I just got back from a week with the elephants and didn’t have much wifi, so I’m catching up on some posts! Truth be told I was kind of excited to leave Bangkok. It’s such a big city completely filled with tourists, and coming from New York City this was the last thing I wanted to deal with. So I was really excited to make my way to Chiang Mai, as it’s surrounded by the mountain ranges of the Thai highlands.
I arrived in the late afternoon to my hostel and decided to relax for the rest of the evening and plan my next day. Saturday morning I woke up early and wanted to go explore the Old City, which is surrounded by a moat. Within the Old City there are many temples, so I just wandered through for a few hours and ate some delicious noodle soup called Yen-Ta-Foo. I walked over to Wat Phra Singh, which is the most revered temple in Chiang Mai, located on the western side of the Old City. I walked the grounds for a while and admired the structures and monks walking around.
For lunch I met up with a friend I knew that lived in Chiang Mai, Pin. She went to my high school for a year as an exchange student and we kept in touch after she moved back to Thailand! She and her boyfriend treated me to a lovely meal of traditional Thai food and we chatted for a few hours. It’s always nice to see familiar faces when traveling!
She dropped me back off in the Old City and I continued to roam the streets before stumbling upon the Saturday Walking Street just south of the Old City. It’s basically a big street market that’s filled with street food and merchant stalls. You can buy anything from soap to clothes to souvenirs and more. After strolling around for a bit, I ordered a dragon fruit smoothie and started walking back to my hostel.
On the way I remembered there is a famous Night Bazaar that happens every night in the direction I was headed, so I stopped to check it out. It was quite similar to the Walking Street, with different merchant stalls and food.
On Sunday morning, my alarm went off at 7am and I got ready for a full day of hiking and biking through the Maesa Valley. I was picked up by the tour company and sat in the back of a truck as we picked up the other four people in my group. One couple was from Switzerland and the other couple was from Vietnam. We drove for about 1.5 hours until we arrived to our hiking spot in the mountains.
We lathered on the bug spray and sunscreen and started on our three hour hike through the wilderness. Our guide was extremely friendly, pointing out different plants and animals and letting us stop to take photos. We saw things such as ginger (seen below), coffee, turmeric, eggplant, and banana trees.
As we were hiking I kept hearing this loud noise that I assumed was machinery. Curious, I asked our guide and he told us the noise was actually cicadas. I’m not kidding you when I tell you this noise was extremely loud! Sometimes when you pass directly by them you need to cover your ears. We ended up seeing one flying around and it was HUGE. Probably the biggest bug I’ve seen so far.
Midway through our hike it started to rain…excuse me, POUR. It is the rainy season for Thailand, so it was inevitable that we would encounter some rain on our hike. But like most rain showers I’ve experienced in Thailand, they last maybe 15-20 minutes and then stop. Well, not this time. It poured the entire rest of our hike and after about 5 minutes of being worried my shoes were going to be ruined, I decided to just enjoy the moment and laugh it off with the rest of my group. Our tour guide wasn’t phased one bit, which made it more enjoyable.
The very last part of our hike required descending a steep hill, which our guide said was hard to do even when it wasn’t raining. The rain had created these little rivers that were flowing down and the clay ground was especially slippery. Well, in true Monika fashion, I slipped and slid down a portion of the hill and ripped the skin off my knee pretty badly. The rest of my group was continuing to traverse down the hill as I was wiping blood off with leaves, water and my raincoat. There was SO much mud stuck to our shoes that it kind of helped weigh ourselves down, so I safely made it down the rest of the way.
I LOVE hiking, but I had never been so happy to see the finish line of this one. Our truck was waiting for us, so we climbed back in and made our way to a waterfall to have lunch. We were supposed to swim there as well, but the heavy rains made it impossible to safely swim. Our guide told us he had never seen the water so high this early into rainy season.
Finally the rain stopped after lunch, just in time for the biking portion of our trip. We were each given a mountain bike and started off on our off-roading journey. We weaved up and over hills, passed through small villages, and even saw a few rice fields. The landscapes were absolutely beautiful with the mountains filling the background and lush green of the trees and plants.
The first thing I did when I got back to my hostel was take a shower! I was so excited to get all the mud off and to take my soaking wet shoes off, which didn’t dry for three days. I rested for a bit and then headed back to the Old City for the Sunday Walking Street. It’s just like the Saturday one except twice as big and runs right through the center of the Old City. After about 20 minutes crawling through the crowd, I decided to veer off on a side street to get some street food. I picked up some pork dumplings, a fried banana roll, chocolate mochi ice cream and finished with another dragon fruit smoothie as I walked back home.
Once back in my room, I repacked my bag and laid out my clothes for the next morning as I was heading to the Elephant Nature Park for a week to volunteer. I’ll have a separate post for that coming soon!