We’re up early and off to the airport for our return to Thailand. We’re both pretty sad to be leaving – Vietnam and Cambodia have had that effect on us. Still, more adventures await. Our plane is delayed slightly (and more disconcertingly has no vegetarian not pot noodles available) but we arrive in northern Thailand late afternoon in the former capital city of Chiang Mai. CM dates back some 800 years or so and is based around a central walled old city some one square mile in size (roughly the same as the City of London). It’s fairly low rise though – most corporate buildings are based away from the centre of town and while there are a few big hotels they’re small in number and are no more than around 20-25 storeys max. We’re staying in a small guesthouse called Mandala House which is based approximately midway between the eastern wall of the old city and the night bazaar. Pretty quickly we realise it’s a good location.
Our return to Thailand is odd – prior to leaving, we’d thought of it as being a typical chaotic southeast Asian country, but on returning from Vietnam and especially Cambodia it actually seems extremely westernised, almost civilized! The number of cars is pretty much on parity with two-wheeled transport, and it’s actually unusual to hear a car horn (the opposite is definitely true further east!) It’s weird really, even the tuk tuks seem ‘safe’ compared to their counterparts elsewhere! We also realise that Thailand is quite a bit more expensive that the previous two countries we’ve visited. Not crazily so, I mean, paying the equivalent of a quid (or more) for large beer is fine, but when you’re used to paying well under a dollar you start to notice it more!
Our first evening is spent mostly exploring locally, as is the next day with the field expanded somewhat. We quickly realise that this part of Thailand is definitely where all the hippies now hang out – at times it’s like walking round Glastonbury! There are large numbers of veggie restaurants, lots of bookshops, and loads of shops selling ethnic goods (though at least they’re authentic and locally-produced here!) Chiang Mai has a very strong cultural heritage for the Thais – it’s a national treasure – and as such there are huge numbers of temples here: CM has as many temples as Bangkok despite being significantly less populated. Wandering round we see beautiful temples everywhere, and some of them are genuinely magnificent. There’s also quite a bit of traffic, but compared to Bangkok and more so the previous cities we’ve visited it’s pretty sane really.
After a day of wandering round, sightseeing and getting our bearings, Saturday is also fairly laid back as we’ve got a Thai cookery course booked for the day. We’re picked up at a sensible time and we head to a local market to collect ingredients. After doing the same thing in Phnom Penh we know what to expect, but the local market we’re taken to is an order of magnitude more civilised than the one in Cambodia – there’s no live fish decapitation and wandering ‘free range’ chickens here! The school itself is also a bit more civilised – we can all pick and choose specific dishes we want to cook (six in total) from an extensive list, and actually we participate very closely so see how to cook the stuff that others have chosen too. The ingredients list is very similar to the previous course which is unsurprising given that Khmer cuisine influenced the now-more-famous Thai and Vietnamese food. What is surprising though is the amount of chilli that seems to be added. We were using tiny (and incredibly hot) birds eye chilis and the minimum for more dishes (for one person) seemed to be at least 1-2 (for flavour!) – beyond that the sky was the limit, I used a max of half a dozen in one dish, previous participants had used 40+, and while I consider myself a bit of a chilli head I found the incredible heat (and they really were very very hot) rendered some dishes almost inedible! I may have to customise the chilli suggestions when cooking these back in the UK! The cooking was a lot of fun though (particularly the bits where we got to set everything on fire!!) and if anything, the course was worthwhile purely to learn about the various curry sauces used in Thai cooking (for those who don’t know, red curry is the basis for all other Thai curry sauces). Great fun and well recommended. After we finished the cookery school (and most of the food) we headed back then out to the night market/bazaar. Most places like this in southeast Asia are pretty rubbish – mostly fake goods and overpriced tourist tat – but we were both genuinely surprised by the quality of stuff available. Don’t be mistaken, there was plenty of rubbish (and fake stuff available) but this was mostly outside on temporary street stalls – inside, where the permanent stalls sit there was a lot of good locally produced items including artwork, carvings, hand-painted stuff – kinda like Camden but better and cheaper! Much to my chagrin (and Linda’s joy) we also found a local shipping office and this gave us indicative costs for shipping stuff back to the UK – not cheap, but we’re running out of space (and weight) and there’s so much really good stuff available to buy in CM it’s very tempting to think about shipping stuff back home (and that includes stuff we brought with us that we’ve subsequently realised we don’t actually need!)
