Chang Mai Guest Houses

... cooking classes, hiking trips and river rafting available. Three days that we spent there are not enough. There are many inexpensive guest houses and strangely sometimes I felt like being somewhere in Austria, a lot of wood is used in the construction of ...

... by using us as guinee pigs. It turned out to be a ton of fun. SO I signed up to take a course later in the week. I changed guest houses to a dorm room it only cost me 1.25$ a day not to bad. I was wating for dinner and I look up and WOW people from ...

... live the King." We were impressed by the number of tourists in Chang Mai, both young and old. One phenomenon we noticed in Chang Mai especially are the older American or European men with much younger Thai dates/girlfriends. One bar we went to to watch a ...

... . We arrived in Pak Beng at 5pm and had to find a guest house. Naturally there were many people there advertising their guest houses, but we had been warned against people grabbing your bags and heading off to their place. We ignored them all, expecting ...

We got the bus from Chang Khong which is the other side of the river from Huay Xai early on Saturday morning to Chang Mai. It only took 6 hours in total which is nothing to us at this stage and you can immediately see the difference. The roads are way ...

... city with a little city feel. Even the downtown consists of mostly winding allys and roads littered with small restaraunts, beautiful guest houses and a handful of chill bars blaring reggae music noon and night. Since being here we've mostly just been ...

... say about it being an 'authentic' retreat from the tourist trail - this is definitely NOT true. The streets are lined with guest houses and tour booking agencies and everywhere you look has posters for jungle treks or elephant rides. The thing Chiang Mai ...

... Planet guide and finding they were all full we decided to take a taxi to the Khao San area where there are many supposedly cheap guest houses and backpacker places.  So the pink taxi dropped us at Soi Rambutri (not far from Khao San Road) and we ...

... photos'), cheap massages everywhere (total body, head, neck, foot, facials...) street food stalls, friendly helpful people, sweet guest houses, dinner for less then 5$, easy to get around and walkable, much less crazy then Bangkok but still scorching ...

... who pay around $400-500, all in. This is not what a young traveler usually wants. Monthly rates in guest houses sometimes do not include service bills, so allocate another B500 for your water and ...

... we could explore though, we had to find accommodation.  As we pulled into the actual town of Chang Dao we were met with many signs advertising guest houses.  One sign reading "Farm Stay" caught Mike's eye, and we all decided to check it ...

... Thai was serious! There is a "Muai Thai Show" in Chang Mai on the East side of town which sells tickets through most guest houses and tourist agencies. This is no more than a show. The fighting is correagraphed and more emphasis is on booze and lady boy ...

... our pick up, we were still waiting an hour and a half later. Eventually we phoned the tour company - it turns out there are a few guest houses of the same name in Bangkok. Why they didn't realise we weren't there and call the other one I don't know. They ...

... 10 years ago. The old city is a charming collection of criss-crossed backstreets dotted with lush gardens and vegetation, little markets, guest houses and restaurants, and is much less touristy than the night market area East of the old city. I convinced ...

... slum it!) We had a wander round... we were really impressed with Chang Rai. A lot smaller than Chang Mai but more upmarket and loads of nice coffee houses and bakeries (thought were meant to lose weight in Asia!) After having a wander and some food we ...

... and I got some 640 ml bottles of Chiang Mai for 36 baht each while we were first exploring the area around our guest house.  Beer Chang measures in at 6.4%, so one must be careful not drink too many of these bottles in one sitting. Our first night ...

... earthquake in the 16th century but this added to it's charm.  The highlight of our stay in Chiang Mai was a day trip which we organised through our guest house - we picked it because it was billed as being "off the tourist track". Originally we were ...

... that we barely noticed. We've noticed that there's no zoning policies for housing, with huge mansions positioned right next to houses which are little more than shacks. After that, we all regrouped and went to the umbrella festival. We were lucky because ...

... dropped us off, and we had a short walk to Pakawlam village. Which is quite a large village with a school and dozens of houses. The village even has a football pitch. The guys from the village wanted to have game so we accepted the challenge. Europe ...