We’d heard mixed things about this city, and about our accommodation here, but we loved everything about our stay in Chiang Mai! Northern Thailand is beautiful, and there are so many things to do around this city.
Day 107: Exploring the city of Chiang Mai
My stomach was not feeling great again so we held off doing anything in the morning. Same problem as before, seemingly related to the diet being so different here. Less fibre? It was a little better in the afternoon so we went out anyway.
Being cheap, we decided to walk into the main old city which was a couple of km away. It’s interesting to walk through the streets this far out as you see the real city, rather than the tourist oriented centre. There’s definitely a return of the scooter here, and many canals and narrow waterways amongst the streets. All dotted with wats, like this lovely one we walked past.
The old city is surrounded by a moat and used to be walled. Some of the old gates remain, but this one, the South Gate was totally rebuilt in the last 50 years so it’s not that old.
We wandered through the streets, heading for ‘Cooking Love’ which came highly recommended online. On the way we passed so many restaurants and cafes, as well as massage shops and tour agencies. There were also a lot of tourists here, possibly a higher density than locals, certainly on the streets! It was nice ambling about as the streets were not particularly busy, the temperature was pleasant, and most the cafes had made an effort to look nice, with flowers and wood furniture.
The restaurant we were looking for was actually down a quiet side street, and when we arrived there was hardly anyone there – not what we expected from a top rated Trip Advisor place.
The waitress was lovely and very attentive, and helped us to order as the menu was huge! She recommended the Khao Soi Chicken which was delicious – will definitely be looking this up in other places! The food was great, massive portions and the staff lovely. Possibly our best meal in Thailand, or even travelling so far?
Moving on, we wandered past a bookshop, with second hand and new books, all in English. So many books 😊, including a whole load of fantasy including Eddings and Feist, some of my favourites. Not cheap though at around £5 each. We enjoyed some nostalgia and left empty handed.
There are three museums in the centre, located around the statue of the three kings who founded the city.
We went into the Lanna Cultural Museum, where we expected to learn more about the Lanna (Northern Thailand) people. Whilst it was a modern, well set out museum, with explanations in English, we weren’t that thrilled with it. The Chiang Mai Historical Centre was a bit better, and explained more about the history of the region, and the traditions of the Lanna people.
As with most places, there’s a complicated history in terms of ownership and loyalties, with the city being taken over by Burma for 216 years, and then becoming a municipality of Siam. Unfortunately, all this meant that the Lanna people pretty much disappeared, and have blended into the Thai traditions. Some of their practices have been adopted into the Thai ways though, including their ornate temple style. The Lanna temples are very beautiful.
What was more interesting was that it was Design Week and there were a load of pop up art and design displays going on in the museum grounds. We watched people making tie die cloth and trying their hand at weaving. There was a lot around reimagining of design, and we enjoyed exploring these.
The best was the redesigned hat exhibit, where you could try on the hats people had come up with in an attempt to rethink design. Some were pretty crazy!
We wandered on to the Wat Chedi Luang, which is a large site with a big, ruined brick stupa, a large, modern white temple, with gold leaf which was literally blinding in the sun, and many smaller wooden temples which housed some more unusual Buddhas. One of them tried to explain why women cannot enter some of the temples, but as the explanation was basically that we can’t go in because of our dirty monthly cycle I wasn’t convinced by the argument. Apparently ‘it humiliates and ruins the sanctity’. They know that without that there’s be no men right?
By this point my stomach was uncomfortable and I was done, so we wussed out of the 3km walk back and got in a taxi, picked up some pasta and tuna from the 7/11 and watched a film.
Day 108: Elephant poo and scorpions!
My gut issues were ongoing so we spent the morning doing maths as a family before finally venturing out after lunch.
We were a bit short of time by this point, so got in a taxi to take us north to the Elephant Poo Poo Paper Park. Which is pretty much as it sounds! Here they use elephant poo (and some other animal and plant fibres) to make a sustainable paper.
