Chiang Mai 3/22/08

Chiang Mai= Bangkok-(80% of dirt/filth)-(50% of crowds)-(bad, unrecognizable smells)

Okay this may not be the best description of Chiang Mai but certainly a quick & dirty way to compare it to Bangkok! :) I may have said this before but Chiang Mai is our favorite city (in Thailand) so far. First of all, it is a big city with a lot to offer...big city excitement, many good restaurants, and yet it never seemed overly crowded or dirty. Our only regret is that we didn't allow another 2-3 days to enjoy more of this city and the surrounding area.

We spent my birthday in Chiang Mai and to celebrate Jon arranged a Thai cooking course--full day preparing 8 local dishes and including a tour of a local market where they showed us the ingredients we would be using. AND as if that wasn't cool enough...the day before my birthday we made our way north to an elephant training center. I am actually most proud of this day because we resisted the urge to book a group tour...many of the tours in town were going to elephants camps near by for a very reasonable price yet the camps are not well known for their humane treatment of the elephants. So, we did a bit of research and found Lamphang to be the best place...it is a training center and hospital for sick and injured elephants. However, Lamphang was 4 hours away so we found a place that was second best according to Lonely Planet...the Chiang Dao Elephant Training Center. After the elephants take a bath in the river, they show off their work skills used back in ancient times i.e. rolling logs, pulling logs, stacking logs, etc... Jon and I then went for an hour long ride through the jungle and down a river...it was one of the coolest things I've ever done! The thing I liked best about this center vs. other local elephant camps was that they only entertained tourists from 8am to about 12pm and then they had the rest of the afternoon off to roam free in the jungle (fenced section of jungle of course). Some of the camps closer to Chiang Mai simply rent the elephant and his mahout for the day and at the end of the day the mahout takes the elephant home...and unfortunately the treatment and care of these wonderful animals cannot then be tightly controlled. And so, Jon and I successfully found our way to the local bus station, hopped off the bus an hour later in front of the training center (located about 10-15 km outside Chiang Dao), and then later found our way back to Chiang Mai via a local 'sawngthaew': small pickup truck with long benches in back and everyone just piles in. It is a step up from a motorized tuk-tuk because they usually have set routes and set prices. It cost us about $2 to ride an hour back to Chiang Mai! This is one way to see how the other side of the world lives.

~D&J