Charming Chiang Mai

We took a nice "prop" plane over the mountains from Laos and landed in northern Thailand. Chiang Mai (CM) was a major empire in Thailand for many hundreds of years in the past. Now it has become a great place to vacation and I view it as a city where you can do a lot of outdoor activities. The town is nestled among mountains so we have noticed a nice cool down at nights (70's maybe?). During the day it heats up to about 100 degrees, although Kristin and I both said it doesn't feel that hot. Maybe we are in denial that we will be back in colder conditions later this month.

I titled the blog Charming Chiang Mai not so much because of the city, but because of a great bed and breakfast we discovered by luck and Kristin's investigative eye on the internet. It is owned by a french canadian woman named Annabel and her daughter (Sammy) who is in high school. The name is Dream Catchers (dreamcatchersbnb.com). We fell in love with the place and it was the perfect location for our family to "slow down" a bit. We had some of the most delicious home made meals which took us temporarily out of the "rice and fish world" we have become so accustomed to. We had delicious sandwiches, herb roasted chicken, ribeye steaks, chocolate fudge cake, fresh fruit salads, and the list goes on and on. We were only planning on staying 2 or 3 days, but we were having such a good time we ended up staying an entire week. I felt bad for my Mom who had to leave Dream Catchers mid-way through our stay. We all knew it was hard for her to leave paradise and pampering by Annabel and Sammy.

We spent one afternoon site seeing Chiang Mai. In the center of town is "old town" which has a moat built around the city which was created around a thousand years ago. I guess they can rightfully call this "old town". We saw a few temples and even a small emerald Buddha which was stated as being 2,500 years old - which is nearly as old as the real Buddha himself. While the weather was warm and it didn't rain in Chiang Mai, March probably isn't the best time to come. Everyone is burning their rice fields this month so there is a lot of haze and smoke in the air. It almost looks like a fog or mist. But, you don't notice it as you relax in the swing chair next to the pool next to the elephant waterfall wall. We also had the pleasure of meeting some new friends who checked in about 30 minutes after my mom left. Ernie and Lise were a lot of fun and we enjoyed our conversations with them. Ernie likes baseball, so Adam and I had an instant friend. (By the way, I guess I had my nose so buried in work over the last few years that I didn't notice the Montreal Expos were moved to Washington! How did I miss that???? Ernie filled me in on the "latest" news, lol.) Lise is a great Jazz singer which we didn't know about until they were leaving and she was kind enough to give us a copy of her CD. It sounds awesome. If you want to hear it, then you have to come visit us when we get home....it is really good.

So, you might be asking yourself what a person can do in Chiang Mai if they have $32 burning a hole in their pocket. Well, here is our recommendation. We had a private driver pick us up in a "song touh" (little red truck) just a little before 8 am at our bed and breakfast. He will first take your family to Orchard Gardens where you can look at Orchids and walk into a butterfly farm. Definitely a place to stop and smell the flowers, lol. It only takes about 30 minutes and once your done you will then drive to the next stop which is a "long neck" village. In this tribe, the women will start stretching their necks with rings at the age of 6 and continue into their early 20's. Some of the women have necks that look like they are about a foot long. The longer the neck, the more attractive??? Some of the women also stretch their ears out with earings - long ear tribes. I thought these tribes only existed in Africa, but guess not. After a 30 or 40 minute visit, he will take you for an hour drive into the mountains where you stop to go for an elephant ride. We all enjoyed riding the elephants up into the mountains for about an hour. They would stop once in a while and wrap their trunks around a bamboo tree, ripping out a bamboo "log" and then drag it while you ride. They would use their trunk to rip off a piece and stick it in their mouth. My mom's elephant actually stopped in a little river, filled up his trunk and gave himself and my mom a little bath. After a great ride, we stopped and "dismounted" off our elephants and fed them bananas and sugar cane. We then walked down a path where we came to a river. Our guide told us to get into this cage, but didn't say why. Before you knew it, he yanked on a rope and you were sent sailing across the river on a zipline. In a cage. It was a rush! The cage kind of crashed into the other side against a tree and it seemed a bit dangerous, but it was quick and you didn't have time to think. Our guide then took us to another part of the mountain where we started a nature hike. We stopped about half way up and he fed us warm pad thai noodles wrapped in a banana leaf. I have a picture above of lunch. It was very tasty! After lunch we finished our hike (treacherous at times as we walked 30 yards over fallen trees about 20 yards off the ground) and finally came to a nice waterfall. We swam and played, were splashed by the locals in the cold water, and then hiked back down to the truck. It was now about 3:00 in the afternoon, but our day was not over. He then drove us about 30 minutes until we came to a rushing river with rapids. It was now time to go white water rafting. We got a 5 minute lesson, put on our helmets and started down the river. This was the first time our kids experienced white water rafting, so they had a blast. We hit about 5 decent sized rapids with our boat spinning and sometimes going down the rapids backwards. After about an hour, we stopped and then he said "time for bamboo rafting". So, we hopped on a long bamboo raft (50 ft long?). It reminded me of something that Tom Sawyer would ride down the Mississippi river. Because we had six people in our raft we were about 2 inches below the surface of the water, so needless to say we got a little wet, but if felt good in the heat. When we were done, the kids swam in the river and then we were all driven back to Dream Catchers. All in all, it was a great day and we couldn't believe how much you can do for $32 in Chiang Mai. Sorry for the long paragraph, but it was a long day. :)

