Chiang Mai has become our hub for exploring Northern Thailand. In total we have spent 6 nights here, but split into 3 blocks between other trips.

We arrived in Chiang Mai on the 15th January after taking an overnight train from Bangkok. Oh what an experience that was. We knew we would be taking quite a lot of overnight trains and buses to get around South East Asia and had heard good things about the train from Bangkok to Chiang Mai. Unfortunately, when we came to book our train 9 days before we wanted to travel we couldn’t get tickets on either train we wanted to. All the blogs we had read said 2 or 3 days before and here we were 9 days before unable to get tickets. There are 2 modern trains that leave between 6 -8pm from Bangkok. We couldn’t get on those, but managed to get a more ‘locals’ train that was due to leave at 1.45pm and get into Chiang Mai at 4am the following day. Our seats were second class fan (the best on the train) and they converted into sleeper beds at around 8pm so we could sleep. The cost was 650 baht each (£14 ish).

We arrived at the train station after an interesting uber car ride. Even though the driver was following the GPS location I put in when I ordered the taxi we ended up at a hotel rather than the train station and the ride took us 1 hour due to Bangkok traffic. After he finally got us to the right place we saw that our train was 15 mins late. No biggy. We expected some delays. What we didn’t expect was that every 15 minutes or so the train would get delayed more and more. To the point where we didn’t leave until 4.30pm. Nearly 3 hours late. We didn’t mind so much because that meant we would arrive at about 7am. A far more reasonable time than 4am. For 3 hours we sat on our bags on the platform with all the other travellers. We enjoyed some bubble tea and some bbq corn on the cob and read our books.

When we finally did get on the train we were pretty impressed. We had an attendant for the carriage who was making sure all the beds had bedding and engineers came through and fixed broken fans and seats. Simon had a good laugh watching one engineer ‘fix’ a fan by twisting all the wires together and taping them. It worked though. We finally set off and got to look out over Bangkok from our giant window.

About an hour in we ordered some food to our seat for about 60baht each. I had a spicy chicken stirfry thing with rice and fried egg and Simon had a chicken curry with rice and a fried egg. His was pretty spicy though! Even though there was no warning. After we had eaten the attendant came through and started flipping the seats into beds. The upper bunk is a little cheaper and designed for smaller people so I would be up there. As our attendant made my bed he found that it wouldn’t lock in so he took one of my straps that would stop be rolling out and tied the bed down. I started worrying that I was going to fall out, but luckily I didn’t.

We both slept on the train, but not massively well. I probably got about 5 hours of interrupted sleep as the train braked very hard quite often throughout the journey.  We made it to Chiang Mai at about 7.30am. Took a uber to our accomodation and settled in for a few hours more sleep before we started to explore.

We had one full day in Chiang Mai before we headed off to the Elephant Nature Park to volunteer for a week (I will discuss this in a separate blog) so we decided to explore the temples and the old city.

Chiang Mai old city is absolutely full of temples, 200 to be precise. Everywhere you turn there is another beautiful temple (Wat). There is a phrase among travellers ‘Once you’ve seen one temple, you’ve seen them all’. It’s true. They’re all very beautiful, but they do become quite similar. We visited on this day:

Wat Bupparram

Wat Phra Singh

Wat Chiang Man

Wat Saen Muang Ma Luang

We also saw the 3 kings monument in the old city, as well as the Thaphae gate on the East side. Other than that we really just enjoyed the feel of the place. It is more relaxed and the people are far friendlier than in Bangkok. I read a lot of blogs before travelling and many of them were written by expats living in Chiang Mai. I can really see why they’d settle somewhere like this.

That night was the Sunday night market so we headed back through Thaphae Gate on the Eastern side of the old city to see what was on offer. The night market starts at about 4pm and finishes around midnight. I think we were a bit silly in that we went at 7pm which turned out to be peak time. It was packed. We found ourselves in a sea of people getting swept down the road. It was quite difficult to stop and look at stalls, but we could see that everything was of far better quality than the Bangkok markets we went to. Our first aim was to find some food. We shared some meat on a stick (pork sausage and chicken) which was very good, a Pad Thai omelette, also very good and lots of fruit juices and fresh fruit. We bought 3 pairs of hareem pants between us and saw so many other things we would have loved to buy, but can’t because of space. One of the temples was all lit up and there was chanting happening from inside, which was great to hear. We never reached the end of the night market and spent over 2 hours walking around. It is unbelievably massive, but we loved it. So much so, we went back briefly the following Sunday after returning from the Elephant Nature Park.

