Chiang Mai pt. 2

For the morning of the 27th, we signed up for a cooking class! The class consisted of the two of us, three Slovenians, and a French woman. We all went together to a local market and got a brief rundown of the main vegetables, spices, and aromatics in Thai cuisine before heading to their premises to start cooking. The class (1600B, about $53 for both of us) consisted of 6 courses and lasted over three hours. We took each dish through the whole process, including toasting our own dried spices and mortar-and-pestle-ing our own curry paste from scratch. It was really fun, and the food turned out really well. Our instructor Rut was knowledgeable, helpful, and very entertaining.

We left the class incredibly full and kind of at a loss for what to do next. We had wanted to get out of the city a little bit, so we went back to the hotel and did some research to determine the best way of going about that. Turns out, it's scooters (sorry, mom!). So we rented us a couple of them and putzed over to the west side of town, taking a recommendation from our friends Keith and Corinne and looking for a trail behind the zoo that leads up into the hills. We found it without too much trouble and hiked maybe a mile and a half uphill to an absolutely gorgeous monastery (Wat Pha Lat) tucked into the hillside, replete with several temples, some amazing statues, a little creek running through it, and an atmosphere of total tranquility that felt like the hopeful parts of a Miyazaki movie.

The next day, we visited a couple little coffee shops (our favorite: Phumokfa), went to a couple more museums (including the surprisingly well-put-together Chiang Mai Arts & Cultural Center), and had another fantastic dinner (khao soi again) and an amazing mango lassi.

On the 29th, we rode the scooters to Bua Tong waterfall (recommended by our friend Taylor). We got up at 6AM and were on the road by 6:30 to beat as much of the morning traffic as possible. The air temperature was about 55, but driving at 60kph made it feel significantly colder, and our hands were pretty numb by the time we turned off the main north-south highway after about 40 minutes of riding. We wound through some adorable little back roads before meeting back up with another, smaller, highway that took us to our destination. The whole ride, including several short breaks, took just under two hours.

We were the first visitors in the park that morning, and we warmed up with a cup of coffee and a gigantic plate of pad thai before checking out the falls themselves. Over the years, mineral deposits from the spring-fed water have created large limestone formations that are super tactile and sticky without being too rough. The end result is that you can walk through the cascades from top to bottom, clambering around on the rocks and up the waterfalls. We had an amazing time scrambling around on the rocks, playing in the water, and soaking in the gorgeous scenery.

After frolicking around for a couple hours, we took a short hike back to where the spring burbles up from the ground. It's a sacred place (replete with an amazing origin story) and there were several pretty large spirit houses nearby with a wide array of offerings.

Rather than drive back the way we came, we planned to make a loop south back to Chiang Mai through the Mae Takhrai National Park, crossing the Mae Kuang Reservoir. For the first half hour or so, we rode on a beautifully paved road that wound through thick woods with almost no other vehicles. As we got nearer to the bridge over the reservoir, we realized that we would have to take a dirt road--sometimes smooth, sometimes deep and soft, sometimes rocky and uneven--up and over a huge promontory covered in beautiful large-leafed deciduous trees. Since we had started so early, we had plenty of time, and we took it very slowly, making sure to be gentle with the bikes. After at least half an hour, we finally arrived at a very modern-looking suspension bridge that allowed us to cross over the reservoir. On the other side, the roads were much better, and we wound smoothly through countryside and small towns for a long way before meeting back up with the motorway for the final 15km or so into Chiang Mai.

All in all, it was an amazing and pretty exhausting day. We grabbed a little bite to eat in town then headed back to our room to chill. Good news for the 'rents, the cumulative effort involved for our 4 hours of riding today has discouraged us from doing a multi-day motorcycle excursion later on our trip. But it was well worth it today. One of our best days so far in Thailand.

Next up: Chiang Dao, then briefly on to Chiang Rai before setting our sights on Laos.

Cooking class & some desserts we made

 

 Pha Lat Temple

Casual master of noodles

Morning scooter ride

Bua Tong waterfall

Chet Si fountain

Dusty ride

Mae Kuang reservoir, from the bridge

Rural scooting back towards Chiang Mai

Chiang Mai pt. 1

We arrived in Chiang Mai at around 6:00PM on the 23rd after a less-than-totally-comfortable nearly 7-hour bus ride from Sukhothai. We walked about 15 minutes through adorable alleys lined with quiet bars, cute restaurants, and atmospheric lanterns to meet up for dinner with Michelle's cousin Bret. We had a great dinner, maintaining the upward food trajectory we've been on since arriving. Michelle had a delicious green curry soup with chicken that was creamy, rich, and mildly spicy and Chandler had a local specialty, khao soi, a rich, spicy flavor bomb of a soup with fish, some veg, noodles, and what looked like crisped onions on top.

