Great Adventures in Chiang Mai

What a weekend. The plan was to go to Chiang Mai, but eight of us didn’t feel like paying for a hotel for two nights, so we decided to take an early bus from Thaton to Chiang Mai. And since no one else was really taking initiative about a plan, Justin and I found a couple of activities to do there, wrote some numbers down, made a reservation, and crossed our fingers that everything would work out okay! We woke up to one of the chilliest mornings we’ve encountered (chilly is relative of course; it still wasn’t cold enough for a jacket!) and a mist of rain, caught an empty bus at 6:30 am, and were on our way.

The bus ride took four hours and wound through an amazing mountainous jungle. It was a charter-type bus that made lots of stops and eventually filled all the way up. The road was snakey and narrow and we had to be careful not to look down too often to keep from getting carsick. It was kind of like the Indiana Jones ride at Disneyland! Four hours later we were let out at a very confusing bus station where no one spoke English, and wandered around until a taxi driver intervened. He had to ask some other drivers about where it was our address said we needed to go, but eventually we were packed into the song tao ready to go! We found our little hostel on a side street after getting dropped off. It was such a charming little place! Everyone was delighted at our cute destination, and I was just relieved we had done as well as we did, considering I was the only one in the group who had ever stayed in one before. Our room wasn’t ready yet so we decided what the heck, on with the adventures! Our first stop was Tiger Kingdom, which we had carefully scoped out only to find that it is practically plastered all around the city as a major attraction.

We managed to find two taxi drivers who would take us to the Tiger Kingdom and to Wat Phra That Doi Suthep for 100 baht per person, less than 4 USD.  Considering that's an all-day trip, it was a bargain! We love how taxi drivers basically become your best friends for the day: they wait for you no matter how long you take and spend a large portion of their day carting you around. This guy was a stud. He had a little tuff of hair under his chin, and reminded us of Master Oogway from Kung Fu Panda.

Tiger Kingdom was unbelievable. Justin and I laughed at the funny English translations on the website, but it lived up to its description: "not a zoo, but instead a tiger park and restaurant." You pay to spend 10 minutes in a pen with the size of tiger of your choosing: smallest, small, medium or large. And then you wait for your number to be called, spend 10 minutes laying down, basking, and spooning with tigers and have the greatest time of your life. Standing outside the cages waiting our turn, it was crazy to think that we were going to very shortly be IN the pen, touching these huge, beautiful creatures, and honestly it was a little bit frightening at first, but as soon as we got in there was nothing scary about it. It was like hanging out with a big lazy dog. The organization claims to not tranquilize or abuse their animals, so who knows why they didn’t rip us to shreds and eat our bodies, but we’re sure glad they didn’t! Tigers are AMAZING and it was pretty unreal to be petting their beautiful striped coats and holding their long tails. We weren’t allowed to touch their front paws or heads (which makes me feel like there was still potential for harm!), but they told us to rub the big kitties’ bellies because they really like it.

Ah, such an amazing experience!!

We headed over to the smallest tiger play pen, at which point we noticed that our camera was mysteriously not saving any pictures onto the new memory card we had put in earlier that morning, and could not even believe how lucky we were that the ticket selling lady had talked us into going in on a photographer with two other people. Otherwise we would have ZERO pictures of this remarkable experience! And it wasn’t a bad deal—the pictures turned out really well. We’re just grateful to have them :)

The baby tigers were pretty sleepy but impossibly adorable. We got to feed one of them with a bottle and pet plenty of tiger tummies and backs. I want one!! The pictures Tiger Kingdom advertisements are pretty deceiving into making you believe that you will have tiger cubs, like, play on you, lick your face, and be your best friend for 10 minutes, but it was still worth it to get to play with the little guys.

Thinking our day could not get any better, we got back in our taxis and agreed to have our drivers take us to a snake show. No one was really psyched about it, but it ended up being really awesome. The main snake guy apparently worked on the set of Rambo with Sylverster Stalone when it was filmed in Thailand lots of years ago, and he was legit! There was one giant python that we got a picture with, two stalker cobras, one GIANT king cobra, a jumping snake, and three smaller snakes whose name I don’t remember. The arena wasn’t very big and the snakes would sometimes just B-line it for the outside of the ring of the arena, which made us feel like tigers weren’t the most terrifying experience we’d had during the day. These snake trainers had guts!

Oh and after the show they put scorpions on our shirts. Tigers seemed like cuddle buddies after this!

See? Rambo. Legit.

Our last stop of the day was to Doi Sutep . . ., a Buddhist temple at the top of a 306 step staircase. It’s one of the major Buddhist attractions in the area where lots of Thai people come to worship, and the architecture was amazing.

At the bottom of the steps

Gotta love signs that target you for paying money..haha. 

 The main part of the temple. It was beautiful!

 There was a sign by this piece of fabric telling people to write their names on it so that it can be wrapped around the temple. We weren't sure why, but we weren't going to pass up the chance! We left our mark in English, Farsi, and Chinese.

We had to remove our shoes before going in, as is custom in most religious buildings here. The view from the top was incredible—it looked like the last three minutes of an airplane ride when you can start to see the details of the city below.

 We loved the details on the temple and in the outside courtyard, including these little Buddhist monk statures that reminded us of lawn gnomes back home. Adorable!

We bartered for a bit there, always a good time, until our drivers told us it was time to go. We ended our day adventure at our hostel, only to gear up for a fun night on the town. We got some food at a Mexican restaurant, which seemed like a good idea until halfway through our green chili and chicken burrito we realized that it just tasted like Thai food wrapped with a tortilla and smothered with cheese, but it was still fun to be Americans eating Mexican food in Thailand.

Funny thing about the silverware: Thai people, like Persians, use a fork in the right had for shoveling food onto the spoon held in the left hand, which is then used to deliver food into your mouth. Hard to maneuver at first, but once you can do it you realize it’s efficiency. After eating this way for a couple of weeks, we got to this restaurant where we were only given a fork and a knife, and we had a seriously hard time with it! I kept trying to use my knife as a shovel to get food onto my fork but it just wasn’t the same. What has become of us in such a short period of time??

We finished the night off with some shopping at a night bazaar in the city, bartering for fun souvenirs and trying to not make the street vendors mad when we wouldn’t pay their ridiculous prices. Always a good time!

Riding home in a "tuk tuk"

Ronald McDonald has adapted well to Thai culture!