Chiang Mai
I ended up in Chiang Mai after a nice overnight train, which was a good experience, but if I were to do it again I’d just fly–is only about $20-30 more and cuts about 10 hours off the trip.
Chiang Mai was a nice change of pace from the unrelenting bustle of Bangkok. Everything moves just a bit slower, and people that I encountered were generally nicer and less pushy.
When getting off the train, met Mike who also wanted to tour the countryside on Motorcycles, so we ended up spending most of the week hanging out on the trips. Ended up staying at Jacky Guesthouse which is located inside the moat of the old city. The moat provided a nice navigational landmark that made it very difficult to get lost. Chilled out for a day and then rented a 400cc Honda Super Four from Mr. Mechanics; Mike rented a 250cc Kawasaki dirt bike from Pop’s. I had a GPS tracker on me for the entire trip, will upload the way points and maps when I get back to the States.
Our first day trip was a nice ride out to Samoeng, in which we were able to get a nice feel for the bikes and the terrain. The roads are in pretty good keep, but very twisty. The small displacement bikes were perfectly sized for the terrain. Towards the end of the ride I got perhaps bit too confident on the bike and ended up running a bit wide on downhill right-hand corner, and ended up dropping the bike on the gravel as I came to a stop. Got couple of bruises, and was glad I was wearing the proper riding gear. Seemed like all that happened to the bike (which had been down several times before) was a scrape on the gauge pod. Once we got going again I realized that the handlebar was actually bent! We were way out in the boonies, and as luck would have it, at the next village there was actually a full-service Honda motorcycle dealership. I pantamimed to the mechanic that I wanted him to bend the handlebar back and repair the gauge bezel. 15 minutes later the bike was good as new, and the shop owner only wanted 20 baht for the work, which works out to be about $.60. I happily gave him 40 baht, and we rode on back to town.
The next day (Thursday) we road 100km or so North up to Pai, and then on back. It was a nice mellow trip, we took some nice pictures, saw some great scenery… just an overall nice day. When we got back into town I took stroll along the moat-road looking for dinner. Around sunset, a funny thing happens in Chiang Mai: sidewalks become restaurants, complete with dining rooms and tables cloths. I ended up stopping at several of these street vendors, picking up some Gyoza, a Banana Smoothie, Salted BBQ Pork and sweet and sour soup–all very good. Or so I thought.
I ended up going to bed early because the following morning (Friday) I was supposed to ride out to an Elephant camp and go on a trek. Mike had some personal stuff to do, and had already done the Elephant thing, so it seemed like great timing. The problem is that I woke up in the middle of the night feeling very, very nauseous and had a really bad upset stomach. I had gotten food poisoning from something I ate and was up numerous times during the night. In the morning, I went down to the guest house lobby, bought two enormous jugs of water, two cans of Fanta orange drink and a couple pieces of toast. I had a pretty bad fever and I didn’t emerge from the room until about 24 hours later.
Saturday I woke up feeling okay enough to get on with my trip, although I didn’t have much of an appetite. The worst part about the whole experience is that because I ate some many different kinds of local foods, my body has strongly associated the distinct smells of each with ‘bad food’. When I walk by a lot of the restaurants and vendors now I get hit by little waves of nausea. It really sucks because the food here in general is really quite good and safe, but since then I’ve had to stick to mostly western food or mild-smelling Thai food. This has been really tough for me because I had originally intended to eat only local food for the entirety of my trip.
Even though Mike had already experienced the Elephant thing, he Kae (a local we had met) and I decided to check out an elephant camp southwest of Chiang Mai in Mae Wang. We got there and had lunch (I had two Oreos and a bottle of water), and ended up going to ‘meet the elephants’.
This may sound stupid but elephants are pretty damned big and intimidating–this is the main thing going though my head as I approached the one that I was going to ride. We had to climb up stairs up onto a wooden loading platform where I jumped on. We then went on a 30 minute trek through, up and down the hilly countryside. It is pretty amazing how maneuverable the huge animals are, and how they are able to walk narrow single-tracks. Riding down steep inclines was not comfortable, and I had to hang on. Half-way through the trek I was informed that the elephant I was riding was 1 year pregnant. Initially this was alarming, but turns out there is a two-year gestation period, and the animal was barely showing anyway. We eventually walked down to and crossed the river, which elephants seem to really enjoy. I got pretty well soaked.
After the trek we got to feed the elephants bananas, which they really like.
After the ride/trek the guides took us up the road a few kilometers and put us on a bamboo raft, which we navigated down the shallow river. The rafting was actually a heck of a lot of fun, and quite refreshing in the heat. I was standing on the back of the raft with the bamboo poll when we the raft snagged on rock in the shallow water. I didn’t think that we were going very fast, but physics would beg to differ because when the raft came to a quick stop I did not. Ended up landing on the raft in a quasi-graceful pseudo-fall. I am claiming it was somewhat graceful and not exactly a fall because I did not actually end up in river, but remained squarely on the 4 foot wide raft. I’ll take the small victories. I did skin my knees though, so perhaps it was a Pyrrhic victory?
In any case I’d highly recommend doing the elephant trek / bamboo raft thing. If I have another opportunity I’d like to do a much longer rafting trip.
Tags: chiang mai, elephants, rafting, thailand