The next morning, we slept in for the first time since arriving in Asia--until after 8:30! After an espresso for Chandler and a Thai tea for Michi, we effectively went puebleando for a few hours around the town. We found a super nice market in a small square surrounding a pagoda of some sort with lots of great handicrafts and other nicely-made goods. After a bit of shopping, we ordered an incredible green papaya salad with pickled fish and crab (som tam), and then some super tender pork shoulder over rice with some spicy sauces (khao kha moo). The food was once again incredible, and we really enjoyed eating and people watching in the little market.

It was the first day of the Chinese New Year celebration in Chiang Mai, and we planned to check it out with our German friend, Laurenz, who we met in Ayutthaya. We walked about 10 minutes east, away from the city center, and met him at a big street fair going on with scores of vendors selling food of all kinds. We sampled a bunch of different stuff: a weird Vietnamese sausage, grilled prawns, a super spicy green papaya salad, some bao buns, skewered grilled meat of various kinds, and a multitude of sweets including a baked biscuit that tasted kind of like the inside of a Butterfinger and dragon's beard, a bizarre candy consisting of extremely fine threads made of honey and corn starch surrounding a sweet nutty filling.

Looking to get away from the masses of people a little bit, we walked several blocks over to the Chiang Mai night bazaar. This was mostly knockoff goods and tchotchkes of various kinds, but it was still fun to walk around and feel out the scene. Michelle had picked up Chandler's head cold and was starting to feel a bit crappy at this point, so we decided to head back to the hotel and call it a night.

On the 25th, we actually had a pretty similar day to the day before. Chiang Mai is a town where it is tremendously pleasant to wander aimlessly around, people watch, and kind of just lose yourself in (all of which we were forewarned--or I guess really fore-encouraged--about). So we basically just did that for another day. This day did include a stop at the Lanna Folklife Museum, which had a wide and impressive range of interesting and beautiful artifacts, even if it didn't manage to tell a super coherent story about the region's cultural history. We had another incredible dinner at the same place we ate with Bret and ended the day in another gargantuan street market teeming with goods of all kinds.

We had only booked three nights (Jan 23-25) at our first place in Chiang Mai but wanted to stay on a little longer, so we booked three more nights at a different place on the opposite side of the Old City at Bed In Town. We had booked a private room, but the guy said that room was actually pretty dark and small, so he gave us a five-bed dorm all to ourselves! Our room is amazing with a high ceiling, beautiful double-doors that swing out to a tiny balcony overlooking the street, and, of course, five single beds. Also, the area isn't as cutesy-touristy as where we were before, which makes for an interesting change, and in many ways feels like a completely different city.

We walked around again for a while on the afternoon of the 26th, passing through yet another street market and actually buying some nice art and small souvenirs this time. As evening rolled around, we took a tuk-tuk about 15 minutes south where we had bought tickets for a Khantoke Dinner Show designed to "showcase the traditional Northern Thailand, Lanna, culture." This involved dinner, too, so we sat on cushions on the floor and were served a large meal consisting of several delicious Lanna dishes, many of which had a kind of Indian-ness to them that we hadn't seen in other Thai food. As we finished eating, the performance started, which involved music, dancing, and a sort of vague overarching narration of northern Thai history between stage performances. We both thoroughly enjoyed the performance, which really did feel more like an enthusiastic showcase of some cultural heritage rather than a kind of pandering to tourist expectations that these sorts of "cultural experiences" can sometimes have.

Stay tuned for Chiang Mai part 2, coming soon!

Prepping the papaya salad!

Khao kha moo

Som tam

Grilled prawns with Laurenz

Chinese New Year night market madness

Khao soi

Some sass at the Lanna Folklife Museum

Wat Phantao

Coffeeshop downtime

Khantoke

Fingernail dance

Drum dance

Closing the evening outside

Also no durian :)

Sukhothai

We took a cushy five-hour bus ride from Ayutthaya to Sukhothai on the morning of the 22^nd. The historical park is a little ways out of the main city, so we had to take an open-air bus for about half an hour (30B). We got dropped off right in the heart of the old town, just a couple blocks from our guest house, which turned out to be adorable.

The little town is full of places to rent all kinds of modes of transportation. We indulged a little and got a kind of electric-powered tuk-tuk to putz around the more outlying temples (quite pricey at 200B/hr). We took turns driving (maxing out at about 48kph), constantly reminding each other to stay left, and spent a really enjoyable couple hours cruising around the lovely countryside and stopping at a handful of historical sites. The sun was just setting by the time we returned the vehicle to the guy who rented it to us. 

