Chiang Mai – Thailand’s Second Largest City

From the monkey town of Lopburi, we took a 12 hour, miserable train ride up to Chiang Mai. It went from being hot and sticky on the train during the evening to freezing cold in the middle of the night! But, I made it through and we arrived to our hotel at 6am and were able to get a few hours of sleep there before hitting the town. We stayed in the Old City, which is about a one square mile area that houses a lot of boutique hotels, restaurants, massage parlors and some of the historic wats.

Typically this is where many people will go to visit elephant sanctuaries, but we just couldn’t bring ourselves to do that. Very few of the companies offered the ability to just go SEE the elephants and not actually interact with them, and apparently, if the elephant is docile enough for you to give it a bath or cuddle with it, somewhere along the line it has been abused to get it to do that, so it just didn’t feel right. We are going to try to find another place where hopefully this doesn’t happen to go see them.

Wats, wats and more wats

After seeing so many wats in Ayatthuya, I had hit the point of wat fatigue in which pretty much every temple was starting to look the same. Although they are all beautiful in their own way, I found myself neglecting to take pictures because I already have so many, so here are just some of the things I found most interesting in the wats we saw in Chiang Mai. That said, there were two temples here that we had to hike up a pretty big hill to get to, which was part of the adventure in seeing them. We looked like a million bucks all sweaty from our journey, especially next to all the fancy tourists who rode in cars to get to the top of the mountain.

Thai Cooking School

One of the highlights of our stay in Chiang Mai was the cooking school we attended out on an organic farm. This was a fun experience in which the company picked us up, took us too a local market to show us where to find some products, gave us a tour of their organic farm providing information about the types of crops that go into the food, and then taught us how to make five Thai dishes. We were stuffed by the end of the day, but the food was so good! They gave us a cookbook as a parting gift, so once I get home, I’ll try my hand at making it again which I am sure will go real well…

Cat Cafe

I know they have these back home, but when you can go hang out with cats and drink a coffee for less than $2, you have to seize the opportunity. And just look at how cute these cats are!