The title says all you need to know. This will be a shortish blog post (for how long we’ve been here and how long these posts usually are) with lots of pictures, no history lessons here, and we’ll fill you in on why we love Thailand and why we’re skipping the last country on our original plan (Indonesia) to spend some more time here. From an awesome capital city to the world’s largest waterfight to enormous caves filled with ancient relics to incredible beaches, Thailand has shown us a great time so far, and we need more time to figure out what else she has in store for us.
We flew from Bhutan directly to Bangkok and were bracing for the worst. We’d heard from other travelers and our guide book about how crazy the city is and what a nightmare it can be, but that nightmare never came for us. We had a great time in Bangkok. The craziness of India set a standard for us and we were expecting something similar, but Bangkok is much more organized and relaxed, people actually wait in line, drive in their lanes, don’t bother you constantly, and don‘t honk! We spent 5 great days wandering the city, checking out the spectacular Grand Palace, eating awesome street food wherever we could find it (which is everywhere! And yes it‘s safe Moms), and had our feet rubbed into ecstasy for $2 every day. Bangkok is a very modern city and there is a ton to see and do so we were reluctant to leave, but we knew it was time to get to the north and see the mountains before our feet really started itching to get to the beaches down south.
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| Good luck and happiness forever? Just for freeing some birds you clearly trapped yourself? Don't mind if I do. |
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| Mmmmmm, Pad Thai. Even better when not in a restaurant |
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| They build sand pagodas during Song Kran at the major temples, not sure why but they do look cool |
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| The squirt gun combined with an umbrella, good offense and defense |
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| We took a couple laps around the moat on the scooter, then abandoned it to walk much faster on foot |
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| How it all started, washing a Buddha statue with rose water |
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| Thank you waterproof camera case |
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| Why this man came out with his birds during a giant water fight remains a mystery |
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| Friends from Georgia, Klay and Janice |
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| Above the madness on a bridge |
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| This is what world peace looks like |
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| Cold water feels so good |
We spent the rest of our time in Chiang Mai doing a 2 mile long zip line tucked into the jungle, visiting temples, driving our scooter around town, and spent one glorious day in close contact with elephants. One of the touristy things to do in Chiang Mai is to visit an elephant camp, and Maggie with her elephant fixation wasn’t about to miss out on that (neither was Todd though). We opted to go with a tour operator that rescues elephants from abusive situations and from other tourist operators that treat them poorly and they do things a bit differently. Their philosophy is to give the elephants as close to a natural life as they can provide, no tricks, no saddles, no long trekking, and incorporate tourists into that life as unobtrusively as possible in order to be able to pay for it. They are trying to develop a new model of tourism to get Thailand off the exploitative and often abusive track they have been on for so many years with these majestic animals. We got to hand feed them for about 45 minutes (lots of bananas and sugar cane), then learned a few simple things like getting on and off (you ride on their gigantic neck when they don’t have a saddle on), rode them bareback on a short jungle walk, then bathed them in a pond close by while the baby elephant bathed us by spraying us with his trunk (disgusting water with elephant poop floating by but so much fun and they gave us a shower right after). What a day!
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| Walking market in Chiang Mai |
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| Life is all about perspective |
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| We just got sprayed by the baby elephant. Elephant poop water in the ear, yummy |
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| One dragon vomiting out four dragons, Thai art is awesome |
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| Pit of desire |
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| Pit of desire up close |
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| Makes you want to have a drink, right? |
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| Maggie imitating the random pose of the artist behind the White Temple |
The next day we took our car to Chiang Dao and stayed right at the foot of a jungle covered mountain. We visited an ancient, sacred cave that was turned into a temple long ago (because it’s a temple, Maggie had to dress modestly inside despite the humid heat and difficulty moving in a skirt). We were guided through the cave by a local villager with a pressurized gas lamp and came across one amazing formation after another, squeezing through very tight spaces in between the caverns. The cave tour finished by going through a part lit by electric lamps that contains a 400 year old reclining Buddha that many people come from all over to come and meditate in front of. The next day we drove 9 hours (damn you Google maps! see below for why it should have been a 4 hour drive) on the curviest roads in Thailand (literally not even one small straight part for 2 hours of it) to reach the town of Pai and the Cave Lodge, about 45 minutes out of town. Built by a guy who discovered a bunch of caves in the area as a base station for further caving expeditions, Cave Lodge is a very cool bunch of bungalows set right next to the river that formed the major cave. We went on yet another cave tour the next day, entering by floating in on a bamboo raft. We again explored the cave led by a villager with a pressurized gas lamp and found even cooler formations than the first cave. We also came across a 2000 year old cave drawing of a pair of dogs and a couple sets of coffins that were even older (about 3000 years old, but with no bones left, they think the possums came and ate them). The squeaks of the bats inside this cave were deafening at times and there was so much guano on the ground it was actually spongy (this is a major bat house, thousands and thousands fly in and out at sunrise and sunset), but the cave was well worth the nauseating smell.
