thai massage | trying to travel light

The best fruit salad and fruit smoothies in Chiang Mai

We all stayed at Little Bird Guesthouse in Chiang Mai, which was super chilled and cheap. The bonus was that it was right next to a little food market that had several fruit smoothie and iced coffee stalls. There was one very sweet lady that sold the best fruit salad with muesli and yoghurt and my favourite iced coffee made with fresh coconut milk and a dash of cinnamon. It was also opposite a laundry service so you (and everyone else and their dog) could see your clothes and undies hanging out to dry.

On our first day me and Becky headed off to do a walking trail and visit the main temples but we only got as far as the Chiang Mai Arts and Cultural Centre down the road. The museum gave a good overview of the history of Chiang Mai but all of the interactives didn’t work and there were some dodgy mannequins in the street scene you could walk through. Just before leaving the museum we discovered they had a free Thai painting class where you could learn how to paint flowers, birds and butterflies that are typically painted in umbrellas and fans. Despite 3 years at art school I have to say my efforts looked like a five-year old’s but my butterfly wasn’t too bad. Becky’s paintings were much better so maybe that’s why she’s a silversmith and I work in a museum with other people’s artistic creations! It was super relaxing and a lot of fun though and the lovely Thai teacher had a little girl who also painted with us. We also met an Irish girl there who invited us to a St Patrick’s Day party at the Irish bar near our hostel.

Painting class

My painting efforts

I don’t think I’ve ever celebrated St Patrick’s Day before but it seemed like a fun thing to do when you’re not in your own country and we also met some great people. After the Irish bar we gate crashed the end of karaoke at bar Loco Elvis and me and Maria belted out a bad version of Bohemian Rhapsody with some random people before we headed back to the hostel.

The next day we managed to visit the main temples in Chiang Mai and were lucky enough to see some apprentice monks chanting and also go to a Monk Chat. Monk Chats have been set up at some temples in Thailand (mainly Bangkok and Chiang Mai) so that foreigners can ask the monks questions about their daily routines, Buddhism etc. and the monks get to practice speaking English, so it’s meant to be something of an exchange. The monk we spoke to was a bit too cool for school but we did find out that you can be a monk for any length of time (not sure if this is actually true – could you be a monk for a couple of days?). Another monk also started talking to us but he was a bit mad (talking about snakes) and a bit creepy, so we decided to leave. Only afterwards did we think of more questions, such as ‘can monks have mobile phones?’ (I saw one visiting a temple with his iPhone 4!!!).

The same temple had a garden filled with Buddhist(?) quotes fixed to trees. Me and Rebecca got our fill of advice and took loads of photos.

Novice monks at the temple

Lots of advice...

We went to the women’s prison (twice) for a traditional Thai massage. For anyone that hasn’t had a Thai massage you have the massage fully clothed (in nice Thai cotton clothes) and it’s kind of a mix between lazy man’s yoga and acupressure. It can also hurt a bit but you feel amazing after all that stretching. When I say we went to the prison, we actually went to the prison shop across the road where they have a space for massage as part of the prisoner’s occupational training programme. You can see Karl Pilkington’s visit to the women’s prison here and find out more about the reasons behind the programme here.

Riding elephants

Walking in the National Park

We also did two days of trekking in the Doi Inthanon National Park close to Chiang Mai with Maria (from Peru), a couple from Canada, three girls from Argentina, a couple and a guy from France, a guy from Israel and a French woman who lived in London. Our first stop was the elephant camp where we took a ride on an elephant. Rebecca and I had serious reservations about this beforehand and quickly knew once we got on the elephant that we were not too happy about how the elephants were treated and vowed not to do any more animal related activities on this holiday. In the afternoon we trekked to a waterfall where we could swim and then on to our village camp for the night. The landscape of the national park is quite hilly and the landscape very dry because we are in Thailand at the end of the dry season. We also saw where the fields and land has been burnt, supposedly to regenerate the land for new crops. In reality though the burning of the land creates smoke and pollution that means, at this time of year, the sky around Chiang Mai and northern Thailand is always cloudy and you can really feel the pollution in the air.

We stayed in lovely traditional wooden hut next to a hillside village for the night. The guides organised for the children from the village to come and sing songs for us around a camp fire and in exchange we each had to sing a song from our country. Our combined effort with the Canadian couple was pretty poor (we sang In The Jungle) but we had fun.

The second day of our trek took us back through the hills of the national park to another waterfall for swimming before we went bamboo rafting. This was similar in style to the rafting I did in Madidi National Park in Bolivia and of course we all fell in the river at one point. I got to have another go at navigating and even managed to steer us safely through some small rapids. As we got to the end of the river we passed lots of riverside bamboo huts, which were full of Thai people eating and drinking around small tables. There was even a basket pulley system in place for sending food and beer across the river. The Thai children had a lot of fun splashing water at us as we passed by.

Wat Doi Suthep

After we got back to Chiang Mai we headed out for some drinks at the bicycle cocktail bar (where Becky sat chatting to a lady-boy without realising, much to our amusement) before going on to some other bars to dance the night away to international backpacker hits such as Danza Kuduro and Super Bass.

Of course, we also filled our days eating yummy Thai street food, drinking fruit smoothies and iced coffees and visiting the day and night markets. After some shopping I had to post a box home, which was much less eventful that posting anything from South America because the post office was calm and organised (and run by a lady-boy).

Once we’d had our fill in Chiang Mai we decided to head to Pai, which we’d heard was a nice chill-out place and was sort of on our route further north to the border with Laos. We took a small air-conditioned mini bus that took us up and over the super windy and hilly roads. I don’t get travel sick and even I was feeling a bit rough by the time we got out of the bus 4 hours later in Pai.