Chiang Mai

The night train was a good plan! I actually got something like 7 hours of sleep while traveling. More like that please! The beds were bunk-beds basically, and I paid a little less than Andy because I took the top bunk. Turned out the top bunk was slightly narrower, but ho-hum. When we first got on the train the top bunks were folded out but the lower bunks were still set up as seats. A guy came around later to make the conversion.

We had decided on the way to stay at the Eagle House 2 guesthouse. We discovered on the way there that the road system in Chiang Mai is a bit odd. The old city is surrounded by a moat, and there used to be a city wall – bits of that can still be seen here and there. The moat and the wall enclose the old city in a 2km x 2km square (I believe). Of course the city’s grown way beyond that now, but the old town is where our guesthouse was and was pretty much where we stayed.

On the first day Andy and I wandered around the old town, looking at wats (temples). There’s a very impressive, very old and pretty ruined wat there called Wat Chedi Luang. We also looked at Buddhas inside and when we arrived at Wat Phra Singh a procession was just leaving. This consisted of a line of pickup trucks – the first one had various buddhist religious implements on (gold boxes and things), then the following ones variously had people playing drums and other musical instruments. We found out later that a monk had just been ordained there and so this was the celebration.

Feeling templed out by now, we walked back.

We arranged with the tour guides at the hostel to do a 3-day trek, starting the next day. This was to be a trek up into the hills, staying overnight in hill-tribe villages, riding elephants and white water rafting. Unfortunately a couple cancelled at the last minute and so the trip never happened. We decided not to put it back a day – we’d already spent too long in Thailand – so sadly the trek never happened. Apparently Sapa in Vietnam is a better place to do a trek anyway.

A bit later, I got a text message from Mitch. He was going to fly from Bangkok to Chiang Mai, and would be joining us that evening. We had an excellent dinner at Daret’s house (it’s a guesthouse, we didn’t just invade somebody’s house and demand that they feed us) and an early night – Andy was feeling a bit delicate that day.

On the next day, Andy was still feeling bad, so I teamed up with Mitch. After looking into elephant rides (really expensive), zip lines (almost as expensive) and tiger stroking we decided to go with the tigers. Our hostel pointed us at a chap at the hostel next door, who was planning to do the tour today. Before taking us to the tigers, he insisted on taking us to see some temples! After visiting Wat Chedi Luang and Wat Phra Singh again (although Mitch hadn’t seen them, and the sun was in a better place so I got some better photos), off we went to Tiger Kingdom!

Tiger Kingdom was pretty cool. They let you in to the cages and take photos of you cuddling up to the tigers. They won’t allow you to do the really big ones – the alpha male is about 230kg – but you can lie with the 130-150kg tigers. They did various packages at the door. I opted to go with the big tigers and young (9 months) lions package, while Mitch went for the baby tigers. It was a little nerve-racking, although they keep the tigers well fed and it’s really hot there, so all they really want to do is lie around and relax. When I got there one of them was getting pretty restless and a bit later we saw the trainer playing with him. He had a big long stick with some kind of balloon or plastic bag on the end. He would wave it around and the tiger would just leap at it. It’s amazing to see, it’s just like watching a house cat, except that it’s twice the size of you! The tiger kept leaping in the water as well, a nice way to cool off I think.

The baby tigers were really cute too. There were two of them, each about the size of a house cat, maybe slightly bigger. We went to see those next and this was Mitch’s turn. One of them was rolling around to have his belly played with and crawled up into his lap and everything.

Next was my turn again to go and see the lions. These were 9 months old and weighed about 50kg. These were walking around a lot more – we saw one of them playing with a rock earlier, in much the same way that a cat plays with a ball. I don’t know if I touched one of them wrongly, but it lunged at me at one point. I don’t think he was actually aiming to bite, probably just wanted me to go away.

The trainer was telling me they only feed the cats chicken. Apparently any other meat would give them a taste for flesh. They’re also trained from birth not to attack people – the guy with the baby tigers was a little worried about Mitch letting them bite him.

After the tigers, we got back to the hostel at mid-afternoon, by which time Andy was feeling a lot better. We went out that evening and started off playing pool at the Heaven Beach Bar. This was about as bad as the name suggests, and it had a truly awful Thai cover band on, but they did have a free pool table. A bumpier pool table I have never played on, the games were pretty hilarious. After that we went to the Reggae bar for a dance – Mitch went home sometime in the interim. A bargirl at Heaven Beach Bar advised me that people head on to Spicy afterwards, and we would need a tuk-tuk, so we grabbed one from outside, who drove for about 30 seconds and dropped us off. Stupid bar girl! We walked back at the end of the night.

The following day Mitch was leaving for Pai and we were leaving to get the slow boat to Luang Prabang. Roll on a three-day journey!

Advertisement