Chiang Mai

Photo: Wat Sri Suphan, the Silver Temple

I’m finishing up my four-day stay in Chiang Mai! Tomorrow I leave for Chiang Rai via bus.

Chiang Mai was a pleasant experience. If we’re comparing the larger cities I’ve visited so far, Chiang Mai definitely beats Bangkok for best of Thailand. However, like Bangkok, there was a noticeable amount of “party tourists” - plenty of weed and prostitution. I just avoided those folks and still had a blast :).

After the bus ride to Chiang Mai, I took a quick grab over to the hotel to check in before heading down to a local street market for dinner. As the sun was setting I took a stroll around the market and nearby streets.

The next morning, I ate some green curry and had yet another Thai tea before taking a self-planned walking tour of the major temples in Chiang Mai. As I would later learn, the province of Chiang Mai has nearly 2000 Buddhist temples, and the city proper is host to 117 of them! I visited the most famous and most glorious ones. I found the Silver Temple the most impressive (see this post’s hero image). And apparently it is indeed partially made out of silver, along with aluminum and bronze. I don’t have much to say about the other temples - they were all neat in their own way, but none stood out in particular. Several of them (the Silver Temple included) forbid women from entering them because their menstruation “humiliates the sanctity” of the space. What a load of horseshit.

On the second day, a Saturday, I took a lazy day. I only left my hotel room to visit the Saturday street market, which was a fun affair. The street they close off for the market is quite long, and there’s a ton of vendors selling all manner of snacks and trinkets. I also commissioned my first foot massage, which is something I should have already been doing!! Foot massages are a cheap and comfortable way of enjoying the atmosphere of the street market without having to walk up and down in the crowd.

I woke up early the following Sunday morning to take a small group tour that I had booked the previous day. The tour would take us to the top of the local mountain near Chiang Mai with a beautiful temple at the top. The other people in the group ended up canceling, so it was just me!

The guide was a former Buddhist monk of 6 years. Thai Buddhism, unlike most other varieties, allows leaving monk-hood if you feel like it. Most Thai men are actually ordained once in their life as a rite of passage, but most don’t stick around for as long as my guide. He was super knowledgeable - I learned a lot about Thai Buddhism and the significance of the various buildings and statues present in the temples. He also knew everybody at all of our destinations, including all the stray dogs! Thanks to his connections, I got to have some very interesting conversations with a couple of the monks.

Something funny happened to me too. The tour was incidentally on a Buddhist “holiday”: the full moon. He had planned for us to do some almsgiving, but because of this holiday, the monks weren’t performing their alms ceremony. So he chased down this monk boy he knew and had him perform a mini ceremony just for me. It was very awkward but also cute and exciting to get my own personal blessing.

After the tour, I finished the day off at the Sunday street market, which is even larger than the Saturday one. It takes up several full blocks, and even bleeds into some of the nearby temples.

My last full day in Chiang Mai I splurged on a morning trip to a nearby elephant sanctuary called Elephant Nature Park. There were an absolute ton of elephants, and it was cool to see them (very!) up close in such an ethical environment. My absolute favorite were the baby elephants, which were all so naughty: we saw them wrestle with each other, steal some fruit from the caretaker’s stand, and were told that they even figured out how to unlatch some of the gates. I also learned that Elephants are quite clique-y! They remain in groups of 1 (solo) to 6 and stay away from the others except maybe to quarrel about territory. So the dozens of elephants in the park were all standing separately in their own favorite nook of the fields.

After the trip I relaxed in my hotel room before heading out to try some Michelin-recommended yen ta fo, which was absolutely amazing. These Michelin guys are really onto something. I also had my first traditional Thai massage, which was… painful. I did actually enjoy it quite a bit, but will otherwise be sticking to the more pleasure-focused massages in the future :).

Overall, I definitely enjoyed Chiang Mai. There was plenty to do, the city wasn’t too crowded, and there were plenty of affordable touristy things to do.

I also took the opportunity to do some longer-term planning. Chiang Mai is known for it’s Songkran celebrations - Songkran is the Thai festival for the South and Southeast Asian solar New Year (and an [intangible cultural heritage](# Intangible Cultural Heritage)) where people celebrate by spraying each other with water. It’s celebrated on April 13th. Unfortunately, I will miss Songkran unless I go out of my way to return to Thailand for it, which I’m not currently thinking of doing. Instead, I’m aiming to catch the new years celebrations in Vientiane, the capital of Laos. Broadly, my next plans are to head into Laos, travel south into Cambodia, and then enter Vietnam to make a big zigzag. I’m looking forward to it!