Chiang Mai - Days 160-163
We had packed a lot into Ao Nang but we were approaching our biggest leg of the trip with our biggest numbers. At our peak, we’d be 15 people in Chiang Mai for the Yee Peng festival, which would be both exciting and a little bit daunting to coordinate. Here goes nothing!
Day 5.2
After a late start in Ao Nang, we catch our 2pm flight out of Krabi with Chiang Mai in our sights. 10 of us hop in the van to meet Kelsey and Tyler at the Krabi airport. Jason and Katelyn headed to Chiang Mai a day earlier but the rest of us we were all on the same flight.
We run into a little trouble with the carry-on baggage rules for Thai Air Asia. They only allow 7 kg of carry-on luggage total but most of our packs are in the 10-13 kg range. Ilya and Laur get hit with the on-site check bag fee but the rest of us either pre-paid or successfully snuck one on. Flight was painless and once we land, Ben rushes to get a new sim card (claiming practical reason but mostly video games) as the rest of us pick up our luggage from baggage claim. Unfortunately, Meg’s bag didn’t make it. You’re not allowed to store a battery pack in your checked bag and unfortunately, Meg’s hadn’t made it to her carry-on. Bummer, but there’s plenty of flights to Chiang Mai from Krabi so her bag would arrive within the day.
Tyler, Kelsey, Aaron and Taylor are in a different Airbnb so they split off as the rest of us get a taxi to meet up with our Airbnb host, Xue. We’re staying in an area called Nimman road. Nimman is known as the trendier part of town, full of bars, restaurants and cafes. Xue was outside on the patio waiting for us when we arrive. He gives us a quick tour of the 4 bedroom, 4 bathroom house. Each couple takes one of the private rooms as Laur and I head to Bunky town (our term of endearment for the room with 5 bunk beds). On the tour, Xue explains to us that he doesn’t get a lot of western guest so most of the amenities he has around the house are tailored towards Chinese tourists. When we look around, we see a slew of toiletries all with an element of skin whitening. Kind of an odd
difference specially after most of us just worked on our tans for the past couple days down south.
After we settled in, we discovered that Maya mall is down the street and is hosting the NightOut Market. Once we’re in, our eyes light up with all the food options and Ben and I start aggressively walking from stall to stall looking for some tasty treats. Between the 12 of us at the market, I’m pretty sure we ate everything they had to offer: pork dumplings, khao soi, bbq ribs, Korean chicken, unidentifiable fruits, pad thai, green custard pudding cookies. We ate it all. Good and stuffed, we walk down Nimman street and grab a drink at a place called At 9 Bar. From there, head to the local Tesco shopping center to pick up a case of beer to add to the fridge and some cold ones to enjoy on the patio. Once we’re back to our place, we play some Moniker and call it a night.
Day 6:
Today is the day of the Yee Peng Festival, a celebration on the full moon of the 12th lunar month every year and a part of the greater Loi Krathong celebrations. I’ll get into more details as we go about the day.
With no set call time, everyone’s getting up when they get up. Meg, Ilya, Lauren and I go grab breakfast nearby at a place called Cafe de JJs. An ex-pat must be involved because their was Philadelphia sport apparel all over the walls. They had tasty food but service was slow. We chalked it up to only one person working and having to do basically everything in the restaurant. Meg has to leave without getting her breakfast sandwich to try and pick up her bag (and surprise Sally) from the airport. No success finding a taxi on Nimman Road so Meg calls for some reinforcements from Ben to help. Surprising Sally is out of the equation as Sally arrives to the Airbnb and Meg steals her taxi to head back to the airport. While Sally settles in, Ben heads back to the brunch he abandoned at Rustic and Blue and grabs some coffee at a cool shop call Ristr8o with Mikki, Sam and Laur. Word on the street was Sam won brunch with an excellent order of Chicken and Waffles. Good job, Sam!
Once we’re all back together, we head out on a temple crawl. We visit Wat Pra Sing and Wat Puak Hong. Both are glammed up for this weekend’s festival, full of lanterns and decorative flowers. At Wat Pra Sing, I learned a little bit about the Krothong and Dhukka, which I think are these little boats made of banana leaves and various offerings, plus a candle. The roots of the festival come from Buddhist origins, and the beliefs center around this concept of ‘letting go’ of your troubles. People release their Dhukka, or sufferings, on their Krothrong boats and make a wish for good luck in return.
Now, Krothong is celebrated all across Thailand but what makes Chiang Mai special is that they also celebrate this with the Yee Peng festival. Yes Peng derives from Lanna culture and takes place at the same time, celebrated with a lantern release. So many lanterns in fact that they have to shut down airplane traffic for the evening. Needless to say, excitement was building.
