It was certainly a change to be inland without a beach within reach but for me at least it was a welcome one. Flying into Chiang Mai we saw what looked like from the air to be a fairly tidy city surrounded (albeit at a distance) by rolling hills. On the short taxi ride to the city centre we got our first real look at the place, everything is pretty low level in comparison to thailands main city, Bangkok in everyway from architecture to crowds of people. We decided to stay in the old part of the city which is surrounded by a moat (with fountains and pretty lights at night!). This part of town also has lots of small tree lined lanes which are good to explore on foot, the area being fairly traffic free. After looking at a few guesthouses and finding them all full we found one just down the road from the local produce market with its colourful stalls full of veg, meat, lots of live fish and the occasional skinned frog or 2 and tasty snacks.
A lot of the time we had in Chiang mai we just wandered around taking the place in. We got a motorbike one day although it was pretty crazy driving by the look of it (it is bad enough being a passenger!) as on the main roads there is a lot of traffic. I think that all the traffic put us all off trying to go very far on the bikes so we just went and had a drive around the huge and very impressive university campus before returning to the relative safety of the leafy lanes in the old town area looking at some of Chiang mai's many beautiful wats.
We spent a night walking to and around the 'famous' Chiang Mai night market which was a good way of spending a few hours. It was very big and not many of the stalls sold much of a lot of interest. There were a lot of stalls selling fake football tops, ethnic style necklaces and clothes (i.e. fisherman pants!), other fake designer goods and pretty much anthing else you can imagine. There were some areas which were dedicated to food stalls too where it was nice to sit to relax and recharge for a bit before heading back out to the main shopping areas. We had, had enough of walking after a few hours and so opted to get a rickshaw back to our guesthouse, a luxury i felt we deserved.
Sam and I also took a cookery course one day to learn how to make our favourite thai food. The setting for the course was in a nice leafy garden and it turned out that we were the only participants on that particular day which meant extra attention from our Mr.?. He was a very interesting teacher (although i can't remember his name at the moment!) with a way of speaking which exaggerated various syllables resulting in a crazy sing song voice. We got to choose 5 dishes each and eat them all. We went to the market in the morning where we were given explainations of some of the strange looking produce and where we collected the ingredients for our choices. We then spent the day cooking everything from tom yam to spring rolls and stir fry chicken with basil and fried rice. Sam tried to get the teacher to let him put in about 20 chillies into each dish but we were rationed them to a level he thought that we could handle! The name of the cookery school was chillies, maybe that is one of the reasons that we chose it. We left full with doggy bags for later and a happy knowledge that we could recreate these things at home with the help of the recipe book that we got.
We went to another night market too, this one on a street that is closed to traffic for the event. We got there a little early when a lot of people were still setting up and had to hang around a while before anything really started to happen. It was nice to walk around although it was not as interesting as we had been led to believe by the magazine article which sent us there in the first place. It had most of the usual kinds of things we had seen in other markets but there was some interesting looking food some in the form of big black jelly stuff and some deep fried insects! And it was not all bad as i did find some things to buy!
We also met some really nice people who were part of what must have been one of the craziest trekking groups their guide had seen! Our neighbours in the hotel invited us to meet them for a drink which we happily agreed to and we all went to a bar/all you can eat BBQ down the road. Here the drink was flowing freely and the group were having a good time singing and dancing around. Niall managed to convince the guys playing in the band to let him play which he did to a rapturous reaction from the trekking group. After a couple of hours of manic dancing and a lot of alcohol the guide who had organised this night out, birdie, tried to get everyone to leave to go somewhere else. After another hour of trying to move the party we ended up going to a club/bar called spicy- it was truly terrible even with a few drinks. The crowd was mainly local with a good splash of tourists too there was much crazy dancing and some crazy outfits too. I decided then that i did not fancy ever going back to this place but somehow we did end up going, and it was even worse! I suppose it was a good laugh but mainly because it was so awful!. Some of the people we met in this group were from Scotland and they very kindly took us up to use the swimming pool at their hotel, which was much appreciated as i think we were all suffering from water/beach/swimming withdrawl.
From Chiang mai we had originally planned to go back to bangkok and enter laos at the south and miss out the north but once up north we did not have the inclination to retrace our steps. We ended up with only 2 weeks to experience Laos, which is not a lot as the journeys are so long especially down to the South. We ended up booking some flights with Laos airlines which despite hearing worrying reports on their safety in the past were very good. You even got a snack on flights under an hour and a meal on flights over an hour. Once we had managed to get these flights sorted it was time to leave Thailand and go to a Laos another new place which i had heard so many good things about.
