We arrived back in Chiang Mai and have scaled the pace of the trip back from 11 to a leisurely 4. We have more time here so are not as rushed, and Mrs Columbus and I have been here a couple of times before so we have a reasonable feel for things that are worth seeing and stuff that we can take a pass on.

We have reacquainted ourselves with our friend Sopa who owns the massage place and are happy to see a familiar face (and of course the massage is good too).  We spend a little time chatting about things that have changed since we were here last year and then Brooklyn opts for a haircut while the rest of us get a foot massage.

We spent today walking around the old city and hanging out in the hotel pool – basically just doing a bunch of relaxing, after all that’s what vacations are for 🙂  It is nice to see that the city seems a little more active than last year – there were many businesses that closed last year due to the extra slow tourist season they had in 2010.

We did make one great find today – while out walking around we saw a restaurant and guesthouse that I recognized from some of my reading on the internet.  The guesthouse (Ginny Place) is owned by an American originally from the Seattle area, and his Thai wife – they recently took over some additional space and added a restaurant (Ginny Cafe) serving a mix of American and Thai foods.  ‘Captain Bob’ has been very helpful a few times providing information and answers to questions about Thailand and the Chiang Mai area, so I figured it would be great to pop in and say hi, and also to try out the new restaurant.  In our past couple of visits we had some ok food, but we had not yet found a real ‘go-to’ place for great, well priced food in Chiang Mai – I think that search is over!!  We had lunch at Ginny Cafe and the food was fantastic!  We decided fairly quickly that we would come back for dinner and try out a few other dishes to see if we had just made some good choices, or if all the food was as good.  Well dinner lived up to all of our expectations so I am sure we will make several more visits during our stay here.

Tomorrow we are going to meet up with Riam who has been our tour guide of excellence the last couple of trips, and discuss some different things that we might do while we are here.

And that is a wrap for another day in paradise…..

We are leaving Chiang Mai today to head south to Phuket and try and take in some beach goodness.  I guess that means I would be remiss a little if I allowed myself to become such a slug that I did not get some comment on the blog about our last few days here!

After reconnecting with our friendly and super-helpful guide Riam from last year, and spending the afternoon with her looking at a few things close to the city we decided to book a couple of day trips with her to see some things we did not see on our previous trip, but that are far enough out of the city that you cannot really cover more than 1 in a day.

Our first day trip is to Doi Inthanon – this is the highest peak in Thailand, rising about 2500 meters above sea level and is the center of a national park bearing the same name.  The drive takes about 2.5 hours south-west from our hotel in Chiang Mai, and about the last 1/3 of the trip is a twisty road that climbs the mountain to the top.  At the top of the mountain is some sort of government research facility that is fenced off from the public, there are lots of signs around indicating that you should not take photos, and one sign says something about neutrinos, but I don’t read enough Thai to garner much more than that.

Even at this height the jungle is still very thick, but the temperature is a little more ‘moderate’ if you can say that about Thailand.  It feels like a nice warm summer day in Seattle, and Mrs Columbus comments that some of the plants and flowers we see here are the same as what she grows in her flower garden back home – I do however point out that we do not have any banana or palm trees in the yard at home…..  Just down from the summit there is another peak where the Thai people have built separate monuments to the King and Queen.  The monuments are quite impressive given their location and like everything else here they were built with manual labor.  Mrs Columbus suggests that we should have some like that for ourselves at home – I agree and tell her I will build hers right after she is done building mine 🙂  Further down the mountain we stop for a short hike up to see another waterfall – this hike is much easier than the one we did the day before!  Then it is back to Chiang Mai for what has become our evening routine – dinner, a massage, and a banana pancake before wrapping it up for the night.