After a few of us felt a bit “templed out”, we break off on a quest for the best Khao Soi in town. Khao Soi is a dish only found in the north of Thailand. It’s a curry noodle dish that has some burmese influence. It’s got a bit of a soup presence, topped with a chicken leg and some fried crispy egg noodles. Ben starred a place call Khao Soi Khun Yai by the north gate and we head that direction. Khao Soi Khun Yai is only open for about 4 hour a day and given the festival, the place is packed. So, a few of us opt to wait it out, while other head to a different restaurant and Mikki and Sam hit up some more temples in the meantime. It probably took an hour but we got our food and it was mighty tasty, but that could also be that we were pretty much starving at that point.
From here, Taylor requests coffee and beer in that order so on our walk towards to east gate of the old city, we stop at a place call Fact Cafe. After placing our order, we learn from our some of our friends that they went there earlier and it took an extremely long time to get their drinks. My assumption is that most places are severely understaffed today because most workers are off to enjoy the festival. I can understand the capacity issues but we weren’t really in the mood to wait almost an hour an a half for 5 coffee drinks. -__-
While waiting for our beverages, we make a game plan for the festivities that evening. We’ve decided on heading to the head to Riverside Bar for a central meet up location and then Ping Bridge for the release. We determined Ping Bridge the best location because most people can release their lanterns right on the bridge and you’re also right next to the river to release your Krothrong as well. Best of both worlds, amiright?!
On the walk to the bridge, we see a limitless number of stands selling lanterns and boats for that evening. We pick up some supplies on our way and once we’re all in one spot at the restaurant, we grab a walking Leo and make our way to the river. One by one we take
turns getting to the lip of the river, light our krothrong and release our worries, wishing for some good fortune. Given our group size, we were big enough to try and carve out our own space in the crowd. After we released all of our boats, it was time to try our luck with the lanterns. We got a quick demo from someone who looked like they knew what they were doing. Each paper lantern had a fuel source at the bottom. You’d pinch four corners to make it eaiser to light. Once lit, your group would hold the lantern to let it fill up with hot air and once you were confident it would fly up, you’d let go to see the lantern release into the sky. And, of course, we weren’t the only ones with the idea of doing this on the bridge. It was packed and you’d look up and see thousands upon thousands of lanterns lighting the night sky. It was pretty breathtaking, one of those pictures you’d see on instagram or a travel blog and aspire to but to actually experience it in person was just a different level, especially with close friends and family. We may have had a few casualties with lanterns getting stuck in wires or now quite making it up but falling into the river, but all in all, more good luck than failure.
Once we ran out of lanterns, the ladies left on a quest to find a restroom and the rest of us headed across the bridge to find some food. After some more Khao Soi and bag full of tasty pork and rice balls we opt to head back to Nimman street for a night cap. Unfortunately, we learn that Nimman isn’t really the night time bar scene we were hoping for as most places shut down at 11pm and it was already past midnight. Given we have an early morning at the elephant sanctuary, we call it a night and head to our perspective beds.
Day 7:
Early wake up time for Elephants. Sam and Kelsey did their research and booked a half day session with Elephant Jungle Sanctuary. They seemed to be one of the more ethical elephant sanctuaries in the city. We read about some horror stories of blow horns in the ears to get the elephants to submit or painful saddles to support riding so we made a point of finding one that really just allowed you to feed and play with the elephants. I feel like we found a solid one so good work team.
It took about an hour drive southeast of Chiang Mai into more of the mountainous region. When we arrived, we were greeted by the team of keepers and they laid out the agenda. Put on your swimsuit, here’s a shirt and some sugar cane, we’re gonna feed
them, give them a mud bath and then have a water fight in the waterfall. They also taught us the way to feed the elephants. You hold the sugar cane up to their temple and yell “Bon Bon” which is apparently elephant for “Up!” They then raise their trunk and you can place the sugar can in their mouth. (This would later turn into a bit of an inside joke in the group when we would give each other bites of our street food…I probably said it a few too many time so I apologize for being annoying). They released us to the elephants and it was a feeding frenzy. Their wiggle trunk pretty much probing all over for sugar cane. Gotta be honest, I was pretty uncomfortable with the experience initially but others took to the elephants very well. Sam gave one of them a big hug right off the bat and it was one of the most endearing moments. Their rough skin and wire like hairs were an odd thing to pet, along with their curious trunks searching all your pockets for loose food. I eventually got a hug in but you could tell how uncomfortable I looked.
After feeding the big guys, we got to play around with the little babies. One was about a year old and the other was about 4 months. These were a little less intimidating in my eyes…guess I’d rather play with someone my own size. From here, we moved over to the mud pit. The keepers asked these friendly beast to sit down and once they did, we were able to pick up some mud and rub it all over, but you can’t put 15 friends in a mud pit without some mud slinging so a bunch of us ended up covered. We also had an awkward moment where a group of us was posing for a picture with one of the elephants but it turned out Meg was actually putting mud all over Laur’s leg for a while. Laur spoke up about it but Meg must not have heard. I guess Laur’s leg feels like an elephant trunk…maybe she didn’t shave that day. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ Good and muddy, we head over to the waterfall and we’re all given a bucket to start flinging water at these monsters, ultimately turning into a giant water fight amongst our group. When the fight winds down, we swim around a bit in the waterfall and then make our way back to lodge for lunch. Eat up, change and grab a group picture and we’re on our way back to Chiang Mai.
