Chiang Mai, Thailand
February 15th 2011
Taking a 13-hour overnight train from Bangkok, I arrived in Chiang Mai around 8:30 am. First order of business was to secure a place to stay, which wasn’t too hard. I pictured Chiang Mai to be a modern village town but it’s a small city with many modern shops. Among these shops were tour companies offering elephant visits, trekking, and “flying gibbon”, where people strap themselves to lines and go “flying” through forests. I had no interest in any of these so that dulled the city a bit because every other shop held nothing interesting. Actually, I was interested in checking out elephants but it was quite pricey and even-though I am missing out on a chance to touch them, I decided that I had seen enough elephants on my safari already. It just wasn’t worth the hefty tour prices. So what else was there for the common traveler uninterested in the above? Lots of temples, that’s about it. And if I went on a temple binge, I know I would burn out really fast. I am saving my energy for Angkor Wat so I picked a few temples to check out and that was it. Yes, Thai architecture is really cool but after a while, they start looking the same. How many temples does a city need anyway? Apparently Chiang Mai has 300!
I know how you feel, it’s the same with me and Roman ruins. I was so burned out on Roman ruins in Portugal, Spain, France, Slovenia, Croatia, that by the time I actually got to Rome I was done with them.
As far as tour prices, I usually find you can do your own thing for much less. If you can secure transportation by bus or whatever to various places, and then pay whatever the actual thing is at the place, that’s usually a much better deal than doing tour packages advertised at hostels and tourist info shops. Don’t know how relevant that is to you.
Seems like even the elephant places prefer if you’re on a tour package of some sort.
Ken,
I think its about time you post another update…come on…you can do better that visiting 300 temples…
Working on it cuz.