The next day sees us up again and ready for 9am when Riam is picking us up for a trip to Chiang Dao Caves.  To the north of the city about 1.5 hours is a complex of natural caves that go deep into the mountain.  It is estimated that there are a total of about 12km of interconnecting caves (about 8 miles) but apparently some of them go so deep into the mountain and are so narrow that they have never been fully explored.  There is a big temple complex here as well, and in days gone past the monks used to live inside the caves, but they have clearly moved up a notch as the caves do not seem all that comfortable to me.  As we walk up to the cave entrance you are a little in awe about the opening/entry way, and the smell of ‘cave air’ hits you almost immediately.  From the main entrance there are 5 ‘caves’ or caverns that are open to the public, the rest are closed off either due to the lack of oxygen in the air in those areas, or because of the tight spaces.  Two of the three caverns are lit with fluorescent lights, but the other three are only accessible with a guide and a camping lantern.  We head off with our guide to explore the ‘lightless’ caves first – the guide reminds us several times to watch our heads (for rock outcroppings and low ceilings) and to watch our step as it can be slippery.  It is not until we are in into the caverns that we realize about the slippery bit – as one might expect if they were thinking it through, the caverns make quite a comfortable home to bats, and the floor can be slick in places where the bats have deposited their droppings….!  The caves themselves are completely amazing – we were in a cave before in Krabi and had some idea what we were expecting, but we were in for a big surprise – some of the caverns are big enough to put our house in!  As we wander through the maze of passageways and rooms the guide takes time to point out various rock formations that resemble different animals or trees, etc.  Then we come to a small opening that I think means we have reached the end – wrong, it is just a small ‘door’ to the next ‘cave’.  We have to crouch very low for the 2 meter channel, but then it is back into the giant caverns like the last cave.  All told we are inside for about an hour and only see about 15% of the estimated full cave size, but walk away very impressed with what mother nature has carved out of the limestone here over several hundred years.

Outside the cave entrance there is a pond with a bunch of fish swimming about, and legend has it that if you can find the fish with the 3 fins on it’s tail then you will receive ‘chok dee’ (good luck).  We mostly don’t have a clue what we are looking for, but spend a few minutes searching before wandering off to look at another part of the pond – this is when our guide rushes up and points out Mr Lucky Fish himself – so chok dee mahk for all of us 🙂  On the way back to the city we stop along the road to see a rice field that is in the process of being planted.  Each ‘paddy’ is about 1/4 of an acre in size and is completely worked by hand.  The rice needs a lot of water to get started, so unless you are near a river or some other water source, rice is planted 1 time per year.  The ground is flooded, and then worked with a relatively primitive ‘plow’ into a nice thick muck. Once it is nice and gooey, the planters come in and plant the individual rice seedlings by hand.  As the crop grows, it spreads out (sort of like grass in your lawn) and the field drains and you are left with plants growing in soil.  After about 6 months the rice is ready to harvest and then is processed similar to wheat, with the seeds/grains being extracted from the top of the dried plants – this of course is also done by hand.

Our last stop of the day is at the local market close to Riam’s home where she goes everyday for fresh ingredients for cooking.  Between the market and her large garden they don’t need (or buy) a lot of goods from the supermarket like we do back home, and everything is fresh!  Finally to round out the day it is back to the city and another round of our usual routine.

Our last full day in Chiang Mai is almost completely a slug day – Mrs Columbus and I sleep in a little, and spend some time laying around the hotel reading books and catching up on emails and such.  We venture out sometime after noon for a little walk around the city and then head off to the Spa where Mrs C gets her hair done and then massages all around!

I should give a bit of a shout out here to an electronic gadget that I did not have last year – this year I am traveling with an Amazon Kindle.  When mom and dad came down to take over stewardship of the kids while we were gone, my dad asked if I wanted to borrow The Precious (as we have come to refer to it back home).  I had though off and on about maybe borrowing it, but at first was just going to go with ‘dead tree’ type books as I usually do, but dad offered and I figured I would give it a shot.  I think I saw a single tear form in my dad’s eye as he gingerly handed it over, but after using it for a week, I am a total convert!  I had tried to do a little reading on Mrs C’s iPad that she got for her birthday, but found it a little heavy for my liking in terms of reading books on it (she seems to quite like it though), but reading on the Kindle I find to be a great experience – I can use it one-handed, and there are more books on it than I could read in a single vacation and it consumes less size and weight in my bag than one of those large size paperbacks.  And of course if you ever run out of things to read, it can access Amazon via 3G wireless in like 80+ countries to download new books in just minutes.  Definitely a thumbs-up on my travel gadget list!!

Lastly, returning readers may have noticed that my postings contain much less photos than last year.  This is partly due to the author being a bit lazy in getting his photos sorted 🙂 but also because the connectivity to upload things has been a little spotty so far.  I have finally been able to start uploading stuff this evening, and they can be seen in the gallery here.

And we are off to Phuket…….

A lot of people we talk to about our trip(s) to Thailand ask us why we like it here so much – it is always hard to quantify the whole rationale because it is not one thing that is the ‘gotcha’, but a bunch of things working together in concert.

