A Vacation From Vacation: Five Lovely Days In Chiang Mai

The tour plans were for us to spend one night in this city and then to trek (hours) into the jungle to have “homestays” in two local villages for two nights before two more nights in the city. The weather has changed and gone from “freakin” hot to cloudy with rain. It took me a nano-second to “bag” the jungle for a continuous stay in Chiang Mai.

I did a few activities but mostly walked about the old walled-in section of the city, ate street food, browsed the street markets and had foot massages–one every day. You can have your whole body taken care of with this treatment.

I had a visit to the elephant sanctuary with my young Irish friends from our tour. The cost was $60. We were picked up at our hotel and drove about an hour to the site:

We were provided with clothes to wear and warned we would get muddy–we did!

Did you know:

*Elephants have 6 sets of molars and when they lose the last set they can’t eat and they die–life expectancy is about 80 years

*Females give birth to baby elephants every 3-5 years after a gestation of 22 months, babies weigh 250 lbs

*Males leave the herd between 12 and 15 years old

*Elephants have large brains, poor eyesight, great smell, use their trunk (has 50,000 muscles) as a finger, can walk 4 miles/hour, can’t jump and are afraid of mice!

*Elephants eat between 300 to 500 lbs of food a day–so we helped (they get a truckload of bananas every day), they can just chomp a whole coconut, shell and all

*Elephants are vegetarian and pretty much eat the whole time they are awake, they also poop a lot–every half hour (the Thai’s make paper out of it)

*Asian elephants are smaller than African elephants and the females don’t have tusks

A load of bananas this size is delivered to the sanctuary every day–elephants love bananas. The procedure for feeding is to set the banana or pineapple on their trunk and they pop it into their mouth. The alternative is to just stick the food in their mouth–WOW!!!

That large pink protuberance is the elephant’s tongue. Her teeth are way back so I didn’t worry about having my fingers bit off.

After their snack, we went to play in the mud pit. Oh Boy! We threw mud on them and they threw mud on us and themselves. They do not like sun or insects and their defense is MUD!

After all that mud, we needed to go rinse off in the river. I’m just a natural at cleaning elephants but it took me 3 days to get the dirt out of my fingernails and toenails.

We took a shower and they fed us also–Khao Soi, a Northern Thailand specialty–boiled egg noodles and chicken in yellow curry topped with crispy noodles. Yummy!! I proceeded to have the same dish for my lunch for the next three days. I had to limit the number of fried banana roti that I consumed–they were sooooo delicious!!!

I went to cooking class. We went to the market and bought the ingredients, then on to the school. My pad thai and yellow curry was good but there are “way” too many ingredients and too much chopping. I’ll stick to restaurants……I could get “good old” Heinz products in Northern Thailand.

We left the city to travel north. I love Thailand–in the roadside gas station restroom, they had fresh Gardenias. Along the way we saw great town decorations and monuments.

We made a stop at the white temple. This is about 25 years old and not much liked by the locals–too avant-garde. It was designed by a famous Thai artist and will not be finished until 2070. He is 65 years old now so he won’t be around for the dedication ceremony. He designed the clock in the town square you saw earlier. The hands (below) which are in a pit are his version of hell.

We are “on the road again” with some more exciting things in store…..stay tuned.