Thailand Adventures

I'm a bit late in posting this, but here are my adventures in Thailand:

As we headed out our first day, we found ourselves stopped by a kind older Thai gentleman. He asked us where we were going and was very helpful, explaining that it was a Buddhist holiday and the palace wasn't open until later. He then proceeded to draw us a bit of a diagram on the back of a receipt, pointing out other places we should go that would be open already. He also helped us get a tuk tuk to chauffeur us around for the morning for less than $2.

Our first stop was a temple with a sitting Buddha statue. There, we met an English teacher from the primary school next door. He was volunteering at the temple on his day off. He was very nice and explained that the sitting Buddha statue was over 1000 years old.

Meghan, Buddha statue, and English Teacher

We were also about to go see a giant standing Buddha:

And the Marble Temple:

Our last stop of the day was the Grand Palace. Due to the holiday, it was extremely crowded. However, it was also quite magnificent.

Meghan is much more up for silly pictures than I am.

Also, all the pictures of me are on her phone.

They have murals depicting the history of the Buddha on the walls of temple:

The mother of pearl (or something similar) on these doors is one of my favorite architectural choices.

The next day, we went out to see the Damnoensaduak Floating Market. It was quite touristy, but also very cool. We got to ride on a motorized boat part of the way to the market and on a paddle boat around the market. People were selling all sorts of knick knacks, clothing, and food. Coconut ice cream is very popular, as are fried bananas.

The sleeper train to Chiang Mai was quite nice, especially compared to my experience in a six person sleeper compartment in Romania last summer. It was a four person compartment, but it was only Meghan and I in the compartment.

My little hidden bed

We got to see a lot of the countryside in the morning on our way into Chiang Mai. While it has expanded, much of Chiang Mai is still within the borders of the old city. There is even a moat surrounding the old city. There have been many bridges built over it for cars, and the wall surrounding the city is gone except for the corners and the gates, but it is still quite impressive.

We were able to go on a motorbike tour outside of the city, and it was beautiful. My favorite part was the waterfall we went to at the end. The rocks actually had very good traction, so we were able to climb up the waterfall. Meghan was even brave enough to climb down too.

Our drivers were quite fun

While Buddhist temples all look very similar, I found my favorite one in Chiang Mai. It is called Wat Chiang Man. It does not get very many tourists, so it is a nice place to sit and enjoy the peace and quiet. We ended up spending over an hour there.

And because we were in Thailand, we had to ride elephants. That was definitely an experience. It's a very good leg workout as you are constantly shifting to stay on as the elephant's back rocks from side to side as it walks. 

They are very nice creatures, but you have to keep a bit of distance from the babies or they'll knock you over, being too young to know better yet. We got to feed them kilos of bananas. We had the peel them for the baby, but the adults would eat several at a time, peel and all. I also learned that elephants have a lot more hair than I thought. It gets shorter as they get older, but it's still there, and it's bristly too.

We also got to play in the river with them. They had fun spraying us and falling over. They don't just lie down in the river; they just let themselves fall to the side. It was quite amusing to watch.

We are waiting on the elephant people to email us the pictures they took (we couldn't bring anything to take pictures as we got soaked in the river), but I will be posting those when they come.