Sunday sees us head out of town into the mountains for the first time – we’re off into the hills quad biking! It’s a bit of a trip, maybe 45 mins or so from CM. I last did this in Las Vegas a couple of months ago so had a fair idea of what to expect. Unfortunately, standards we’re not at Vegas levels. The intro and safety briefing last about 15 minutes (accelerate, brake, lights, that’s all you need) and the rider testing was fairly primitive, but hey ho, we’re not in Kansas anymore. Linda and I have buddied up on one bike and we seem to inherit the packhorse – the one carrying all the supplies. It looks OK, but looks can be deceiving. We head out. Sadly, the Vegas comparisons don’t end there – that ride was 95% offroad, this is maybe 25% offroad, which renders things a little, well, unchallenging. The bikes are also a lot poorer – ours has a gearbox malfunction 10 minutes into the ride which eventually gets fixed, but the bike is seriously underpowered for 2 riders – on the steeper hills at full throttle it’s struggling big time, which is a bit of a worry. Still, the actual offroad sections were a lot of fun and it’s definitely nice to get up into the hills even if most of it is onroad. However it’s not an ideal intro to ATV for Linda so we’ll have to try again somewhere a bit better.
Monday is better. We’re off mountain biking down the mountains outside Chiang Mai, with emphasis on the word DOWN – we’re dropped off at the top at around 1800m and descend to around 300m, so 1500m of vertical descent. We’ve picked the ‘easy’ route as we want to ride together. It’s probably 80% offroad and 90% downhill (though the 10% uphill is tough given the heat and humidity). As we head up to the top, one of the guys on our bus tells us he’s heard the route we’re doing is actually “really hard”. These things are always relative – one man’s meat etc. The safety briefing at the top is amusing (I’m in the beginner’s group after all!) then we head out. Truth be told, from my point of view anyway, the route is pretty easy. The scenery is beautiful and amazing to see, but the track itself is unchallenging for anyone who’s done any downhills anywhere in the UK. We pick up a couple more riders (and another guide) partway down but unfortunately we’re a bit late so I miss my opportunity to jump ship and join a different group. We continue down, I’m right behind the lead guide – he’s a decent rider but it’s obvious this ride isn’t testing him either. The guide we picked up partway down is a Danish rider called Nicolai, and he’s a very good rider indeed. A few of us branch off at a couple of points early on and hit some slightly technical singletrack – it’s twisty and fast with a few drop-offs, good fun but only briefly. After exiting the first section Nicolai tells me I should have gone for route 4 instead (the full-on super-technical downhill route!) He’s probably right. Still, we carry on – the route is interesting, sometimes steep, rocky, rutty and/or slippery, but never really too challenging (well, for me, but then I’ve been riding stuff like this for years!) Further down though, the group splits – there’s some really technical singletrack and Nicolai and I depart from the rest of the group and head that way. This part of the ride makes my day completely – it’s genuinely really challenging, super-tight twisty singletrack with lots of roots and drop-offs, it’s also pretty steep and we’re both riding, frankly, fairly shitty hardtail bikes: this is the sort of thing I’d want to be riding on my normal full sus bike. Still, it’s a great test of skills, and with just the two of us we’re able to hit the trails at full tilt, caning everything at top speed – it’s REALLY good fun and has me grinning from cheek to cheek. At the bottom Nicolai tells me this is the sort of stuff they normally ride on route 4 with full suspension bikes (and full body armour!) It leaves me wanting to come back and ride route 4! We regroup again at the bottom – Linda’s ridden down really well, with just a couple of bruises (and an annoyingly late puncture) to show for it – hardly any dabs at all which is genuinely excellent! We stop for a very late lunch by the lake then back to town. We’re almost halfway through our time in Chiang Mai but we’ve still got a lot planned to do here – it’s proving to be a great place!