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| Our bungalow in Chiang Dao |
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| Our rental car, Ah the open road |
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| Going in for some cave nips |
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| What is foreground and what is background? Trippy right? |
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| Our adopted dog at Cave Lodge, he followed us absolutely everywhere. He also looks a heck of a lot like Todd's dog growing up Max. |
Our caving fix settled, we drove back to Chiang Mai, turned in our rental car, and hopped a plane down south to Phuket, then up to Khao Lak where we‘ve been for the last few days sitting on a beautiful beach. We’re getting on a live aboard scuba ship tonight for the next four days and Todd’s so excited to finally do some scuba diving he can barely keep from putting his mask on now and walking around town with it on. We’ll update again in a few weeks at the end of our time in Thailand. Until then, you stay classy America.
Top things we’ve never done before this trip:
1) Got nailed by a bucket of freezing cold water when we came around a corner on our scooter (yes Moms, very dangerous but no harm done, Todd‘s an excellent scooter driver), a day before Song Kran was supposed to begin! Luckily we had heard that some people start early so we had waterproofed our camera and ourselves just in case, but wow was that a shock we were not expecting.
2) Been offered a shot of whiskey when filling up for gas. We were in a very rural part of northern Thailand and had nearly run out of gas (the light nervously blinking at us). We were searching for gas somewhere in a larger town, but everyone kept telling us to go back to Chiang Dao as there was no gas there, which was 3 hours away and not an option. We kept driving, assuming with all the motorbikes and trucks around that somebody was selling gas, and came across a family sitting around the floor drinking with a barrel of gas out front of their shop/house. We pantomimed our way into explaining what we needed and they proceeded to use their hand pumped contraption to fill a cylinder with gas and gravity fed it into our tank. During this, Todd used the few words of Thai that we know to say hello and how are you to the people sitting around drinking, and they loved his limited language so much and got such a big chuckle out of it, they offered him some whiskey! Definitely a first to have a fill up come with a shot!
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| The woman on the right filled our gas tank, the man on the left offered Todd whiskey, a full service operation |
4) Got screwed over by Google maps. Google maps, combined with our cheap smart phone we bought in India and SIM cards we buy in every country, has made navigating our trip very easy, but not that day. Google doesn’t discern between the types of roads there are and didn’t realize our small Toyota rental car was not equipped to go four wheeling on a nearly vertical service road in rural Thailand. We thought we were taking a shortcut through a national park from Chiang Dao to Pai, and it was an awesome road for the first 3 hours, super windy through the jungle with awesome views and nobody on it. However, 3 hours into it, the road turned to dirt. We thought, okay we can do this no problem. An hour after that, it turned to washed out dirt road with big rocks sticking out and we thought, okay a little offroading, we can do this no problem, we‘re almost back to the main highway. A half hour after that, the road turned to steep hills combined with washed out road and big rocks sticking out and we thought, okay, this is getting hard but we’re really almost there, we can just go really slow. Then we came to the final obstacle that we just couldn’t get around, steep, big rocks all over just waiting to puncture our undercarriage and after a couple attempts that had us nervously skidding backwards, we called it quits. We turned around, drove 4 hours back to Chiang Dao, and took the other road that is all easy highways to Pai, arriving much later that we thought we would. Thanks a lot Google Maps (but we still love you).
5) Riding bare back on an elephant through the jungle followed by bathing them and being bathed by them.
6) Having a $14 drink on top of the world (we shared one given our budget). Bangkok has a quite a few tall buildings but only a few true skyscrapers. A couple of them have open air rooftop bars on the very top. We went and had a drink at a bar aptly named Vertigo that had no other buildings around it so we had an unobstructed 360 degree view high over all of Bangkok. A great place to have a drink, but not more than one.
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| Restaurant on top of the world (with $140 steaks, good deal no?) |
7) Stood for the national anthem before a movie. They love their monarchy in Thailand (democratic monarchy actually) so they play the national anthem along with a slideshow of the king doing various kingly things before movies, which everyone stands for out of respect. Very patriotic, but kinda weird for us, we felt like we were at the start of a baseball game back home, not about to watch a movie.
8) Waited out a rain storm in style. It started to rain, so we headed in to a massage shop temporarily set up on the side of a road and had foot massages and drank beer for half an hour. When it didn’t let up, we opted for a half hour back massage and another beer until it did. All of this for $6 per person. Thailand, you are awesome.
9) Stumbled across a nearly 2000 year old monument. After parking the car on our way to visit the cave in Chiang Dao, we turned a corner and saw an ancient looking building. Todd went to take a picture and saw a plaque that said it was from 190 AD. It was in perfect shape and in most places in the world would be a historical site to come visit on its own. We just stumbled upon it on the way to an even more awesome cave temple. We guess when your culture is as old as Asian culture, nobody gets excited about a 2000 year old building and they just sit nearly anonymously along the road. But we were pretty stoked.
10) Had a near daily trip to 7/11. In the world of convenience stores, 7/11 has absolutely cornered the market in Thailand and there are more 7/11s here than there are Starbucks at home, literally one on almost every block. They sell everything you could possibly need (on different trips we bought Maggie a new loufa, bought batteries, a sowing kit, shaving cream, cough drops, you name, they have it) and because of this, nobody has bothered to set up competition. They are a monopoly, but a convenient one, and their’s nothing like a coke slushy with rum in it.
