Temples, adventure, food and elephants in Chiang Mai

After reading way too many blogs and watching too many videos on Youtube I knew that I would enjoy all the beautiful beaches in Thailand. But Thailand has so much more to offer than beaches. I have experienced this first hand when we explored a big part of Thailand.

From Kanchanaburi, we continued our trip to Chiang Mai. We made a quick stop in Bangkok to drop off our rental car and take a flight to Chiang Mai. Chiang Mai is located in the Northern part of Thailand. They say that this part of the country is a little bit cooler in terms of temperature, but do not believe the rumours because it was just as hot as in the rest of the country. In Chiang Mai, we stayed at a place which was a walking distance from the Old Town located between city walls. We had 3 days in Chiang Mai, so enough time to explore.

Temples

The Old Town houses most of the temples. We explored them by booking a tuk-tuk for 100 THB and the driver drove us between all the temples. My favourite is the silver temple! It is one of the most impressive temples in Chiang Mai, in my opinion. No women are allowed inside, but that’s okay because we went to a few other temples as well.

Ziplining

We have not only seen temples in Chiang Mai, but we also went on an adventure at the Eagle Track Zipline. The zip line adventure is located under an hour outside of Chiang Mai city centre. I loved the view high in the trees and I could not have asked for better tour guides. The guys were professional but also so much fun. We booked the Golden Package, so we had 16 zip lines and we flew down from 40 meters back to the ground.

Cooking class at Thai Aka

Chiang Mai is also known because of their food so a cooking lesson was in order. Maarten and I booked an evening class and together with a French family of 5, a couple from Singapore and a lady from Canada, we cooked a lot of traditional Thai/Akha dishes.

We also made one of my favorite desserts during the cooking class; Mango sticky rice. An absolute must eat in Thailand.

Elephants

The best part and the part where I was looking forward to the most was our visit to the Elephant Sanctuary. This was such a special experience that I would recommend this to everyone. I strongly encourage you to never ride elephants and to do your own research about the parks you visit. Elephants are poorly treated in some places in Thailand so checking on the current reviews of every animal place is important. when in doubt, just do not do it.

The Elephants are brought to the sanctuary out of captivity, they have been treated poorly and are skittish and sometimes even aggressive. Feeding is therefore done behind a bar so you and the elephant are both safe. When the elephants are fed, they are free to roam and we admired them just how they are. We even got to wash them!