We took his dinner recommendation and had two really good plates of noodles, some of our best food in Thailand so far. Afterwards, we cruised through a small night market on our way back to the hotel, trying several small market snacks that we hadn't yet had the opportunity to try: fried shrimp cake, strongly-flavored spicy sausage balls, and some savory fried dough balls with a variety of mystery fillings. After eating our goodies, we walked across a small bridge to the beautifully-lit Wat Traphang Thong, in the middle of a man-made pond. It was really a pretty magical scene that is apparently also the site of a famous Phra Ruang legend.

The next morning, we only had a couple hours to spend in the main central temple complex right across the street from our guesthouse. We rented bikes (20B each for a full day) and cruised around the quiet, treed promenades with ruins, pools, and ancient dykes scattered all around us. We wrapped up our ride just in time to pack and catch the local bus back to Sukhothai new city and get the bus north to Chiang Mai. That's next time!

Our kinda ride

View from the back seat

Very large Buddha at Wat Si Chum

Ancient staircase at Wat Saphan Hin

Wat Traphang Thong

Central section of historical park, Wat Mahathat

 

More from the central historical park

Ayutthaya

We had no problem at all getting to Ayutthaya on the 20th. Got extremely cheap tickets at the train station (20B, $0.66 ea), but then discovered that we hadn't paid extra to have assigned seats so we had to stand for most of the 1.5 hour ride with no AC. There were fans blowing vigorously and most of the windows were open, though, so it wasn't too bad. Central Ayutthaya is an island completely encircled by two different rivers, so we took a short ferry across to the island and then walked a couple kilometers to our cute little hotel called Grandparent's Home.

After cooling off for a little while, we walked around the corner and scored some Pad Thai (our first in Thailand) and boat noodles, a savory-bomb national dish that originated in Ayutthaya. By this time, we were right next to the central park and a couple of the temples. We walked around the nearest one, Wat Maha That, dipping our proverbial toe into the ruins water before taking a leisurely sunset stroll around a large public park teeming with swampy ponds, birds, and more temples.
Afterwards, we went to the Ayutthaya night market and finally got to purchase things from Thai vendors who had literally zero English. So we sampled a bunch of things that looked delicious, we had no idea what they were, or both. We had mixed results, absolutely loving the sweet crispy rolls, not really caring for the fruit-shaped mung bean sweets, and ending up more or less neutral on some fried chicken. We also ordered some green veg-and-pork curry from a woman tending a giant bubbling pot. The flavor was rich and creamy and savory and delicious, but this was also the first truly spicy food we've had in Thailand. Michelle took a few bites and sipped quite a bit of the broth, but Chandler really dug in and was absolutely drenched in sweat and panting from the pain in no time.

The next day, the 21st, was Chandler’s birthday! We got up around 5:45AM and walked back over to the park where we had seen the previous night's sunset, hoping to enjoy a similarly lovely sunrise. Although the sun didn't really materialize through the haze until much later, we had a very lovely stroll enjoying the beautiful bridges, small ruined temples, and abundant wildlife, including watching two 4-foot lizards thrash around fighting in the water!

We ended up walking for about two hours until we reached a Thai sweet shop called Baan Kao Nhom on the south side of the island where we sampled several small desserts each individually packaged in banana leaf wrappings. Our favorites were a salty-and-sweet coconut custard and a small pile of sticky rice with a flan-like egg custard on top. 

 
Chandler was coming down with a mild head cold and wanted to rest a little, so we picked up some herbal medicine from the 7-11 and chilled a bit at the hotel before setting out again a little later in the afternoon. We got some more boat noodles then took a tuk-tuk to Wat Na Phra Meri before walking to Wat Phra Si Sanphet. We're recording these names here as much for our benefit as for yours. When we got back to the hotel, we treated ourselves to a super fancy (200B) mango kakigori, a Japanese dessert with shaved ice, whipped cream, fresh mango, and sweetened condensed milk. Unbelievably delicious. 

For the evening festivities, we booked a two-hour boat tour around the island, visiting three temples along the way: Wat Phanan Choeng Worawihan, Wat Phutthai Sawan, and Wat Chai Watthanaram. Some highlights from these three were a massive golden Buddha over 30 feet tall, gorgeous ornate interiors, a beautiful white prang, and a super iconic hazy sunset over the temples and palm trees.
That night, we got an alright meal at the night market and had a beer with a couple of Germans we had met on the boat tour. We bought some fruit for the train ride the next day and turned in pretty early once more.

Next up: Sukhothai.

Boat crossing into Ayutthaya

    

Wat Maha That

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Amazing curry & not-so-hot mung bean candy

Rama public park & Asian openbill stork

       

Birthday goodies

Giant gold Buddha, Wat Phanan Choeng Worawihan

 Wat Phutthai Sawan

Iconic hazy sunsets