As we were in the airport catching a flight up to Chiang Mai, we checked email and got one from Dad telling us that Sheri (my sister) has had her baby! The pictures are amazing and Sheri looks great. Congrats and welcome JAKE!!
Flew up to Chiang Mai and caught a local bus in (damn taxi wanted $3 ... what a rip off! :-) Walked around thinking 'what the hell kinda place is this????', but got a nice room with AC (VIP Hotel, you know -- $8.50/night).
Chiang Mai really opens up at night! What fantastic and amazing markets! Apparently, the 'original Yunnanese trading caravans used to stop here along the ancient trade route between Simao (China) and Mawlamyaing (Myanmar).' And still to this day these night markets are kicking! Loads of stuff to do and see. Music from all over, fantastic smelling food, bird whistles, and children running around giggling. It is also HUGE...it goes on and on and on and on. The best part is that it is not (quite) been taken over with the tourism stuff. Not too many rip off T-Shirts and fake hand bags yet.
Had a great dinner on the river at River Side Restaurant and Bar which was worth the walk and the Tuk-Tuk ride back. -B
Spent the next couple of days generally exploring the city and eating a lot of bloody great food (no suprises there). I have to say that Chang Mai really is a bit of a grower. I had pretty high expectations when I arrive that it would be a small place which was quite rural. Well obviously I have only myself to blame in not really doing my homework. It is the second biggest city in Thailand and it positively booming. There is a rage community of expats here and also a strong tourist trade soaking up the food and culture and getting right into the shopping at the markets. This certainly is the beaten track. Despite this I felt myself warming to the place as it is so sociable and we spent a couple of very enjoyable nights drinking and chatting with people we had just met.
We took a cooking course for two days which was something that was on my wish list from the start of the trip. We didn't hang around choosing the company as we had heard great reports from lots of people about the Chang Mai cooking school which is the original one and is run by the "international" celebrity chef and wife, Sompon and Elizabeth Nabnian. We opted to go and cook at their house in the outskirts of Chang Mai which is a beautiful house, school and garden. Over the two days we cooked and ATE 12 dishes which were pretty dam good ! B was competitive as ever and managed to be the teachers pet which is just about typical ! However he was quite gutted when my red curry got the perfect thumbs up from teach. He did however take great pleasure when I managed to burn my garlic on the first day - yes and I believe there is photographic evidence of me scowling just to prove it.
The first day was really hectic as we had to go shopping at the market first and I'm sure we ran back from the classroom to the cookers to get everything done but the second day was at a much more relaxed pace. So now we are fully qualified to make the following dishes. Red Curry with chicken (paste from scratch after some serious pestle and mortar pounding), fat noodles with vegetables, clear soup with noodles and pork balls, chicken with cashew nuts, chicken and ginger, steamed fish with sticky rice, yellow curry, tiger prawn thai salad, mango with sticky rice, banana and coconut milk and more......
We continued to do some serious homework after school and managed to pack in a whole host of eating in restaurants and markets every day - whole fish with garlic, papaya and bamboo salads, changmai sausages, tom yums, pork and basil....yum
The last day before we left we decided to go on a tour from Chang Mai. We had originally planned to do some serious treeing from here but the whole thing seemed a bit too commercialised. Having said that some guys that we met had great things to say about Pooh's Eco trekking. The one day we went off we visited two hill tribe villages but to be honest we felt quite uncomfortable and the villagers were trying to flog their crafts -and so they should. Anyway moving on, we went on an elephant ride which again I had my doubts about but I must admit it really was fun and the elephants didn't seem to mind too much(?). B ended up steering the thing by sitting on his neck and making encouraging grunting noises which was very amusing. Afterwards I fed my elephant some sugar cane which was a big hit. He nearly tried to have a go at picking up one of my twig legs but it didn't smell as good as the sugar cane ! Afterthat we went on a bamboo raft down the river which was really cool. We nearly came into a couple of tricky moments when the next raft got caught in a rock but managed to shift out of it and sink their raft a bit at the same time.
The next day we checked out the Chinese market and some of the temples around Changmai before scooting off in our tuk tuk to the airport....
L
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