Chiang Mai

Location: Chiang Mai, Thailand

On Wednesday morning, we headed out into the downtown area of Chiang Mai. Chiang Mai is the largest city in northern Thailand, and was once the capital of the Lannathai Kingdom. The ruler of the kingdom constructed a moat and a wall around the city to protect it from attacks. The moat and parts of the wall are still visible today:

There are plenty of temples in the city, and they are generally much older and of a different style than the ones in Bangkok. Since we didn’t really know what else to see, we decided to head to a temple called Wat Chiang Man. This was the oldest one in the city, having been built in 1296. It was nice to see this one, as it lacked the tourist presence that existed in Bangkok. It was a smaller, quainter site, and there was no admission charge as well. Some pictures of the wat:


The inside of the main building had some beautiful artwork on the doors and walls, which was probably recently restored:

In the back was a large cheddi (pillar). The pillar was built on top of amazing statues of elephants:

After this, I walked over to another wat, Wat Phra Singh, which had a white cheddi, and old, unrestored paintings on the walls of the temple:


We took it easy for the afternoon, as it was raining outside. Later, we headed out to see the Night Bazaar, which is the main market of Chiang Mai. This market is similar to the others (of course), but has more indoor areas and a neat food court like area. In this food court, you bought coupons from one desk for a certain amount, and then exchanged the coupons for different courses at different stands. Each stand specialized in a different type of Asian food, from Middle Eastern to Japanese. I got a pad thai, a soda, a bottle of water, and a dessert of sticky rice and mango for 100 baht , or about 3 dollars and 33 cents.

After walking around some more, we headed back to the hotel, to get some sleep.The following morning, we got up to go on a tour of the north of Thailand, and the Golden Triangle…

Bangkok, revisited

Location: Bangkok, Thailand

On Tuesday, we headed out of Phuket early to catch our plane to Bangkok. We got into Bangkok at around 10:30 am, and had a flight out to Chiang Mai at 8:40 pm. Ben decided he wanted to just stick around the airport area for the layover. I however, did not have this choice, as I had lost my cell phone, and believed it to be in the hotel in Bangkok. So I headed to the hotel, and sure enough, I had left it under the bed. After convincing the hotel staff to let me search the room and recovering the phone, I decided to head out and explore some areas that we had missed earlier.

First, a word about Bangkok's transportation systems. Bangkok has two methods of mass transit: a subway system, and an above ground system similar to Chicago's L system. However, these two systems don't have stops in useful places (at least not for tourists) and there is no airport connection, for now. Add to this a ridiculously inefficient way of timing the traffic lights, and it makes for a terrible mess of traffic at all times during the day. I decided to take the above ground system for a few stops:

Upon entering the train, I noticed a sign above one of the seats for preferred seating:

I wonder if we should offer preferred seating for priests, rabbis and ministers on subway systems in the United States.

I ended up taking this train to the Victory Monument, constructed in 1941 to commemorate the Thai victory against the French in the French-Thai War. The whole area was a wide open roundabout:

After this, I walked over to the Chitralada Villa, which is the official residence of the royal family of Thailand. The palace is surrounded by a large fence and a moat, and I could only walk around the outside:

I then walked across the street to the Marble Temple, Wat Benchamabophit (quite a mouthful). This temple was made of Italian marble, and houses many images of Buddah, made of different materials. There is also a stream running through the grounds. The whole area was quite beautiful. I managed to get some pictures before my camera battery died:

After seeing this, I walked around for a long time looking for a place to eat, before giving up, buying some pineapple, and taking a cab back to the airport. I met up with Ben around 6:30 pm, and we headed for our flight to Chiang Mai...

Phuket

Location: Phuket, Thailand

Phuket is an island in the southern part of Thailand. It sits in the Andaman Sea, and is known as a prime beach vacation spot. This quickly became apparent, as we walked around the Patong Beach area at night. Plenty of hotels right on the beach; with open air restaurants and bars, serving up all manner of bad rock tribute bands and Elvis impersonators. We saw a lot of tourists here, especially from Australia. Perhaps this is a vacation spot for Aussies, just like the Bahamas or Bermuda for Americans.

