Thailand Travels, Day 4-5

Chitraroff Blog Thai Entry

Bangkok, Thailand, Day 4-5

Tuesday, 11/22

"Sang Tau”  Taxi truck with two benches

“Taow rai” How much is this?

“Hong nam yoo tee nai”  Where is the toilet?

Well, it was exciting to move out of Bangkok for some more rural action.  I have to admit that we were pleasantly surprised in Bangkok for how friendly the residents were and how safe we felt while walking around the city.  Prior to leaving, we had this vision of danger, corruption, violence and chaos.  We really didn’t find any of that through our traverse of the city.  It was more interesting than others suggested.  With traveling its always good to take peoples warning and recommendations with a grain of salt and just see it for yourself and make your own impressions, instead.

We opted to take a domestic flight from Bangkok (central Thailand) to Chiang Mai (northern Thailand) instead of the all-day overland train ride.  Our flight was only an hour, so it was very easy.  We stayed at a hostel but had a private room to house us all.  The best thing about our hostel, TCH house, was that it was situated on the main street where the Sunday night market occurred.  Now, we’ve been to some night markets before, but nothing even came close to the Chiang Mai market.  It seemed like the entire Old City was filled with vendors and the streets were packed.  In about 2-3 hours time, we took care of most of our Christmas shopping.  We found so many handmade items in the 100-300 $BAT range ($3-10 US).  The problem is that now we have to stuff those items in our already bulging backpacks.  

Besides sampling food from the many street vendors, Kahlo located THE vendor of desire...the frozen flat plate ice cream curls “  “.  The boys had watched YouTube videos of these vendors months before our departure and it was one of our missions to locate them.  The mixing method is similar to ColdStone creamery but the final product were these ice cream curls scraped off this frozen plate.  I had blueberries mixed with vanilla ice cream...yum!

If you’ve ever travelled to Guatemala, then Chiang Mai is a spitting image of Panajachel and Lake Atitlan.  It is a very hip town with coffee houses, yoga studios, thai massages, and artisan vendors.   There’s definitely a young, early 20’s college town vibe but not a lot of late night partying.

One of our highlights in Chiang Mai was a visit to “The Faces” cafe and museum that contained all of these terracotta statues, masks and artwork.  The pieces were assembled under this canopy of lush vegetation that had a jungle-like feel to it.  Chiang has a lot of temples “WAT”, but the most dramatic one that we visited was a very rustic one with incredible grounds and housed Thai monks studying their craft.

From Chiang, we took a Sang Tau up into the highlands of Mae Wang where we will stay at the Elephant sanctuary.  When we arrived the change in weather was immediately apparent and for once we needed our long sleeves and long pants. From the road we had to cross a suspension bridge over the river to get to Chai Lai Orchid.  Immediately, they handed us ice cold coconuts to drink.  Once finished, we walked over to the elephants and fed them the coconuts.  They had no problem crushing and eating them with their massive mouth and jaws.  We were amazed at the force they exerted to crush the coconuts.  

We decided to join a Thai cooking class for our evening meal, so we traveled into a local and authentic vegetable and meat market in Mae Wang to get supplies with one of our hosts.  When we returned they set us up in this outdoor kitchen in the jungle.  They let each of us prepare our own dish and we cooked and ate sauteed morning glories, Thai green curry soup, Thai mango chicken, and mango sticky rice for dessert.  We were all so stuffed from our feast that we fell into a deep food coma shortly afterwards.  The family continued to sleep and I woke back up at 9pm to finish my book, The Revenant.

The next morning we woke up at Chai Lai Orchid, had an incredible breakfast, and embarked on an ethnobotany hike up to the Mae Wang waterfall.  Our guide, Sing, was a local native and a total comedian. He showed us the local plants including the sensitive plant, a plant that turned our hands bright red when crushed, one that produced soap bubbles and another that smelled like farts.  We crested past the waterfall and continued up to a swim hole on the river where we floated down a rock slide and where they prepared lunch for us.   

We finished the hike, then the family hopped in the back of a pickup truck and drove to the put-in for our bamboo raft trip.  They loaded up 3 of us per raft and the guide use a long bamboo pole to navigate the twists and turns of the river.  We had a few close calls as the 25’ rafts side swiped rocks and dipped into the vegetation along the banks of the river.  We continued floating past elephants bathing on the river and they dropped us right at our riverside accommodations at Chai Lai.  

Our adventures continued to the next stage as we fed the local elephants sugar cane then boarded them bare back style for a walk through the jungle.  Going downhill for me was extremely stressful as I felt myself come close to going over the bars as my legs came out from behind the elephants ears.  Our guides used only voice commands to direct the elephants to stay on the trail.  Leslie was absolutely in a state of bliss as her lifelong dream of riding elephants came into fruition.  One of the highlights for me was bathing and scrubbing the baby elephants in the river and then being lifted up by their strong tusk and head.

The evening came to a wonderful close as we enjoyed Thai food prepared from the kitchen while engaging in great conversation with travelers from all over the United States.  We finished off a couple of bottles of Thai rum with our fellow travelers and laughed into the night from everyone’s funny stories.