Having not stayed on Khao San Road in Bangkok, Chiang Mai was our first exposure to a backpacker area. Firstly, it turns out “backpackers” aren’t just white 22 year olds scraping by on $20 a day. Sure, they are the largest group, but they constitute only about 40% of all travelers. 30% are retired white people, 20% are Chinese or Korean families/groups, and the remaining 10% are like us — not quite 22, and not quite retired.

Most of the touristy bits of Chiang Mai fit within the old walled/moated city — a 1.5 km x 1.5 km square.

Hotels, guesthouses, hostels, restaurants, cafes, food carts, bars, clubs, tour agencies, tchotchke vendors, tuk-tuk hustlers, and of course numerous wats occupy most of the space. While there are still some people who live there, it feels that more and more of them are getting forced out in favor of some latest guest house or restaurant. I guess they have the same gentrification issues as poor areas of western cities, except here the old flavor of the city is slowly being replaced by tourists who are there one day and gone the next. In the 3 weeks between Chiang Mai and the writing of this post, we have seen various stages of this pattern taking hold in Thai, Lao, and Cambodian cities.

But I digress. The city is lovely, full of tasty food, tasty drinks, friendly people, and lots of things to do – both in town, and as a jumping-off point to a myriad local activities – such as cooking classes and elephant visits.

The 2.25km² old city is home to several dozen wats of various sizes, ages, blingery, and disrepair. Most were empty and quiet – as a wat should be. Only a couple of the more famous ones were overrun by tourists. We spent a few of our days simply wandering around town, wat peeping and taking in the culture.

On our second day in town, we did what just about every tourist in Southeast Asia does – rented a motorbike for the day. Since Rochelle was feeling less than confident riding through Thai traffic, we rented one scooter for both of us. After we got our little Honda 150 (which we later learned had a weight capacity that we exceeded a bit…), we took a couple terrifying laps around the old city and we were ready to go. We were headed up to Doi Suthep, a mountain just 15 km west of the city. The road up is full of curves and switchbacks, but thankfully not a ton of traffic.

Our main destination was Wat Phrathat Doi Suthep, a 600-year old temple that overlooks Chiang Mai. There is a lot of history mixed with legend here. According to the story, a white elephant carrying a piece of a relic was left to roam the jungle and trumpeted three times then died. So they built this wat there. This wat is a very popular pilgrimage destination for Thais, and as a result the number of donation boxes, offerings for sale, and other requests for money is astounding. Money is everywhere. That said, it is a beautifully golden temple and probably has a great view of Chiang Mai — when the air quality allows.

After the wat, we continued up the road for a few more kilometers to check out one of the king’s winter palaces. It is known for its gardens full of exotic (to Thais) flowers like roses and tulips (up there it’s cool enough for them to grow). The garden was quite indeed full of roses, but there wasn’t a whole lot else to see. On our way back down the steep curvy road I only overheated the brakes once before realizing that a little gas puts the automatic scooter in gear and allows engine braking. Luckily the terrifying feel of the brake lever going soft only happened when we were already going slow…and there is a redundant mechanical brake.

Overall, we really enjoyed our time in Chiang Mai and could see spending a lot more time there. But we wanted to get back on the road – we rented a car to see more remote Northern Thailand. More on that adventure to come!

Neither of us knew what to expect from Bangkok (or Thailand, in general). I imagined a crazy Asian city with insane traffic and Eugene was expecting slums and dirt. What we found was surprisingly modern city with skyscrapers and subways, as well as beautiful old temples, food carts galore, and some not so nice parts of a developing, touristy city.

First to get the bad out of the way – when we arrived in Bangkok, we took the Air Link train into the main part of town (the airport is about 30 km from the city). From there we decided to take a taxi the rest of the way as our B&B was a bit south of the main part of town and it was getting late. I had already read about all the various scams that taxi and tuk-tuk drivers pull on tourists, so I thought we could avoid them. The advice we’d been given is to always ask the taxi to use their meter. Many of them refused, some offered to take us shopping (because that’s definitely what we want to do at 10pm with all of our stuff). Finally, one almost eagerly said yes he’d use a meter. That really should have been a give away. It turned out he had a rigged meter that not only started high, but went up way faster. Unfortunately we were tired and new, so we did not just get out and let him take us for the proverbial ride. Despite overpaying about 3 times the regular price, the whole ride was still about $10.

For the 4 nights we spent in Bangkok, we stayed at a lovely B&B (W Home). It was a bit further out than we would have liked to stay, but they served incredible Thai breakfasts (fried rice or noodle soup and sweets made from rice flower, coconut, and sugar) and it allowed us to see how average people in Bangkok live. There were also plenty of food carts right near us – a woman who made incredible pad thai (and only pad thai) for $1 was just a couple blocks away. Beyond our neighborhood, we ate much cheap and tasty street food.

We spent one day in Bangkok exploring the Grand Palace and Wat Pho. The Grand Palace was by far one of the most touristy places we’d been to in a while, rivaling Versailles in the number of tour groups shuffling through. But we still enjoyed taking in the ornate details of all the buildings. Eugene was even able to capture plenty of people-free photos with a whole lot of patience and creative angles. One of the best things we saw were the people actively upkeeping all the bling on the buildings. They still painstakingly add one small piece of mirror tile at a time. Wat Pho contains one ridiculously large reclining Buddha statue and many other smaller Buddhas around the grounds (according to Wikipedia there are over 1000 images there).

We spent another day at the giant Chatuchak Weekend Market. Eugene filmed a walk down one of the 40 or so aisles, just to share the magnitude of the thing. At this point we’re a little shopped out, so we didn’t buy much, and mainly enjoyed the atmosphere and the abundant cheap-and-tasty food carts.

While there’s much more in Bangkok to explore, things we only saw out of a corner of our eye or briefly wandered through – like the red light district (ping pong show, sir?), we tired of the big city pretty quickly and moved on to parts less travelled…

So far we have traveled*:
22 hours by plane
5 hours by airport bench
45 minutes by train
4 hours by bus
30 minutes by boat
20 minutes by tricycle
1 hour by subway
20 minutes by car

*We are counting our inter-city transit only.