After returning to Chiang Mai from the most amazing week at the Elephant Nature Park, we met up at a bar called the 2gether bar with some more of the volunteers. We enjoyed our first non-vegan meal in a week and relaxed with the others whilst drinking a few beers. We briefly walked through the night market again as we headed to another bar to see some of the other volunteers. I enjoyed my first taste of Japanese Mochi icecream. I went for a safe flavour, cookies and cream. In mochi the icecream is surrounded by a pounded sticky rice shell. The same consistency of marzipan without all the disgustingness. We had a lovely time that evening and are hopeful we will see some of the others again in the future.

The next day we needed to recover. Getting up at 6am,then doing chores at the elephant nature park, being in the sun all day and then staying up chatting and drinking beer with the other volunteers had taken it’s toll. So much so we slept for 11 hours and didn’t wake until Midday the next day. No problem! All we had planned for the day was a Thai evening cooking class. Simon was pretty apprehensive about this one, but I was determined that we would have a go whilst we were in the North of Thailand. We decided to go with Smile Organic Farm Cooking School as they offered an evening class, but also because the class was based on their organic farm about an hour away from the city.

On the way to the cooking school we stopped at a local afternoon market so we could have a look, feel and smell of some of the produce we would be working with later on. It was great to see the local people shopping at the market and also to see some of the weird and wonderful offerings… (apparently, it’s just like chicken).

We made it to the cooking school, picked our dishes and then went for a tour around the organic garden. We were able to try Thai aubergines straight from the plant, as well as long beans and lots of different herbs. It was finally time to get cooking.

Simon made:

Pad Thai, Spring Rolls, Red Chicken Curry, Chicken Coconut Soup

I made:

Stir fried Chicken and Cashew, Spring Rolls, Penang Chicken Curry, Hot and Creamy Soup

We started with the spring rolls and then made our stir fried dish. After this we got to eat them. Yummy! I have to say they were the best spring rolls I’ve ever eaten and so simple to make. We will definitely make these again when we get home.

After our appetisers we made our curry pastes ready for our mains and the soups. It was great fun, taking it in turn to pound the curry paste ingredients in the massive pestle and mortars. We have made curry pastes from scratch before, but the freshness of the ingredients made the room smell amazing. Definitely not the same as using the dried ingredients from Tesco.

The dishes were cooked pretty quickly and we were soon tucking in to our mains. We learnt one key lesson during this class. When the Thai people ask how hot you want it, always say less than what you expect. Our teacher told us she usually had 10 chillis in her soup so everyone went for 2 or 1. 2 was still REALLY hot. She must have an asbestos lined mouth. All the food was brilliant and we had great fun with the other people laughing as we made our meals. I would recommend this to anyone!

The next morning we headed off to Pai for 3 nights and I’ll write another blog about our time here. We returned to Chiang Mai for 2 more nights before our time here was going to come to an end. We needed to book our next bus to Chiang Rai, so once we had finished that job we found a lovely little cafe and had lunch in the old city. I’d been feeling a bit off during our time in Pai so decided I needed to go to the hotel and have a nap.. that turned into 3 hours of sleep. Whoops.

Once I had finally woken up, we walked towards the night bazaar for an explore. We found a great little pizzeria/italian restaurant that was reasonably priced, so we stopped and had some food whilst watching monks walk past on the main street. It was great to just people watch for a while. Once at the night bazaar we couldn’t believe the endless stalls and markets that were set up. We bought ourselves an elephant picture to put up at home and ended up at Hard Rock… of course we did. It was a really chilled out evening, and we got back after walking for around 3 hours through different market stalls.

On our last full day in Chiang Mai, we were lucky enough to meet up with 3 girls we met in Pai (Anne, Jenn and Rachel). We started our day with brunch at a lovely little cafe called Blue Diamond. Simon found rogue broccoli in this full English… Despite this we had a leisurely brunch before we started our exploration for the day. Today we were heading up to Doi Suthep which is a mountain that reaches a peak elevation of 1676m tall. We hired a songatew for the few hours it was going to take to get up there, look around and then head back for the grand total of 1000 baht. A little over £4 each. It was about a 45 minute drive each way so we saw this as a bargain.

 

We got out at the temple, Wat Phra That Doi Suthep, paid our 30 baht entrance fee and walked up the stairs to the temple. It was a really beautiful temple, but as I said before… all the temples start to merge into one. What was really special was the view back over the city from the top. From the picture below you should be able to see the square of the old city, which I keep referring to.

This evening we are going to head to an international food market that is near the night bazaar. We walked through it yesterday and was slightly disappointed that we’d already eaten as there was endless choices of food and live music playing. I can’t think of a better way to end our last night in Chiang Mai.

I would say to anyone visiting Thailand not to miss the North. This area is absolutely beautiful and you get far more for your money up here. We have been so fortunate that we have been able to spend a large amount of time up here as most people only get a little time before the islands take over their itinerary. We can’t speak about the Southern Islands yet, but we know that we’ve enjoyed it here too and will definitely be back on our next visit to South East Asia.