This is the last leg of my Southeast Asian adventure. After Chiang Mai, I went to Journey to Freedom for a week. Read on for stories and photos documenting my transportation getting to Chaing Mai, and then my short-but-packed 24 hours there:
I got help in Bangkok from the front desk of my accommodations to book this sleeping train to Chiang Mai. I figured it would knock out a place to sleep for the night as well as means of getting there. Two birds/one stone!
I was nearly the first person on board, so this lady used all of her saleswoman energy by sitting next to me and asking if I wanted to buy orange juice 500 times.
The bottom deck of beds are two seats facing each other. A table can pull out from the side if you're having a meal.
A man came around and used a tool to flip beds out from the ceiling, as well as turn the seats on the bottom deck into one bed.
Curtains slide over for privacy once you're ready to call it a night. Not bad! The couple I got to talking to next to me decided they were going to sleep together on the bottom bunk, so they offered to put my things in their top bunk with theirs (instead of putting them on the floor). It worked out perfectly!
I took one of these red trucks from the train station to my hostel, called "Hug Hostel." Chiang Mai is SO much more economical than BKK. It cost me 50 baht to take a decently-long ride to my hostel, whereas in Bangkok in a Tuk Tuk or taxi, they would have taken nothing less than 300 baht. The red trucks were neat because they would pick people up on the way to dropping you off – it reminded me of an American hop on/hop off bus.
I only had 24 hours in Chiang Mai, because my Elephant Nature Park volunteer stint was planned for the next day. So when I got to my hostel, I got down to business on putting my laundry order in, showering/settling in, and planning everything I could possibly fit into one day. I did this by interrogating the poor man sitting at the front desk of the hostel. I also Googled things to do in Chiang Mai, and saw that "Cat Cafes" were not only places that existed, but places that were prevalent. Like...there were multiple of these Cat Cafes scattered throughout the city. So obviously that was on the list. He also recommended a popular temple close to one Cat Cafe.
This was maybe the best place ever. Coffee and cats...what more could you ask for? My friend who I met in Vietnam said she went to an Owl Cafe once, and I've also heard of Bunny Cafes. Life-changing discoveries.
I met a new friend at the Cat Cafe, too. Her name is Tammarine. We talked a bit about where I was from and where she was from, and then realized the temple I wanted to see was in the same direction as her house. So we walked together for a bit. But once she saw me nearly got hit by a car (I have a feeling you could be in a country where they drive on the "wrong" side of the road FOREVER, and you'll never stop looking left instead of right before crossing the street. Old habits die hard), she decided I would probably be in some kind of imminent danger without her assistance. Which was probably true, and the backstory of how we spent the majority of the day together!
Wat Umong
She bought some kind of bird seed/fish food combination from a woman in a hut nearby, and we fed all of these creatures.
Less than $1.50 U.S. well spent...
Chiang Mai Sunday Walking Street. Of course I had no idea this existed until I met a few people in my hostel going and decided to tag along. Apparently Sunday is one of the best times to be in Chiang Mai! So many people, so many goodies for sale.
"I can't think of anything that excites a greater sense of childlike wonder than to be in a country where you are ignorant of almost everything. Suddenly you are five years old again. You can't read anything, you have only the most rudimentary sense of how things work, you can't even reliably cross a street without endangering your life. Your whole existence becomes a series of interesting guesses." -Bill Bryson
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