Another fun thing to do in Chiang Mai is to visit the local elephant conservation camp. They do an elephant show where elephants move timbers, and they demonstrate how the "mahout" or elephant riders get on and off elephants. We saw three elephants paint a picture by holding a paint brush and only using their trunks. Not sure how they train this, but Adam said that elephants are the second smartest animal in the world next to dolphins. I told him that I never saw a dolphin paint, lol. We also saw our friends Ernie and Lise as they were staying 3 days at the conservatory learning how to be a mahout. This was a dream of Lise's however it seemed Ernie was going along to support her as any good husband would. Ernie said he fell off his elephant that morning, so we hope his back is okay! I'm sure with enough massages in Asia, even a bad back can feel better. Kristin and I have decided to take preventative measures by always looking for a good spa. Anyway, Ii was fun to see our friends from Canada again before we left Chiang Mai.

One last thing I will mention about Chiang Mai was our visit with the tigers and lions. Chiang Mai is the only place in the world where you can go inside a caged area of about 7 grown tigers. The cost is only $9, so who can refuse doing something like this?? Not me.... Well, Kristin had NO DESIRE to step inside the giant cage of overgrown kittens. I could tell she was disappointed in my lack of judgement when I said "Oh, I am in!" in front of the kids. You should have seen her when I told her that both Adam and I were going in...not good. I told Kristin that the reason we pay money on a life insurance policy each month is so we can enjoy activities like this without any worry. She didn't buy it. Anyway, Lexi and Anna had the chance to play with some baby lions which they enjoyed before Adam and I entered the tiger pen. We all thought it was fun and I think Kristin thought it was all "ok" when Adam and I left the cage unharmed. Annabelle told us about someone needing 50 some stitches a few weeks ago. The good news is that they sold that tiger to a zoo. I forgot to mention that we had to sign a waver before we went inside. I didn't read it, but Kristin did and she can tell you what it said if you really want to know.

It was sooooo hard to leave our little "home away from home" at Dream Catchers, however we somehow know that we will come back someday. We said our goodbyes and somehow forced ourselves into our taxi to the airport. We were excited however, because while we didn't have any plans for our last 2 weeks, the day before we purchased tickets to our new destination - Kuala Lumper, Malaysia. We met a family (Atnips) who gave us a couple of fun ideas of things to do while we visit Malaysia. The Atnips lived in Burma before coming to Chiang Mai as he works in the US Consolate. They are a fun family and we enjoyed visiting with them in their home. We also heard from a few people along our trip how much they liked Malaysia and we decided it was a new country that we just had to check out! We also found very reasonable flights on Air Asia to Bali, Indonesia which will be our last stop of our trip before returning home.

FUNNY STORY OF THE WEEK and DEAL OF THE WEEK: I decided to combine both stories this week as they are related to one another. One day in Chiang Mai (we stayed at another hotel before we found the bed and breakfast) Kristin and my mom were wanting to do a load of laundry. They searched high and low for a coin operated laundry mat, which would have been better than washing in the hotel sink. I tried over and over to tell them they need to "outsource" their laundry which would be more convenient and cheaper than doing it themselves. (This is the same angle I used in my last job when explaining why it was better to outsource call center services.) Anyway, after a day or two they both gave in and agreed to take our laundry down the street. We took almost every stitch of clothing we had for 6 people and dropped it off at the laundry mat. I could tell both my mom and Kristin were nervous as we walked away giving our clothes to complete strangers. They told us the laundry would be done the next day about an hour before we checked out of our hotel. Well.....Adam gave us all of his clothes including "all" his underwear. He decided he would wear a pair of souvenir "Muay Thai" boxing shorts as his underwear. The boxing shorts are quite bulky, have bright colors and are quite the site. They weren't made for underwear to wear under pants. As we were walking down the street the next morning, he stopped looked at us frantically and said with his hands in the air: I Can't Wait To Wear Underwear Again!!! We all started laughing and thought this was pretty funny. I looked at him and said - Congratulations, you just made funny story of the week, dude. Oh, and yes this was deal of the week as we received back the freshest, cleanest, perfectly folded laundry back for the whopping price of $2.10 US. Kristin and my mom tipped the lady like four bucks and when I looked at them like they were crazy, they told me I had no idea how hard laundry was and that she deserved every penny!