Included in your entry price is a 20 minute tour. Ours was just us and the place seemed pretty empty. He took us around the different stations, explaining where the poo comes from, why it’s good for paper, how they clean it, colour it and make it into paper. The amount of times our guide said poopoo in his soft voice with thick accent was brilliant. The idea was to find a more sustainable way of producing paper. As a by-product of an animal, sourced locally and requiring no chemicals to clean it they do pretty well in making impact free paper. It does have to be boiled, and needs a machine to mix and press it though.
At the paper sheet making station we got to have a go separating the paper ball into the water filled tray, which has a sieve base so can be lifted out and propped up to dry with the paper in. The kids also got to have a go at removing the dried paper from a frame.
There’s a craft station at the end where you buy a product and can decorate it yourself. The kids made a book each in which they are going to record their favourite memories from each country, so they can look back on it later and remember the fun things they’ve done.
We went back around to read the information too as there are loads of boards about the history of paper. # worldschooling 😊. I didn’t know that making paper from fibres originated in Asia, and that, despite people predicting that our electronic age would remove the need for paper, we actually use more of it today than we ever have! So finding a sustainable way of making paper without industrial chemicals and diminishing materials really is important.
We couldn’t hang around for too long as we also wanted to fit in a trip to the Siam Insect Zoo which was about 4km away. Annoyingly, a Grab taxi to cover this tiny distance was more than the cost to bring us all this way out, so we decided to walk.
The route took us along some lovely back roads initially, where we got some odd looks from the locals – I don’t think many tourists walk this way! But it was taking too long, so when we hit the main road we decided to try our luck hitchhiking again.
After only about 10 cars a couple pulled up in their pickup and, after some discussion as the seemed to think it was back the way we’d come, we got a lift for the 2km up the road. Yay!
This gave us an hour in the insect zoo, which was ok, but we could have done with a lot longer as we ran through most of the information part at the start to get to all the live exhibits. This place was great, with tons of tarantulas in tanks (which no one offered to let us hold thank goodness although there were shed skins with lots of hairy legs which we could pick up – surprisingly soft!).
We were offered a caterpillar to hold as soon as we entered the live area though, and there’s a butterfly garden and an area with loads of stick insect tanks. On the tree in the middle you have to try to spot the different stick insects and then they take some off so you can hold them. Evie really liked the one which impersonates a leaf, wiggling its curled abdomen around like a leaf in the wind. I got the massive one!
Our guide took us around to the lizards, where we could stroke an orange iguana and hold some baby green ones and bearded dragons wearing odd little jumpers…
Scorpions were up next! These ones (Giant Black Scorpions) glow in the dark and they have them in all sizes from babies to adults. The adult ones we could hold. After letting the kids hold them he showed us how you can tell whether they are angry. The best way to do this was of course to make it angry by poking it! Risky business as it opened its claws and raised the stinger ready to attack. Then he scooped it up and covered it with his other hand, when he removed the hand it was back to totally calm! Not a trick to try at home perhaps!
Having let the kids hold these guys, who can sting, although it’s not a bad one, I had to do it myself. Mine was definitely not as relaxed as with the kids though which made me a little nervous. He did calm down though. I say ‘he’, the only way to tell is to get them upside down, which our guide proceeded to do to show us. He’s a brave man!
We just about had time for the turtles and to dig for grubs and then it was closing time ☹.
No I didn’t eat it!
We headed back to the main road to try to catch one of the yellow songthaew buses which supposedly come this way. We had no time to work that out though, as a red one passed us and pulled up to offer us a lift back to town for 100THB (less than the yellow one) as he was driving back that way anyway. Perfect timing and he took us to the Festival Mall rather than the bus station where there’s a Salomon shop. Chris’s trainers have holes and as his Salomon Speedcross 3’s are the comfiest he’s ever worn, he’s hoping for a direct replacement.
This is a massive, modern mall, so it took us a while to find the shop, but not long for him to pick up the latest version which were in the winter sale 😊. Not that it feels like winter for us! There were Christmas decorations up here, some of the first we’ve seen.