Without much of a game plan for the evening, Meg proposes a Anthony Bourdain type night. We’ve all watched his Chiang Mai episode of Parts Unknown and our goal is to check out some of the same markets and end with some pork shoulder from the cowboy pork lady at the North Gate. We say “adios’ to Katelyn and Jason and rest up before we make our way to the Saturday Night Market by the South gate of the Old City. Since the markets are so vast, there’s no way we can do it all as a group, so we usually opt for a meeting point and a meeting time and scatter. When we scattered, Laur finds a local t-shirt vendor name Natal Rungjang that custom screen prints his own designs, which is exactly the type of souvenir I was looking for. I thought it was kind of cool that I was also wearing a Orchard Street Press Milwaukee t-shirt and showed him on the map where Milwaukee was located and that I was excited to wear one of his t-shrits back home.
Besides the t-shirt vendor, I had a funny run in with a pork dumpling vendor. After I got my dumplings, the husband asked me in broken english if this was my second time eating at his stand that night. It wasn’t and his wife hit him in the shoulder. I guess this thai guy thinks all white people look the same. :)
After the Saturday Night market, we make our way towards the West gate for the Anusarn Market for a little shopping. We deployed the classic scatter and meeting point/time tactic. From here, I had the idea of doing Chiang Mai secret santa were we need to get each other a full outfit. More on this tomorrow. When we regrouped, we made our way to the North gate for some delicious pork shoulder from Cowboy Pork lady. She’s built quite the empire since your Bourdain debut. She now just sits in a chair like a pork kingpin as her staff takes care of the business. She just needs to sit in her chair with a cowboy hat on and oversea pork empire. In my opinion, the pork lived up to the hype but I wasn’t sitting above a sewer grate so my experience was a little bit different than a few others. We were a bit stuffed and tired and headed back to Nimman to enjoy some last night patio beers with Mikki and Sam and head to bed.
Day 8:
We had to say “adios” to Mikki and Sam this morning. They had an early flight to Japan to continue the second half of their vacation. Once we hugged and saw their Uber disappear in the distance, we had to come up with a game plan for the day. After hearing such good things about Sam’s brunch two day prior, we decided to head back to Rustic and Blue. Brunch lived up to the hype and we decide today is going to be a pamper day with a spa visit in our future. I jokingly called it “Pretty Woman Day” because we’re already going to get some new clothes due to Chiang Mai Secret Santa and Ilya and I had booked a haircut a a local barber. After a little research and an atrocious attempt at making a phone call to a Thai person by Laur, we end up at Choeng Doi Massage. They were offering a 2-for-1 special on a two hour thai massage treatment so the 7 of us go that route. We basically booked up the place and I’m pretty sure they had to call in backup masseuse to accommodate us all.
When we wake up from our massage (I for sure fell asleep once or twice), Ilya and I make our way into the Old City for our hair appointment at The Cutler. I’ll tell the guy the guy he has free reign and sit back and enjoy. It’s always interesting to do a mundane task like getting your hair cut in a different country. From my perspective, I felt like they approach the problem slightly different. My hair was sectioned off slightly different and I felt like there was an added level of precision. I also splurged on the beard trim where he straight razored some lines to to make sure everything looked just right. The whole experience cost ~ 400 baht which comes to about $12. So, this was probably the best haircut of my life and also the cheapest.
While Ilya and I were getting trimmed up, Ben, Taylor and Meg spent a good part of the day figured out the motorbike situation for our drive up to Pai. We all meet up at the Sunday Night Market by the Three Kings Monument in the Old City for Chiang Mai Secret Santa. So here’s the rules: you have 250 baht (about $7) and an hour to pick out a full outfit for your person. We draw names, pick a meeting time and place and scatter. It was fun to pick out things for each other and added some new life to the night market routine. I was particularly proud of the McDonalds dress and Thai baseball jersey I found for Lauren Snell, plus I was under budget so I bought her a cat keychain. After meeting back up, we exchanged gifts and ooo’ed and aaah’ed over what we had gotten each other of so little money but the night was coming to a close so we said “adios” to Tyler and Kelsey and made our way back to Nimman street. Laur and Sally decided to stay out and make their way to Ram Bar for a lady boy show but you’ll need to speak to them about that. Back to the Airbnb, we enjoyed some patio Changs and Ben and Meg taught us the official backpacker game called Cambio.
Day 9.1
The first part of today was pretty low key. We basically just needed to get our motorbike, gas up with fuel for both our bodies and our bikes and hit the road. I hinted at it earlier but with the festival in Chiang Mai, it was quite difficult to get motorbikes so a big thank you to Ben, Taylor and Meg for taking the lead there. I had worked it out with Xue our Airbnb host to let us stay the Wednesday before our flight to Siem Reap, which was really helpful because he offered to store our bags in-between stays. We basically just needed to pack a weekend bag for our two nights in Pai and we were ready to hit the road.
Next stop, Pai!