three separate temples if you look closely (the roofs with the horns at the tips). That pretty much sums up the density of temples in some areas of the city.

The moat and some of the old wall.

We had heard that there were night markets in Chiang Mai but didn’t understand the scope of them until we went to them. The Saturday night market started at the south gate of the old city and headed SW outside of the city for about 1 kilometer. The Sunday night market was down the center of the old city for about 1 1/2 kilometers but also had a North to South road that intersected for about 500 meters or so. The streets were closed down to traffic and allowed only pedestrians. Lots of arts and crafts, clothes, and food and not too much repeating. And lots of people!

It’s hard to capture how massive it is. This video is of the Sunday night market at the cross section of the main East to West road and North to South road with stalls going in every direction.

A lot of the artisans were actually working at their booth so it was cool to watch them do their thing.

One of the artisans was this guy on the left. Marika had met the lady at the Saturday night market and had bought the handbag she is wearing. The lady had said that her boyfriend made those bags and when we saw her again at the Sunday market, her boyfriend was there and excited to see Marika wearing and using the bag she had bought the night before.

Lots of street food!

Thai foot massages on the street!

We did two paid excursions during our time in Chiang Mai. The first was a Thai cooking class. It was amazing and a lot of fun. You started off in Chiang Mai with a menu that was a list of apps, soups, mains, and curries. There were choices in each category and we deliberately made sure we tried everything. Next we had a guided walk through a food market with them explaining a lot of the ingredients we would be working with. The actual cooking class was a short bus ride to the edge of the city out in a quiet little farming area in some open air facilities where they had a lot of the raw ingredients washed and prepped taking a lot of the tedious work out of it. The food was amazing and we had leftovers to bring home.

Lessons at the food market.

Our kitchen area and lining up for the first lessons.

The whole class: Canadian, Italian, Dutch and Norwegian.

The other Canadians and our teacher.

The second excursion we did the following week was to an elephant sanctuary. It was a pretty small one with only four elephants; two adult and two younger ones. They were scheduled to get another one a few weeks later. We learned about how important elephants are in the culture here over the centuries (the equivalent of horses in Europe) and then we got to feed them fruit, walk with them in the jungle while the elephants foraged on their own and then gave them a mud bath and washing down. The elephants had a pretty set routine and they definitely knew what was happening when. It was pretty amazing to see them walking around in the woods and how they could easily maneuver up and down these steep hillsides.

The base camp.

Feeding time was followed by a walk in the woods to allow them to eat more. They need to eat a lot!

We followed the elephants up a hill and then they started each kind of going their own way and you could follow which ever one you wanted. A few minutes later we heard this crack sound and one of the guides said that the matriarch had found a tree she liked and was knocking it over. I got there in time to see the last push. They are strong!

This is the tree she knocked down and once she did, all the rest came to eat those leaves. The guides also started to peel some of the bark back and the elephant would finish pulling it off and they would eat the bark as well.

After all that eating, it was bath time.

After our time with the elephants, their keepers fed them some more while we got to eat lunch. Our lunch was some rice and meat wrapped up in a banana leaf and the elephants knew when we were done and came begging for the banana leaves by laying their trunks across the raised platform we were on. It was pretty cute.