We took a leisurely overnight train to Chiang Mai, expecting leafy mountain coolness, we were met by another large, hot, steaming concrete city albeit with a tourist heart. Thankfully the quaint old town is where the tourist accommodation and café’s are and it’s lovely. It’s surrounded by a moat and remnants of the 700 year old wall that was built to protect the city. The area is shut to traffic every Sunday for a huge outdoor market and down the road near all the fancy 5 star hotels is a massive night market.
On that note, our room actually resembled a nice hotel suite, for $10 a night (bargained down from $15) we had a massive room with leather sofa, cable TV, fridge, double bed, single bed, en suite with hot shower and free wi fi internet in our room!! Funky Monkey Guesthouse everyone run by the lovely English/Thai couple David and Nuy.
While in Chiang Mai, between wandering the markets, hundreds of temples and sampling the fruit shakes we went to a Muay Thai (Thai Boxing) match. Initially I wasn’t too keen on going as I can’t even stand seeing boxing on the TV it’s just so brutish to me, but this sport is definitely about skill and finesse. I was able to relate to the matches we saw from our previous Tai Kwan do training in Korea, especially since the first few fights were between young lads- similar to the shows our students put on in Korea- except they never knocked each other out! These kids really went for it, they held nothing back. We watched seven matches, two of which were kids, then teenagers, then older fighters- three matches ended in Knockouts!
There was one foreign fighter from Scotland, the highlight of the night- all the tourists were interested in watching, but the Thai he was fighting looked out of shape and the Scot knocked him out within a few minutes; a disappointing fight to watch. The rest of our time we spent looking at the millions of Wats (Thai temples) and wandering the back streets. Oh and having amazing one hour massages for an incredible $3 an hour!!
Chiang Mai is a great place to visit the Hill Tribes of the north, the long neck tribe being the most famous, where the inhabitants carry out the horrible (outlawed in many countries) practice of elongating the women’s necks with rings of metal (which actually just pushes down their collar bone). This practice is spurred on by tourism, thus we didn’t visit. We also didn’t go trekking, another accessible activity from Chiang Mai as we were finding it difficult just walking around the temples in the oppressive humid heat. I think it’d be better to visit Chiang Mai in the cool season! Despite this we really loved it and will definitely visit again- Mal is already thirsting for a strawberry yogurt ice shake which he had there everyday.
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