After our 14hour coach journey we had an eventful red truck ride to our hostel. We feared for our lives because there is no back to a red truck, we had bags and cases flying everywhere as the driver swerved in and out of traffic!
Our hostel, Aoi Garden Home was lovely, the garden and room is pictured below! Aoi was great, one of the first things she said to us was 'my name means sugarcane, but i'm not sweet i'm spicy' you can imagine what kind of character she is!
Within a matter of hours we'd made friends with an American backpacker, Tracey. We decided to go and see the temples of Chiang Mai together. There are a lot of temples in Thailand, it seems that majority are in Chiang Mai! We are completely templed out now!
The temples are beautiful and are great to see, there are a few of the 100's of photos we have of them below.
After visiting temples we got a tuk tuk to the night market or locally known as the night bazaar. This was a more touristy version of the one we visited in Surin. Let's just say we did a bit of retail therapy here...
After the night bazaar we went back to the hostel and shared backpacking stories with people from all over the world. It was really refreshing to swap stories!
The next day we were booked on a trekking tour. We have few if any photos of this to upload due to not getting to a computer, sorry.
Our tour started off at a butterfly and orchid farm.. This was a disappointment all the butterflies we saw were dead and once you saw the orchids there was nothing else to do...
We then went on to the hilltribes. We saw the Karen village of the long necked women. This was an interesting experience, we were unsure of how we felt about the women. Children of 5 were being made to wear the coils around their necks. It was like they were only doing it for tourists and that it was a dead tradition. We both felt very strange after visiting.
We then got to feed elephants bananas, they have such characters and definitely know what they want they'd budge and blow at you with their trunks when they wanted more. We then got to go on an hours elephant trek where Meg got to ride on the elephants neck and be a mahout! We did think we were going to lose her a few times! Especially when going down hill!
We enjoyed noodles and tofu wrapped in banana leaves for lunch and were given nothing but chopsticks so should be experts at using them by the time we got home!
We then walked off our lunch with an hour long trek into the jungle to a waterfall in the midday heat! We were very thankful to find a freezing cold pool of water at the bottom of the waterfall. Where we swam and showered, it was perfect!
We then went on to do white water rafting and bamboo rafting. However with less of the white water as it is dry season here so very little water in the river. It was still great fun! We kept getting seriously stuck on rocks, sometimes even our guide didn't know what to do!
After the 'rapids' we got on a bamboo raft. This was extremely amusing, we're unsure if there were too many of us on one raft or our Uganda weight gain was larger than we thought, we spent most of the time sat on the raft partly submerged in water.
The next day we went for a head, neck and back massage opting out for a Thai massage because they are known to be pretty rough. However it seems that head, neck and back massages are pretty rough too... We are both still recovering! The massouse sorted out our knots for sure!
That afternoon we took part in a Thai cookery course. We were taken around a market to buy the ingredients. The course was held at a farm a bit out of Chiang Mai it was a beautiful setting. We prepared so much food! Thai food is so quick! We ate everything we prepared and then had to rest in the hammocks before letting a latern go. It was a relaxing experience and we learnt a lot! We also were given a cookery book containing recipes we cooked and others!
That afternoon we went to visit a temple on a mountain. It was really on top of a mountain. The red truck journey was horrible. Imagine a really windy road and make it 100 times windier. The temple was stunning. All gold!
Today we visited Tiger Kingdom! It was an amazing experience, we had heard about it when we first arrived in Chiang Mai and weren't sure how to feel about it. After doing some research we decided to visit. The tigers were happy tigers and weren't drugged, the little ones especially were extremely playful and energetic. We came to the conclusion that if the tigers are well looked after, happy and breeding then its better than them becoming extinct.
Just waiting for our tuk tuk to the bus station to go to Koh Chang! Goodbye Chiang Mai, hello beach!
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