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1/4/24 - Travel day to Chiang Mai
1/4/24 - Travel day to Chiang Mai
An 8:30 am tuktuk got us to terminal 9 am, 30 minutes before another 6 hour bus ride. Unfortunately no surprise lunch stop this time, but they did give us some snacks.
Our hotel boasted a wonderful (vegan!) restaurant in an open courtyard and a possibly more enviable series of shared balconies on each floor. With a wonderful view of Chiang Mai the mountains around it, we planned out our week before nipping back down to the restaurant for dessert.
The koi pond around the seating area hosted a knot (fun fact a group of frogs is an army, colony, or knot) of frogs.
Reading up on Cambodia with Doi Suthep in the background.
1/5/24
1/5/24
Similar to Ayutthaya, the central old-town of Chiang Mai is around 1 mi square, with narrow waterways surrounding it. Our hotel sat towards the north end of this old town, and with a whole week in the city, we opted to spend our morning wandering that section of the old town.
Wats, markets, a bookstore, and an outdoor mall were some of the points of interest as we traced the jagged alleys and larger edge roads of the old town. After lunch at V Napaphud (a restaurant that morphed to include a frozen/shelf stable food market during the pandemic), we headed back to one of the several tour agencies we stopped by that day; booking day trips to Chiang Rai and its famous modern temples and Doi Intenon National Park. Some more balcony trip planning before a short walk to dinner at Rad Rabbit for some vegan pizza.
Frankly, quite a normal temple (as in they were all stunning).
Sunset over Doi Suthep.
1/6/24
1/6/24
Our morning consisted of finalizing some dates of the previous two days of planning, including booking flights for next two months! After some leftover pizza, we took a quick Grab outside the old town to CMU, Chiang Mai University. While it has surely changed in the 40+ years since Kaia's father did a study abroad semester there, it was interesting to walk around and take photos to share with him later. We also stopped at small museum dedicated to the king, an apparently avid supporter of education in general and CMU specifically. We enjoyed an early dinner at vegan Free Bird Cafe, established in 1982, before we returned to the old town and walked two of the more famous wats Chiang Mai has to offer: the large and ornate Wat Waramahawihan and the famously broken Chedi of Chedi Luang.
Its funny because I went to CMU. Ok, its not that funny.
The gilded chedis of Wat Waramahawihan.
If I may put on my artsy hat for a minute, the scene of a family making offerings and bowing to a monument of the founding of Chiang Mai some 700+ years later, while some skaters hit some gnarly grinds in the foreground, poetically demonstrates the dichotomy within modern Chiang Mai.
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