While we were there we decided to take a cooking class to learn the basics of Thai cooking; and not to brag, but we made some of the best Thai food I have ever tasted. We were pretty impressed with our skills, I’ll be honest. We were given cookbooks to take home, so the real test will be trying to replicate what we made once we are back in SC. Can’t wait to have our friends and family over for dinner!
Chiang Mai had a great night market and we bought some souvenirs and ate amazing street food. We also found an "authentic" Mexican food restaurant while we were here and it was actually pretty good! Actually, our standards are probably pretty low because we crave it so badly, but it definitely hit the spot...burritos and margaritas, yum!
After Chiang Mai, we hopped on a dilapidated local bus for a four hour ride up the windiest road to a little hippie town called Pai. After our stomachs settled, we set out on the town to explore. Pai is a cute, small, artsy town with lots of hippies and handicrafts. We ate more yummy cheap food here and then came back to relax on our hammocks on our balcony overlooking the valley. It was really beautiful here...very jungle-y and green with a river snaking through the town. A big tourist attraction here is elephant rides, so on our second day in Pai, we signed up for an elephant excursion through our guesthouse. They didn't tell us what company it was through, and everyone in South East Asia works off commission...friends refer tourists to other friends and everyone is in it to make a buck. Unfortunately, we didn't ask too many questions since the price was right, and when we were picked up in the morning and driven to the site, we passed all of the more "official" looking elephant camps and arrived at a tiny place on the side of the road that had two elephants chained up under a rickety structure. The elephants were excited to greet us and we fed them bananas, which they loved...but they were not excited to take us around the jungle on their backs. Our elephant was more interested in eating and we stopped frequently throughout our trek so that it could rip huge branches off of the jungle floor to munch on...it was actually pretty fascinating. However, when she was actually moving, she was extremely resistant...she went very slowly and stopped a lot; she did not want to be giving us a ride which started to make us feel bad. I love elephants and was SO excited to ride one through the jungle, but after it all, I felt so guilty! They are not treated great, and we saw later that our poor elephant had a foot that was all deformed and looked like she had lost some of her toes, which was why she was so resistant the whole time! It probably really hurt her to be carrying us on her backs. Afterward, she kept lifting her leg and resting her foot...it was so sad! We should've gone to the elephant conservation camp instead! The ride itself was still fun - an hour through the jungle and an hour up the river where the elephant does tricks and throws you off her back (which was actually a bit frightening) - but it was hard to enjoy knowing that the elephant did not want to be involved in any part of it. After our ride, we gave her more bananas to say sorry and then headed out for the hot springs which our guesthouse made sound so amazing. We arrived to find super hot, shallow sespools of dirty water that had dead boiled animals (frogs, insects, etc) floating in it. We tentatively dipped our feet in for a few minutes, then left. After our day we felt that we deserved some true R&R, so when we got back into town, we decided to get another massage. An hour and a few bucks later we were feeling well rested and relaxed!
(relaxing on our balcony over beautiful Pai)
That night we went out to look for a restaurant and were seduced by a big chalkboard sign that said the night's special was a big juicy hamburger and fries...we were sold. We picked out what else we wanted on the menu and went to order...fresh out of hamburgers and everything else on the menu that looked good. Sweet. We had already ordered drinks so we ended up having to stay there and ordered what they did have in stock and tried not to stare at the middle-aged white men canoodling young Thai girls behind us. On that note, it is crazy and sad how many middle-aged men are here for that kind of tourism. We were at a restaurant in the airport and nearly every table there was taken up by a young Thai girl and middle-aged man...it's really disturbing. On a lighter note, but still upsetting, is the fact that this was not the first time we encountered the hamburger incident. We have been seduced twice...maybe three times by signs with pictures of juicy, mouthwatering hamburgers, only to be told "hamburger finished"! Even at the beginning of the lunch rush! I think it is just their way to get desperate tourists into their restaurant...really! This has also happened three times with spring rolls...spring roll always "finished"! Not cool.
After two days in Pai, we headed back down to Chiang Mai to catch a flight to Bangkok and then Hanoi. We decided to take a mini-bus back down to Chiang Mai rather than the bus because it took half the time and we wanted to make sure there was no issue catching our flight. I wanted to take a video on our way down the mountain so that people could see what we experienced, but I couldn't bring myself to look away from the road for more than a few seconds without getting sick. It was insane! Remember the four hour bus ride on the windiest road ever that brought us to Pai? Well, this driver got us back to CM on that same road in about two hours - we flew around corners, passed on blind curves, screeched to a halt whenever we were about to collide with someone else, and on top of this, the buses don't have seatbelts here which made it all the more "exciting"...South America bus rides are nothing compared to South East Asia! How we managed to keep what was in our stomachs down, I do not know. We made it safely though and also survived our flights...after 15+ hours of travel, we finally arrived at our guesthouse in Hanoi, Vietnam. Thank God!
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