After the intense week in the elephant park and a whole week of veggie food and tofu we went back to Chiang Mai.
First point of call was a good restaurant with meat!! We met up with Cindie, Christina, Sandra and Myra who we'd worked with at the park and descended upon an Italian restaurant recommended Cindie. This was followed by a wander round the Sunday market with some interesting products!
The next day was dominated by temples, the most impressive of which was Wat Chiang Man. Whilst wandering round we met several enthusiastic locals eager to impart their local knowledge to us! After lunch with the same park workers we had had dinner with (completely unplanned this time) we went on a Thai cooking course. This is something we would recommend to anyone coming to Thailand, but beware of the curry paste! The chances of us being able to recreate these dishes however is much to be desires but they did give us recipe books to help.
The next morning we visited Doi Suthep, another impressive temple atop a hilltop which involves climbing over 300 steps to the top. Whilst there we were blessed by monks with good luck and happiness forever and received a white 'bracelet' making it the second one we've received in under 2 weeks! We also fitted in a quick visit to Bhubing Palace, the winter residence of the royal family and home to some impressive rose gardens.
Our evenings in Chiang Mai featured the night market a lot, and included the purchase of some rather dubious trousers by both! The decision to experience a Thai foot massage turned out be an excruciating experience and though our legs felt good afterwards still led to us hobbling home and Em got bitten to pieces after the woman had removed all the deet from her legs!
We then took a tour from Chiang Mai to Chiang Rai taking in some sights on the way. These included some hot springs and the white temple, a stunning sight with some beautiful paintings inside although the appearance of spiderman, the matrix, terminator and others was a surprise! We also got to go to the golden triangle, the meeting point of the Thai, Laos and Burmese borders and a hotspot for opium production.
Chiang Rai is considerably smaller than Chiang Mai, so we visited some temples and sights in the pouring rain, went to a hill tribe museum and took in some street food, with no bad affects as yet! Tonight we are off to a restaurant called Cabbages & Condoms, which is a charity helping to stop the spread of STIs in Thailand. Tomorrow we will head off to laos with our first stop being Luang Namtha.
We apologise for the lack of photos to make you envious, but we forgot to take any on the iPod. We did try to buy a device to transfer photos from our cameras to our iPods, but it didn't work unfortunately.
Hope you enjoyed this post, our next one will be in a couple of weeks when will be leaving Laos.
Take care
X x x
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