After a whirlwind stop in Cambodia and an overnight layover in Bangkok, we were finally on our way to northern Thailand. Chiang Mai and Pai had been on our bucket lists for a while so we were excited to cross these off!
Chiang Mai
We were on the ground in Chiang Mai by 10 AM, so with a full day ahead of us we checked into our hostel, Thunder Bird. It turned out to be the trendiest, nicest hostel with a vegan restaurant, bakery, unbelievably clean rooms and bathrooms, plus a piano & guitar for the more musically inclined. It was the cutest. By the time we checked in and got settled, we decided to try some trendy vegan meals for lunch. Sloan got pad thai and I got a sandwich on a ‘charcoal broccoli quinoa’ bagel. Turns out charcoal is actually great for you and this bagel was tasty as ever, too. Win win!
With full bellies, we left our hostel to check out all the hype behind Chiang Mai. We walked around the old town for hours exploring back roads, small shops, markets, and I even got a pedicure and some other cool souvenirs. We’d been wanting to try the famous mango sticky rice in Thailand since my friend Lauren had recommended it to us back at the beginning of our trip. We were just hungry enough for a little snack now, so when we saw a small restaurant serving this dish we jumped at it. It was sooo good, the perfect combination of salty from the rice, and sweet from the mango/coconut milk.
We sat, ate, and watched as it monsooned outside for 30 minutes, then we headed back to Thunder Bird.
One of our friends, Cameron, with whom we’d spent the better part of our 3 weeks in Vietnam, was now living in Chiang Mai temporarily. He had just gotten to the city too and was still in the search for an apartment, so he ended up staying at Thunder Bird for the night with us. We all met up around 5pm and decided to check out the famous Chiang Mai weekend night markets.
Wow… I think I’ve written before that one of my favorite things about the SE Asian culture is their love of markets. Every kind of market you could ever think of exists somewhere here. Fish, flowers, souvenirs, clothing, wood carvings, pottery, and the list goes on. Sloan and I have loved exploring them all and seeing the outrageous things we can find. But holy wow, the Chiang Mai Weekend Market puts every other market I’ve EVER seen to shame, and that is an understatement.
There were two main roads perpendicular to each other that made the market up, plus many many side streets along the way. To put into perspective how big it was, one of the roads stretched for just under one mile and there couldn’t have been more than 4 inches between each stall. It took us easily three hours to walk down just *one* street along with some side streets to check out the food. It was the most amazing thing ever.
While I’m on the topic of food… if you’re into checking out authentic street food, Chiang Mai is for you. What was originally supposed to be a quick walk through the market on the way to dinner turned into the market’s street food becoming our dinner. We tried a little bit of everything we could find:
- Sheame – fried balls of rice and corn served with chili sauce. Sounds simple, but it was one of the tastiest street foods I’ve had.
- Pad Thai – the classic rice noodles with tofu, chicken, egg and peanut sauce.
- MASSIVE spring rolls – these were easily the size of a Chipotle burrito
- Grilled pork chop – served with the spiciest sauce, I think Sloan was sweating after his first bite
- Cake donuts – just when we got finished talking about how Asia didn’t really have any sweet desserts…
- A chocolate almond Belgian waffle – just wow
Needless to say, we were disgustingly full after eating all that food. We spent a while longer exploring the market, seeing what we could find and trying to walk off the food coma we’d just put ourselves into. We found just about every handicraft imaginable. If we had more rooms in our backpacks I know we would’ve taken home a handful of souvenirs, but that’s the downside of backpacking I suppose.
Elephants at Home
One of our most highly anticipated days of the entire trip was finally here. We were going to play with elephants! We’d heard about the elephant sanctuaries in Chiang Mai back in May when we started planning this trip, but nothing could have prepared us for how cool this day would be.
The tricky thing about the elephant sanctuaries is figuring out which ones are humane and which aren’t. Rule of thumb is if they advertise riding the elephants, don’t go. From our research we found that those sanctuaries typically have really bad living conditions for the elephants and they’re treated as props instead of as pets. I spent a lot of time looking into this, as respecting animals is incredibly important to me, and we found a few that fit what we wanted to do.
The first one, called the Elephant Sanctuary, was filled for three weeks in advance and we were trying to sign up the day before. What normally would have been discouraging ended up being the best luck ever. We went to another place, called Elephants At Home, and had the most amazing day of the entire trip.
Elephants At Home is just what it sounds like, a place where elephants can live and be cared for while still feeling like they’re “at home” in the jungle. We took a 2 hour bus ride into the jungle outside of Chiang Mai and randomly came across a small little hut with a group of people, a few dogs, and four absolutely massive elephants. They weren’t tied up or restricted to a pen, they were very much free to go and do as they please. We knew immediately that we picked the right place.
There were only three other people in our group, which made us even happier with our decision to go to a lesser known, less crowded sanctuary. The guides, who were the 7th generation of caretakers to the elephants here, spoke to us for a while. We learned a lot about their sanctuary and elephants specifically, for example female elephants can live up to 100 years old, 20-25 years longer than their male counterparts. Girl power?
Now it was time for the fun to begin. The elephants had been poking their trunks into the hut we were sitting in the whole time, but now it was feeding time! All five of us dressed in traditional, brightly-colored clothing, grabbed a bucket of bananas, and were sent into this pack of very hungry elephants. Holy wow! First of all, you realize how small you truly are when you’re standing next to an elephant. They made Sloan look teeny tiny. And second of all, they are absolutely ruthless with their trunks when you bring out the food. I swear their trunks have a mind of their own! They’re like little snakes, wrapping around your arms and grabbing all the bananas before you even realize what’s happening. They are so smart! Each elephant had over a bucket of bananas to itself, peels and all, and I imagine they could’ve eaten much much more than that.
