Chiang Mai

Chiang Mai, the tourist capital of northern Thailand. We arrived here Saturday night after a 12-hour train ride from Bangkok. The train made it's way slowly but surely northwards from 8:30 am to 8:30pm. We passed loads of temples, ruins, rice fields, villages and towns in our three car 2nd class train. The seats reclined a bit and we were given lunch and two coffee breaks included in the price of our ticket. As we started climbing in elevation out of the lower plains we passed through bamboo forests and more small villages. It reminded me a lot of Vanuatu, except that every station we stopped at had electricity, a phone and a nice building, no matter how small it was. The last two hours of the train ride were the toughest. We had been sitting for 10 hours and no longer had any scenery to look at. So when we arrived at the station in Chiang Mai we were more than ready to get off.

We walked out of the station past the guys asking if we wanted taxis or tuktuk rides into the city. We then quickly realized that they were our only hope of getting anywhere and asked one to take us into town. He first asked for 100 baht, which we knew was a ripoff, so we tried to bargain. Now, after living in Vanuatu where it is considered rude to try to get things for a discount, Sandra and I both hate bargaining. But I was able to get it down to 70 baht. I was happy, he was happy and we got to our hotel. It turns out the ride should've been about 50 baht, so we ended up paying about $0.60 too much. Not a big deal.

Chiang Mai is the tourist capital of the north like I said before. There are tourists from all over Thailand and all over the world. Add onto that all of the expats who live here and it's almost a 50/50 mix of local to foreigner. People come here mainly for the extreme sports and jungle trekking. You can hire a guide and head off into the bush for 2 or 3 days where you stay in small villages, eat local foods and take bucket showers. Something that maybe we would've liked to do had we not done that exact same thing for the last two years on Vanua Lava. So we've been mainly walking around the old part of town and eating street food.

Today we went to an all day Thai cooking class outside of town. There were 12 people in our class (Austrailians, Canadian, Americans, Dutch and Spanish folks) and we each got to make 5 different dishes. We took a trip to the local market to buy the ingredients then went to the organic farm where they have the school set up. We mashed our own curry paste, cut our own veggies and all cooked on our own. We made a ton of great food that we couldn't finish no matter how much we wanted to. I think I made Vegetarian Green Curry, Thai big noodles stir fry, pumpkin in conconut milk, and prawn soup. We returned to the hotel about an hour ago full and ready for a nap. After a bit of a rest we're all going to meet up for drinks tonight. We'll be in Chiang Mai for another day or two before starting our trip to Laos. More later.