Blogger.com sucks: honeymoon part 2

Thanks to blogger.com, my new worst enemy, about an hour's worth of pictures and writing have just instantly vanished and must be rewritten. So I decided to publish the last post before the gnomes behind blogger.com try to further sabotage me.

cold, delicious tang

Anyway, back to our Chiang Mai hotel. One nice thing about the hotel (aside from the orange amenities) was that it was right next to the Night Bazaar, a collection of stalls selling everything from pink silk elephant key chains to "iPood" t-shirts (complete with image of pooping man) to endless bottles of orange tang. We spent the evening looking high and low for either (a) durian fruit, a notoriously stinky but supposedly delicious tropical fruit, or (b) cheap clothes to replace our ruined stinky ones. We did not succeed in buying either of these the first night, but we did fall for the tang (as you can see).

On the prowl for durian

"scotch"

Since we had been eating Thai food for two weeks straight, we decided to allow ourselves to be lame and eat mild, expensive Western food at "O'Malley's Irish Pub." We were slightly creeped out to find that the irish pub was THE SPOT for 70-something British men to take their 20 year old Thai girlfriends, but Matt was overjoyed to find a menu with reasonably priced scotch. Unsurprisingly, the scotch turned out to be 80% water.


The next evening, after spending the day walking around the neighborhood, we were picked up for our Thai cooking course, one of many offered in Chiang Mai. First they took us to the market and taught us how to shop for Thai produce.

Then we went back to the kitchen, where they gave us little aprons and had us choose which dishes we wanted to make (between the two of us, we chose Pad Thai, spicy prawn soup, spring rolls, papaya salad, green curry and panang curry). We were surprised to find that the most delicious dish by far was the papaya salad, a spicy mix of green papaya, chilis, garlic, carrots and tomatoes -- fiery yet refreshing.

After gorging ourselves on the four-course meal we cooked for ourselves, we went out to drinks (er, out to Chang beer, since that's the only affordable alcoholic beverage) with the other people in our course. We had a fun time comparing stories and travel advice in this little ex-pat bar. I ate some of the durian fruit that I bought at the market, but found it to be a little too stinky, so I threw it out in the bathroom trash, where it proceded to smell up the bathroom.

Our balcony

The next day we decided to transfer to a new location in Chiang Mai, for the heck of it. We booked a very famous and super ritzy hotel called the Chedi,  slightly further away from the night market.


The rooms were beautiful, decorated in traditional "Lani" (northern) style, with a lot of teak woods, and the hotel grounds were beautifully manicured and filled with an inordinate amount of ponds with floating flowers and/or candles.

floating flowers, #1

 

floating flowers #2

...#3

view of restaurant (with floating candles in pond)

Matt getting mad at me for making him rent a bike

After checking into our new hotel, we embarked on one of my favorite adventures of the trip: we rented bicycles and tried to navigate the busy Chiang Mai city streets on them.

Matt absolutely hated the whole activity, but it took us past a lot of little sights we would never have seen otherwise, including a number of temples, a little stand where we had 50-cent mango smoothies, a noodle-eating daffy duck, and -- my personal favorite -- the "Sit Down And Shut Up Cafe."

Sure, the drivers don't use turn signals, drive in "lanes" or brake for pedestrians, but it was still fun!

salty mango smoothies

the picture speaks for itself

The next day, we visited some of the more famous temples in the old city, this time via tuk-tuk (basically a little golf cart, not that much more safe than the bicycle, but somehow it feels safer since someone else is in control). Here's Matt meditating with the golden buddha:

After the busy day, we went back to the hotel and splurged on cocktails by the pool and chilled champagne in our room, a very relaxing end to the busy day.

On our last day in Chiang Mai, we hired a taxi driver (Montien) to drive us around the sights outside the city for a flat daily rate.

One of our favorite places was the Maesa Elephant Camp, where unemployed elephants are given new hope, pets from human visitors, and some bananas and sugar cane. I was a little disappointed to find that the bananas and sugar cane were way higher up on their list of priorities than getting pets from me. One of them (second picture down) would start stamping on the ground when he saw I had sugar cane that I wasn't feeding him. We later found out he played the "goalie" in the elephant soccer show, where his trick is to stamp his hooves as if to say, "bring it on!" to the soccer-ball-kicking elephant.

Our elephant was taking a big dump during this picture (see background)

sugar-cane greedy elephant

They get pretty excited about their daily bath. In fact, in the middle of our elephant trek, our elephant started bathing in the river with us still attached to him. It wasn't quite as dramatic as the elephant pictured here, who is in complete bathing mode, but I was definitely concerned about the possibility of having a snoutful of river water hosed on us.

After the trek and feedings, we saw a short show where the elephants perform tricks they've learned. For some this includes hauling logs (zzz), while for others it was dancing and playing harmonicas,  tipping their hats, painting pictures, kicking soccer balls (as mentioned above), or playing darts. Each elephant learns one of these tricks to "earn his keep" (i.e., help pay for the ridiculous amount of food they consume).

Next we had Montien drive us to the Doi Suthep temple, perched up high on a mountain overlooking Chiang Mai.

Doi Suthep is easily the most beautiful temple we saw. Unfortunately, since we had a plane to catch, we only very briefly got to explore it. You have to climb up this big staircase to get there, but there is a stunning view of the city and surrounding countryside from the top.

After the excitement of the day, we boarded a plane back to Bangkok for our last few days in Thailand, where we did some stuff (visited a bunch of markets, for example), but for some reason I stopped taking pictures of anything. Curiously, all I have to show for these days are (1) pictures of donuts, and (2) pictures of cakes. I don't know why I took these, and not pictures of anything else, but here they are.

last day donuts

That's the end! Yep, I just ended the story of our three week trip with a picture of donuts!