After feeding, it was bath time! We walked with the elephants alongside to a nearby river and they jumped right in with us. We washed them down with sugarcane and soap and they were loving every second. It was so fun splashing around with them. They sprayed us and gave us “kisses and cuddles” and it was honestly the best thing ever.
From there we hiked for over 45 minutes to our lunch spot, which was a big tree hut next to a waterfall. The elephants are surprisingly nimble! They were walking up really steep paths and never lost their balance which was super impressive to me. We had to keep pinching ourselves and looking around at what we were doing. Hiking through the jungle with elephants all around us. Are you kidding?!
The lunch they prepared for us was insane. All the fruit you could possibly ask for. We had clementines, bananas, mangoes, passion fruit, dragon fruit, watermelon, and the freshest pineapple I’ve ever tasted. Plus they gave us each fried chicken wings and sticky rice served in banana leaves. Ugh I wish I could eat it all again as I write this. Just look at how delicious!!!
After lunch we swam in the waterfall with the elephants. As amazing as it is swimming with these gorgeous creatures, you do have to remember how massive they are and that if they accidentally fell on you or pushed you under the water, well, you were probably a goner.
We had so much fun swimming, taking pictures and feeding them some more. It was one of the coolest things I’ve ever done. Even despite one of the elephants accidentally smacking me across the face with its massive ear. That one didn’t feel great.
We hiked back to their home and wished them goodbyes. We were both so sad for this day to end, but I have faith we will be playing with elephants again someday.
We returned to Chiang Mai just in time to grab dinner at Lemongrass for the best pad Thai we’ve ever had. I will definitely miss this city (and all of it’s incredible food) !!
Pai, Thailand
So many people we’d met on this trip told us great things about Pai, and even though we only had two more days before we were meeting our parents in Bangkok, we made sure to squeeze Pai into our itinerary.
The road from Chiang Mai is 85 miles long and has 762 turns along the way. SEVEN HUNDRED AND SIXTY TWO. It took us over 3.5 hour on a bus with a Chinese tour group that wouldn’t stop yelling (or puking…) It was the worst bus ride ever.
BUT, Pai was more than worth it. We stayed in the Pai Circus Hostel which was awesome and stupidly cheap. We wasted no time checking in, renting a motorbike and getting out there to see as much of Pai as we possibly could.
Our first stop was Coffee In Love, an adorable little coffee shop restaurant overlooking the Pai countryside. It was adorable! From there we explored the Memorial Bridge, a few cute shops, and then went on to the Pai Canyon. This was like nothing I’ve ever seen in my life (though I know it doesn’t even come close to the Grand Canyon) but it’s basically that on a smaller scale. It’s a big open area where all the land has eroded over time, leaving just a few massive cliffs that drop off at a complete 90-degree angle on either side. It’s the type of place where you realize that you are actually scared of heights, even if you always thought otherwise.
We spent nearly two hours wandering around the cliffs, climbing up and down and feeling way too nervous near the edges. On our way out, we met a group of girls debating on climbing down the really steep path that we’d just come from. We got to chatting with them and they decided that it wasn’t worth it, so instead we joined the 4 of them to head to a bar for sunset drinks. The first two girls were Rosie and Alice, two sisters from the UK who had been living in Australia for the past year, and then Isla and Lauren, who the sisters had met on their travels. We spent a while chatting with them and getting drinks before we all split and returned to our hostels.
Sloan and I went to the Pai Night Market now, which was much MUCH smaller than the market in Chiang Mai, but we enjoyed how chill it was. We tried some more street food as our dinner (even risked street sushi, which in hindsight probably wasn’t smart, but it was tasty and we lived to tell the tale) and then retreated to our bungalow home for the night.
The next morning we woke up early with a plan to make the most of our half-day in Pai. We took our motorbike 14 miles outside of the city into the National Park, drove down some incredibly steep hills, and finally made it to the hot springs. These were the lesser known hot springs in the area so it was pretty secluded, and I think we were the only non-locals there. It was such a cool place, the water was crystal clear and surprisingly really hot, and the scenery was beautiful. We probably could’ve spent all day here if we weren’t on such a tight time constraint, but off we were to our next stop.
We made it to the Mo Paeng Waterfall after winding through incredibly remote paths and getting funny looks by the locals. The waterfall had some natural slides down them so of course we jumped right in and slid down in the freezing water before realizing that it was next to impossible to get out on the slippery rocks.
We had planned to meet Alice and Rosie for lunch, so we headed back into town and met them at the Rabbit Cafe for coffee. I don’t think I could love a concept any more: order a delicious iced coffee, and they serve you at your table with a bunny too! A real live bunny!!! Oh my heart.
We went across the street after a hard goodbye to the cutest little fluff ball and got lunch at Lemon Thyme. We all got bacon & avocado eggs benedict and I think I might still be dreaming about it as I write this 3 weeks later… wow. We really enjoyed Alice and Rosie’s company, so we spent a while chatting and laughing with them before having to say our goodbyes and leaving on a jam-packed bus with more Chinese people who refused to let us sit together for whatever reason. The ride back was more brutal than the ride here and I think both Sloan and I had moments of feeling nauseous, but we held it down and made it to Chiang Mai relatively unscathed.
After another delicious pad thai for dinner, we were ready to call it a night. The morning was going to be here before we knew it, and it was just about time to meet our parents! Here goes nothing…
A Journal For My Journeys 