It’s been very strange to see all our friends posting their Christmas tree pics and messaging about the xmas lights when we fell so far removed from it. At least Aiden has admitted to us that he no longer believes in Father Christmas, which will make things much easier for us! It always surprises me how well they take it!
We’d expected to get some sort of KFC or McDonalds dinner at the mall due to the lack of options and as a treat for the kids (who never stop going on about McDonalds – how do they manage to have such a magnetism for kids!?). We also quite fancied some junk food too to be entirely honest…
There was no McDonald’s though, only KFC, so we decided to walk to the one on the way home. This turned out to be next to the night market. When we saw the cost and remembered I had to pull the plug though – over 200 bhat for a burger. Knowing we could get four bigger meals for that at the night market I couldn’t bear to spend that much! Luckily the kids agreed with me! We’re so lucky to have such mature kids! Our 900 bhat that we’d have spent at McDonalds went far at the night market. There’s a great area with loads of stalls and tables, so you can get pretty much anything you want. The kids went with their standard pork fried rice and pineapple fried rice, whilst Chris and I went for a pad thai each. Swallowed down with some smoothies for the kids, a beer for Chris (we were sat next to the stand so it’d have been rude not to) and a couple of corn on the cob it was still less than half the price of a McDonalds, and it included some fruit and vegetables!
Whilst we were eating we were treated to some singing and a dance show on the small stage.
We wandered the last couple of km back home to bed.
Day 109: Hiking Doi Suthep and the Hmong village
We tried to get out early today, to get most of our walking done before it got hot. Trying to make use of the public transport, we got a taxi to the bus station at the base of the hill so we could share a songthaew up.
Rather annoyingly, this is a tourist trap, and whereas the normal songthaew on set routes charge only 30 bhat, this was 180 each to get to the top and back. We only wanted one way but that was not an option. A taxi from our place to the top would have been half this and we wouldn’t have to wait until the bus filled with 10 people.
Our plan to walk up and then hop on and off these things around the top looked rather expensive, as these head up, stop at the first point, where you have to wait for the bus to refill before progressing to the next stop and so on. We wanted to get right to the top first and take our time walking back down so we called another taxi.
The drive to the top took around 40 minutes; winding up the mountain past the temple. We were dropped off at the Hmong village towards the top where the Mao/Hmong people live. There are many hill tribes in Northern Thailand (and spreading into the neighbouring countries). Many, including this village, used to grow poppies for opium, resulting in many with addiction issues. The previous king put a stop to this here, gifting each of the families here with crop plants so they could take up farming instead. He is very well loved here.
The village is small, and mainly seems to be made of stalls selling their local crafts, which are quaint winding alleys with barely any tourists. Pleasant. The hill tribes are known for their different dress styles, some of which were available to buy here.
There’s a small fee to enter a little shack museum with some information about all the different hill tribes which was interesting. Especially the feature on the Karen, or long necked people. The thought is that these people put metal rings around their necks as children and then their necks grow longer. Actually, x-rays show that their ribs are pushed down, giving an illusion of a longer neck. If they stop wearing the rings, they should return to normal! It’s believed that they started wearing these rings after the spirits were angered and made the tigers attack the women – neck protection!
(Not our photo exactly – a photo of the photo in the museum…)
Most people then get back in the red buses, or their own cars and bikes, and head back to the temple. Not us. We wanted to follow the paths on Maps.Me and walk to the summit and then all the way down! We had some fairly major difficulty locating the path though, in that it no longer seemed to be there, so we had to amend to another path using more roads. This took us back across the village and up a lot of steep steps to a monastery, from which we walked along the empty, mossy road through the forest to the main tarmac. Along the way we heard a commotion in the trees and saw what we think was a civet 😊.
On the main road we saw a bit more traffic, but not much as it only goes to the campsite and viewpoint. The views over the village were nice, but the air is really not clear at the moment. Feeling a little peckish we bought some of the most delicious grapes from a vendor there and enjoyed them on the little bench.