On Saturday, we just took it easy. This was very easy to do: the hotel we had was very nice, and had a pool that basically ran the whole length of the hotel. It was also right on the Patong Beach, which was very nice, stretching for about 1.5 miles, facing the Andaman Sea:


On Sunday, we took a half-day trip to the Phang Nga area, which is actually on the Thai mainland, north of Phuket. This is probably the area that Phuket is most famous for. If you see pictures of Phuket, you'll probably see pictures of the Phang Nga Bay.

This was the best tour we'd been on so far. The tour guide spoke English very well, and there were no souvenir stops along the way. Our first stop on the trip was the Monkey Temple. This was basically a cave with a reclining Buddha statue. Plenty of monkeys scurried around the grounds of the cave, and people operated stands selling bananas and rambutans that you could buy to feed the monkeys:

After this, we were driven to a dock, to get on a longtail boat. This boat was much bigger, holding about 20 people. We took this boat into the Phang Nga Bay, which truly lives up to its hype. This was one of the most beautiful areas I have ever seen in the world. Limestone cliffs rise majestically out of the water, with no slopes leading up to them. Water erosion makes the cliffs skinnier at the bottom than in the middle, and trees and shrubs grow precariously out of cracks in the cliffs:

After sailing through the water for about half an hour, we reached a Muslim fishing village, situated at the foot of one of these cliffs. This village was basically suspended over the water:

We docked at the village and walked around a bit. Shops sold local crafts and souvenir items. We walked past an elementary school with a ball court as well:

Tourism obviously helps sustain this village; women walked around with gibbons for tourists to take photos with; since Ben had already had one monkey experience in Marrakesh, he was not particularly interested in having another one here. As we walked around, I heard a sound familiar to ones from earlier in the trip: the muezzin's call to prayer (I didn't get a video with this one). After walking around for a while, we had lunch in one of the restaurants in the village, and headed back to the longtail boat. Now, we headed through the bay area for another 20 minutes, underneath one of the limestone cliffs at one point:

We then reached Ko Tapu, also known as James Bond Island. It has this name because it was the chosen location of Scaramanga's lair in "The Man With the Golden Gun". The island was beautiful, and we got there at around 5pm, after most of the tourists had left and the shops had closed. The island is rather small, and the most famous landmark on the island is a smaller limestone cliff rising out of a shallow pool of water, shown in the last picture below:

After exploring this island, we were taken back to the port on the longtail boat, as the sun was setting. This made for some nice photos as well:

All in all, this was a great tour, and I recommend it to anyone who visits Phuket.

At night, we walked around the Patong Beach area, and on the main street of Bang La. Here were plenty of little shops, and go-go bars in similar fashion to the ones in Bangkok, though they seemed a bit more tame. More of the bars were open-air here, so it was easy to just walk through. Obviously, the whole purpose was for men to decide which girl they wanted to take home. There was one twist here though: to "flirt" with the men, the girls would play connect-four with them. I guess when you can't really speak the same language as the girl, it's a good way to "get to know her".

On Monday, we went into the downtown area of Phuket. There wasn't really much going on here, and we ended up going to a mall to have lunch. Still, we did pass by some interesting fruit stands, and pottery stands:

That last picture is of a very interesting Thai fruit. It is called durian. Supposedly, when fully ripe, the fruit is the most foul-smelling fruit in the world, and many hotels will actually forbid guests from bringing it into their rooms. I bought some-it definitely had a smell to it, but I must not have bought a piece at the peak of ripeness. It tasted okay, nothing too special.

At the mall, we had lunch at a shabu-shabu restaurant. Here, you order ingredients off the menu, and cook it in a pot of vegetable flavored water sitting on the table. Definitely a fun way to eat; because we only had veggies though, it wasn't very filling, but it was a good bargain, at only about 4 dollars.

Anyway, we headed back to the hotel after this. I decided to walk around, and took some pictures of the beach area around sunset:

The last photo is of a small Buddha shrine; these exist all over Thailand, and other Asian countries. I guess Buddhists can offer their prayers here if need be.

Anyway, on Tuesday morning, we woke up early and flew to Chiang Mai, stopping off in Bangkok again for a long layover...