Today we left Chiang Mai to go down to Koh Phangan, an island in the Gulf of Thailand.
Highlights of Chiang Mai were:
- Our cute quiet guesthouse, Top Garden, recommended to us by our friend Alli & a 5 min walk to Thapae Gate
- Breakfast at Cat House everyday — best lattes, delish gluten free banana pancakes, French toast w home-baked bread, yummy fruit & muesli bfast
- Dinner show at the Old Chiang Mai Cultural Center even though I can see how this is a weird exoticizing tourist trap, we loved it. Yummy food, and beautiful dancing that you can only see here (if you’re a tourist/foreigner)
- Renting a scooter from the sweetest human, Anh, at Marble & Karntong Motorcycle Rental Shop
- Thai massages at Lila Massage
- Meditation time and talking to a novice monk at Wat Pha Lat –seriously the most beautiful Wat ever. If we were to go again we would walk the monk’s trail to this really unique temple in the forest
- Lunch or dinner at Grazie Thai Local Food (little noodle shop) literally every day – mainly for Khao Soi, one young coconut and a Chang, and the lovely family-owned biz, quiet, sweet, homey vibe
- Sunday Night Market was pretty dope
- The “Grand Canyon” even tho it’s kind of weird and commercialized but cool to swim in a quarry of blue water with bamboo rafts
Things we won’t miss about Chiang Mai:
- Entitled white boys
- Smelly hippies with dreads
- So many 20 year olds
- Literally westerners everywhere ugh tourists and ugh expats
- The traffic and exhaust smell
- So many tourists
- The Night Bazaar was kinda whatevs in comparison to Sunday Night Market (or maybe we were just cranky)
- Constipation
- Sofia getting a cold
- The feeling of disappointment that everyone’s obsessed with this city but we can’t quite see why –???? Why??
I guess we could have done a “feed and bathe the elephants” experience, which was expensive and not that appealing due to the ethics, but now that we’ve left Chiang Mai I’m having FOMO that we didn’t do this “memory of a lifetime” thing. Hmm :/
All in all, Chiang Mai is clearly magical for a lot of people who visit (not to mention the folks who are from there and make their lives there, most of whom we didn’t have the honor of knowing). But although it’s a pleasant small city, we didn’t fall in love with it.
We did love the magic of some of the incredible Buddhist temples, the conversation with sweet Sone (monk in training), the meals with our adopted Thai family lol, the scooter rides (when we weren’t in traffic), the forest!, the trees!, the morning light, learning how to say “Hello” & “Thank you” and living from those two words alone, the Thai massages we could have gotten daily….
So maybe there was magic.
Just needed some reflection to get there.
Top Garden Guesthouse
The streets of Chiang Mai