The top was not far, but as it’s tree covered you can’t see anything! After that bit of hill climbing it was time to start our way down the steep slopes of Doi Suthep. Luckily, this path was easy to find and follow, taking us through some small ruins along the way.
The going was slow, with the path fairly overgrown at the start. I have never had so many spiders webs in my face! For some reason we were walking in height order, so each of us got a few in the face. In the end we stuck Chris in the front and things got a lot better for the rest of us (but worse for Chris of course!) 😊. We hit a wider trail and planned to make better progress, but it went down so steeply, and was largely washed away so we had to be careful not to slip.
By the time we reached some easier trails we were getting pretty hungry! We powered down the path and then the road until we reached the area around the temple. Here there are tons of food and souvenir sellers, and a couple of restaurants. We picked the first restaurant we saw with a toilet, which was now also high on the needs list, and sat down to our usual favourites – fried rice, Pad Thai and Khao Yai.
Feeling refreshed, we contemplated the temple. Here there were hordes of people, and lines of tour buses turning up. Not our favourite place, and you have to pay to enter. Were we that bothered about seeing another gold temple? Not really. So we continued on the route down, taking a road to the side of the temple and looking for our path off, which we couldn’t see…
Then we saw signs to the viewpoint, which we do like, up some stairs through a monastery. We followed the path up, got directions from a monk when it became unclear and emerged in the temple grounds, on the side of the hill with great views over the city.
Seeing as we were here, we thought we’d take a peek at the temple. We did feel a bit bad about not paying, but there are signs up and monks waving you through so…
We took the main stairs down and walked down the main road to where the Pilgrims path comes off, seeing as our other path was proving so hard to find…
The Pilgrim’s trail is well travelled, so easy to find from the road. The final 4km down. It was steep and rough again most of the way down to the mid point at Doi Suthep. Aiden slipped a couple of times but didn’t seem to mind.
Pha Lat Temple was one of the most peaceful places I’ve ever been to – it was like stepping into another world when we wandered into the overgrown courtyard with vegetation covered statues, benches in nooks and crannies, set next to a fast flowing stream with a small fall. Only accessible on foot, this place is especially for meditation and we could see why people would come here. I may be back!
The path was a little leveller and easier heading down through the final foothills to the back of the zoo, which was good, as we were tired, with achy knees, by this point. At 14km on some difficult terrain this was no stroll through the woods! We were very proud of the kids for managing it with barely a moan; we were struggling to keep up with Evie by the end in fact!
After walking the road back into the town proper, we went to call a grab, but passed a red songthaew who offered us a lift back for slightly less. Done!
We had some pasta, tomato sauce and vegetables in the apartment so didn’t have to go anywhere to eat thank goodness – our feet needed a rest. Kids were out like a light 😊.
Day 110: A more traditional way to make lunch
We were pretty excited about today’s trip; it was expensive, but sounded fun as it promised foraging for mushrooms and berries, fishing for your lunch, using local materials to cook and exploring their organic gardening. We were having some trouble finding out where it was though, and ended up with three possible sites. They sent us an address so we ordered a taxi to take us there.
No one there… We had a phone number so our driver called them and we got to listen to their rather heated conversation. Which didn’t really seem to help! What followed was about 20 minutes of us driving around with Buti (the host) on the car phone, the taxi driver stopping to ask for directions from numerous people and then an English speaking lady (Ann from Sweden) telling us to find bridge 18 on the canal road. No idea where that was as we’d come in from the south. We eventually decided to head for another spot on the map, one of the other possible sites, found bridge 18 and all their signs to their place and made it. What a faff!
We tried to offer our driver some extra cash but he wouldn’t take it. How nice 😊.
We were half an hour late for the tour, but the two others were meant to be joining were also lost so we sat around with some home grown rosella tea, waited and chatted to Ann. She’s retired and spends 6 months of her year here at the farm stay, as her children both live and work in Thailand, and 6 months in Sweden.
