Chiang Mai

It would have been easy to just go to Phuket and plant ourselves on the beach for ten days like so many other people who go to Thailand. But we were determined to experience as much of Thailand in our two weeks as possible. It was shaping up to be a trekking vacation. The longest we stayed in one place was about four days.

After Bangkok, we headed north to Chiang Mai via sleeper train.

Chiang Mai is an old walled city and the backpacker hotel we stayed in was inside the ancient city wall. The neighborhood we stayed in was a tangle of little alleyways in which two tuk-tuks could barely pass each other.

While in Chiang Mai, we took several side excursions. We floated down a river on a bamboo raft, rode elephants, and hiked through the jungles. From the school for the blind we got massages that weren’t really so much massages as they were really painful accu-pressure.

We rode zip-lines high up in the canopy of the Thai rainforest which included tromping across several wooden walkways suspended high above the jungle floor. Granted, the zip-line experience was a little touristy, but who cares. It was awesome. We even saw a wild gibbon.

-Jack

Picture: it is pretty standard for Thai restaurants to have a pair of these carved figurines on either side of the entrance. They are called sawadee-ka ladies, which simply means "welcome ladies." We brought one home with us as a reminder of all the good Thai food we've had in Thailand and in Hong Kong.