To fly to Myanmar, the best option was to return to Thailand and take a flight out from either Bangkok or a city in nothern Thailand. We opted to fly out of the city that neither of us had been to, Chiang Rai. It also happened to be the closest to the Laos-Thailand border we were going to cross.
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| Cute graffiti |
Returning to Thailand was glorious. It felt so familiar! There were adorable coffee shops, and fat well-taken-care-of pets. There were 7-11s and more cars on the roads than motorcycles. The internet worked! Webpages (even videos!!!) loaded. The conversations I had felt like the flowed effortlessly instead of haltingly and dependent on hand gestures. Everyone seemed incredibly friendly. Happy to let us stop and play with their dogs. It's hard to explain, but I was overwhelmed (in a good way) coming from Laos back to Thailand. It felt a lot more familiar. It's hilarious to think how different Thailand felt four months ago when I arrived from Seattle.
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| Inside the temple |
It was clear that people in Chiang Rai had a lot more disposable income on average than anywhere I'd been in a while. I saw several car dealerships. There were stores for everything from pets to home appliances. I noticed that there were a lot more Thai women out getting drinks or dinner with their friends. In Laos, Vietnam and Cambodia this was a much more rare site. It was much more common to see groups of men out or women out with their families.
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| Predator hanging out outside the temple |
We took the local bus from the border to Chiang Rai and spent the afternoon wandering around with our big backpacks instead of paying for a tuk tuk. When we finally arrived we were hot sweaty messes. Once we cooled down and the sun had gone down, we ventured out for some food. We finally settled on a small vendor who had phad thai and a coconut soup called khao soi. The khao soi was so good we went back the next two evenings. In the middle of the intersection near where we were sitting contained a massive golden clock tower. We'd snapped some pictures as we walked by and didn't think much more of it. Then halfway through our meal, music starts playing and the lights on the clock tower started changing colors. Dinner and a show! Turns out it does the show three times per night, and we just got our timing right.
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| Lights show and night photography fun |
We spent the rest of the time wandering through the impressively classy night market, enjoying the lightning-fast internet, and getting errands done for Myanmar. The last thing we did was go visit the White Temple that's 12km from town. Originally, we were going to get up early to bike to the temple before it got hot and busy. We both stayed up late so that devolved to sleeping in and then biking. The biking got delayed further by some more errands and some more internet time. I take most of the blame for that because I was feeling a bit ill. Anyways, biking to the temple early in the morning turned into taking a taxi to the temple in the late afternoon. We didn't have as much time as we wanted before they closed the temple, but it was still insanely cool. They started building the temple in 1998 and they are still working on it. It's amazing. And SO different from all the old school temples. It had some random statues from western culture like Mickey Mouse, Predator, and Batman. It also had some pretty sweet dragons and other statues that I'm sure have symbolism (I just don't know what it is). I'll have to do some reading.
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| Wishing well! |
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| I believe you could buy these and write stuff on them to leave at the temple |
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| Weird ish. |
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| Weirddddd |
Now we're off to Myanmar for a month of excitement and awesomeness.
On a fun side note: I was incredibly worried that my bag would be WAY to heavy. Like weigh more than 30kg (thats something around 50lbs I think). Hah. Put it on the scale and its only 16kg. Which means I can continue to acquire all the things, but it also means I'm a lot less strong than I thought. Bummer.