The difficulty in route finding was to do with some other lady they know using their name at the other site or something, but they had sent me that address rather than their own for some reason! The other two possibly turned up and left saying they needed to do something. They never returned so we ended up with a private tour effectively.
The farm stay is pretty rustic, with a few bamboo bungalows and toilet blocks, a cooking area where we were based, with a brick fire area, fridge, gas burners and sinks. There are fruit trees and vegetable patches dotted around the gardens between trees and flowering bushes. All this is set within farmland and jungle – we could see why Ann wanted to spend time here; it’s very peaceful.
Chris got the fright of his life though when he went to the toilet and there was a long, green snake in there (spotted mid flow haha)! I’m not sure who tried to get out of there quicker! Apparently it was not poisonous and it’s going down as one of Chris’s Thailand highlights – our first SE Asia snake!
After taking the ducks some scraps whilst we waited, job one of making lunch was to go off and find some worms. Not for us to eat thank goodness! For the fish. As there’s been no rain for a while the conditions for worm hunting were not great, but it was a task that the kids loved! Eventually we had enough and headed back to the sizeable duck pond where Buti produced some fishing poles. Bamboo canes with some line tied round and a hook and float on the end. Simple! Now we had to sacrifice our worms to the fish. Many of them were pretty maimed anyway from the digging tools, so I tried to use them. Didn’t make the task of impaling them on the hook, passing it all the way up their insides, any more pleasant though… sorry worms….
I wasn’t sure that the murky little pond would hold many fish, but Aiden’s had many nibbles and within minutes we pulled up a fish! Sure it was a tiddler, but it was also success! Aiden seemed very pleased with himself. At around 10cm long it should have been easy to handle, but I’ve never held a living fish before and it was thrashing about and erecting the spines on its back which made it hard to keep hold of. I managed to get the hook out of its mouth but dropped it onto the floor rather than in the bucket. Slippery little ******.
Lunch was looking a little skimpy for a while, until an extra line was made and Chris was set up at the other end of the pond. It took him a while, but once he got one he caught three in pretty quick succession! Big (ish) ones too! Aiden caught another one at the same time so we were running back and forth with the fish bucket! The kids wanted to try Chris’s end as he was getting the big ones so we moved and, with Chris’s help, Evie caught a big one too.
With the fish being kept fresh in the water bucket, we wandered into the gardens to cut a bamboo stem.
It had to be the right thickness so that there’s a reasonable sized hole in the middle which can be stuffed with a mix of sticky rice, black beans, sesame seeds and coconut milk.
Before we could cook them we needed a fire though. Aiden in particular took great joy in lighting the fire (we used lighters to set some wood sticks on fire) and taking care of it.
The bamboo sticks are placed in the fire. As they are fresh they don’t burn properly, and instead the coconut milk inside is heated until it boils, thereby cooking the rice. Clever.
Whilst they were cooking, it was time to prep the fish. I was pretty impressed (or horrified – I’m not entirely sure yet..) by their skill and lack of concern about killing their fish. I had said that if you’re prepared to eat it you should be willing to kill it and they did it like professionals!! We weren’t sure how we would kill them until Buti brought out what was basically a rolling pin, or club, fished one from the bucket, dropped it on the floor, and then, once it took a rest from flapping, whacked it firmly on the head. The kids followed suit – more squeamish about touching the wet fish than the killing…
Of course, I then had to follow through with my own words, and sadly was not as effective, succeeding in only knocking my fish out. How do you know when a fish is dead? When it doesn’t start flapping again shortly after! Next step, gutting. No hesitation from the kids here either, they were excited to draw bits out and try to work out what body part it was! That’s probably my fault, as, being a biologist at heart, we often disect our dinner as a biology lesson!
After descaling and washing, the fish were ready to be fried in copious amounts of oil, mushroom sauce and lemon.
