Having spent the month of September here in the Philippines, Grace and I had to return to Malaysia to pack all our stuff, with the movers of course, clean and hand back the house. As a sort of present to ourselves for doing this, we then went for 6 days in Chiang Mai.
I have been to Phuket and Bangkok before, Grace to Bangkok, but this was our first visit to the north of Thailand.
We were booked into a hotel called Karenthip Village, named after the winged elephant that stands in the front of the hotel. Here is the winged elephant with Grace:-
Chiang Mai is totally unlike the other Thai tourist spots I have visited. Much more relaxed, easy going, slow pace of life, a very pleasant place indeed. It is an old walled and moated city although it now spralls outside the old city too. Lots of good restaurants, although we did find one poor one(!!) and lots to see and do.
We only went on 2 trips. First was to Doi Suthep the temple on the hill, from where you get a magnificent view over Chiang Mai itself. Here are some pictures from there:-
These are the steps, some 200 of them we had to climb to the temple (there is a cable car for the faint of heart)
This shows the view you get of Chiang Mai from the hill.
And this was Grace getting a good luck woven charm bracelet in the temple. Women cannot get the charms from a monk, only men are allowed to do that so there is a non-monk sitting there especially to give the bracelets to women!!!
Our second trip, the next day, was to an elephant farm, where we got to see the elephants up close and watch them performing their various tasks. From what one gathers, the elephants in this farm are amongst the best looked after in Thailand. Included in the display is elephant painting and the photos below show some of the stages of the picture being painted by one elephant near us. They do actually do this!!
Not bad eh?
Grace fed one elephant and then climbed onto another:
And finally we had an ox-cart ride and a ride back on an elephant:-
The rest of our time was spent wandering, shopping in the various markets and eating and drinking!!
One of the occurrences that amused me, is that everyone we met took Grace for Thai. This meant they immediately starting chatting to her in Thai, and though she does know a few words, she is not really at conversational level. So she just smiled and nodded. The poor person talking to her would then continue until finally, unable to contain myself any more, I would say " My wife is not Thai" upon which they would say " But she looks like Thai!" We are thinking of designing a t-shirt for Grace for our next visit saying something like "I may look like Thai but I am NOT Thai"
Just to finish up with here is a picture of a 600 year old pagoda in the centre of Chiang Mai and then the jade Buddhas in the Temple of the same name.