We should really have put the little one back as it didn’t have much flesh on it at all! Unlike me, who hates eating bones, gristle, skin, fat etc, Evie is totally un-squeamish about what part of a fish she eats and once we were done she had a second go, hunting out the brains to eat (should we be worried??). It was literally a pile of bones left at the end and some fins.
After all this effort, and the sacrifice of the worms and fish, I ended up thinking it would have been much simpler to just cook some beans – and no animals would have been harmed in it’s making. Fishing is definitely not something I’ll be taking up, but as an experience it was a good education for all.
We had thought that this was our lunch, but then Buti offered to cook Aiden some fried rice as he hadn’t enjoyed the bamboo sticky rice. We thought this would be a small portion, but she produced vegetable after vegetable and loaded them in the pan on the fire. There was a good portion for four here and it was the best fried rice we’ve had. I ate so much! Whilst we were enjoying this, Buti kept bringing out more food; spicy chutneys, a salad, black beans, plain sticky rice, rosella tea, jackfruit juice, black bean cake (see it’s not just me who makes deserts out of black beans!) and a purple sticky rice pudding. We were so full!
We had been rather disappointed that we hadn’t gone anywhere to ‘forage’ for mushrooms and berries, as we’d been looking forward to that bit, the kids included. From asking some questions, we discovered that in the dry season there aren’t really any out in the jungle, or many in the vegetable patch, so mushrooms, vegetables and fruit are brought from the market.
That should have been it, but Buti offered us a walk in the jungle so we joined in, heading up the hill to a viewpoint of Chiang Mai. It was a bit too hazy to see anything but it’s lovely country here, green and hilly. The government gave them lots of trees to plant out here a couple of years ago to help reforest.
Back at the farm stay, our options home were a taxi back, or to get a motorbike taxi into town and get the yellow songthaew bus from there. We wanted to do that as it’s cheaper, more sustainable and more fun! We were both rather nervous about the motorbikes though (the kids were excited), as I’ve never ridden one before and Chris knows a lot of people who have had some very serious motorbike accidents. They’re not big, fast ones though and she’d already called them so we went with it.
With an adult and a child riding pillion with the drivers we set off up the sand track, rather than the road, which rather worried me after experiencing how slippy sand is in Bagan! No issues for my driver though, he was very confident. On the roads we were going a lot faster than I had on the ebike, and Evie and I had no helmets! Trying not to think about what would happen if we did happen to crash I tried to enjoy the ride through the scenic country and Evie’s delight – she really is a little adrenaline junkie! Chris was not having such a good time as his rider was a bit nervous, especially on the sand, which doesn’t help with trust! I was very happy I had my chatty, skilled guy and Chris was very happy that the ride didn’t last long!
There was a yellow songthaew already waiting so we hopped in and he departed within minutes. I still have no idea how regular these things go, but it worked for us 😊. Locals hopped in and out as we travelled to Chiang Mai; most of them joining us to the final stop in Waroot market. From here we walked the km or so back to the night market we’d been to a couple of nights ago as Evie was desperate to go to the fish spa and have one of the chocolate desserts we’d passed on before.
After our massive walk yesterday, we were all a little achey, so we ended up in the fish spa for 20 mins, then getting a foot and calf massage whilst eating chocolate pancakes. Not a bad way to spend an hour!
The kids loved the fish spa, especially Evie, who could hardly bear to have her feet in, but also seemed to love it so her feet were bobbing in and out all over the place! Having fish eating your feet is a pretty odd feeling, but I rather like it!
Whilst we’d had a lovely, relaxing day at the farm stay and eaten some nice food, it was not worth the money we’d paid, which was a shame. And we’re now overbudget for Thailand ☹. At least we’d been sent home with some leftover bamboo sticky rice and the melon/orange fruit thing so we had some snacks for dinner to top up our pancakes.
One more stop in Thailand to go, Chiang Rai and its temples (coming soon). If you missed our travels through the fascinating Ayutthaya and around Khao Yai National Park catch up here.