One that is on the top of my list though is the relaxed pace of life here.  Don’t get me wrong, people work hard here, and most of what they do is done manually, but the sense of urgency that we seem to be wrapped up in back home just does not seem to exist here.  Sure we are on vacation so care a little less, but even in the mannerisms and actions of the locals you can tell that the rat race we are exposed to every day is a lot more subdued here.

I had almost forgotten how easy it is to almost shutdown here and completely relax, but it is just a few days in and already I feel like the treadmill has been dialed back from 11 and is set at a zen inducing 3 🙂 Time for us is now measured not by what day it is, but by how many days we have left at this particular hotel before we check out.  We get up in the morning, have breakfast (some time between 8am and 10am when it ends), and while sitting outside enjoying our morning meal decide what we are going to do with the day.

For the last few days this has consisted of just walking around the city and getting a bit of exercise while doing a little shopping, and seeing some of the old city.  The big decision of the day so far has been if we should go for our massage before dinner, or after dinner, and I guess what sort of massage to get – Thai massage, back massage, foot massage, etc.  With so many options I guess I shall just try as many as I can 🙂 Rachael in fact has asked me to get 3 or 4 a week for her, so really I am just following orders.

We finally connected last night with our tour guide from last year (Riam).  We had thought we might bump into her again at the temple where she found us last year, so had walked through there a few times, but finally resorted to the cell phone.  She agreed to meet us at our hotel in the morning to suggest some things we might like to see outside of the city.  We have a few ideas including a trip to Doi Inthanon – the tallest mountain in Thailand – but they are full day trips, so we chat for a few minutes and decide to stop at a couple of ‘factories’ on the way to one of the smaller national parks and a short hike in the jungle alongside a waterfall.

Along the way we stop to see a place where they make silk fabric, and there is an area where we can see them extract the silk threads directly from the silkworm cocoons and spin the fine filaments into a larger thread that is cleaned and then dyed into the various colors for weaving.  All of the work here is done by hand right from the spinning of the threads to the weaving of the cloth.  A weaver doing a solid color/pattern can do about 5 meters (about 15 feet) of cloth per day, but someone doing one of the many intricate patterns slows down to about 5cm per hour (about 2 inches).  The cloth and the patterns are quite exquisite, but Mrs Columbus is more in sightseeing mode than shopping mode, and after looking around a bit we move on.

Our next stop is at an orchid and butterfly farm.  I had no idea how orchids were grown, and that they were quite a tricky plant to grow and get to flourish properly.  There is apparently a large number of these farms and they spend a lot of time trying to grow ‘crops’, and cross pollinate different species of plants in order to try and create completely new ones.  In addition to growing and selling the flowers there is quite a market to sell the plants to tourists who take them home in a special bottle (where they can apparently thrive for a few weeks), but they also have a process for encasing the flowers or the petals in a lacquer to make pendants and ear-rings out of them.  They also do this with butterflies (hence the butterfly part of the farm) and the array of jewelry is actually quite impressive.  I don’t escape this place quite so lucky as the last though because Mrs Columbus has managed to get her shop on and pick up a few items to return home with.

Our next stop of the day is at Mae Sa National Park to hike up the waterfalls – there is a series of 10 waterfalls cascading over each other along about a 2km hike.  The scenery is amazing, and hike is very serene and peaceful, but it is about 90 degrees out and we are in the jungle, so for us it is damn hot!  By the time we get to the top Mrs Columbus and I have shed about 5lb each in sweat, and we both look like we just walked through a car wash!  Some relief is found at the top though as we wade into the refreshing water and cool down a bit, that and of course most of the trip back is all down hill 🙂

On the way down our guide Riam offers to take us to see her garden on the way back to Chiang Mai, and this is a bit of an honor for us to be invited to see some of their personal world so we feel very fortunate.  Her ‘garden’ is really more like a small farm (sorry Rick she has you beat by about 2 acres).  They grow lots of vegetables as well as some fruit trees, and some of the local Thai spices like lemongrass and galangal.  We get to pick some Longan right off the tree as it is very close to being ready to harvest – this is something we don’t see in the USA but can perhaps be described as like a grape but with an outer skin you peel off to expose the fruit inside.  It is very popular all over SE Asia, and we are lucky to get some fresh off the tree.  We end the afternoon with a short ride back to the city and a plan to meet again in the morning for a trip out to Doi Inthanon.

Now, back to decision time – massage before or after dinner…….?!

And so it begins 🙂  After a lengthy amount of time on planes and in airports we have arrived back in the Land of Smiles.  Our plane got in to Chiang Mai at about 9am this morning and we have begun to start the acclimatization process.  It was a paltry 82F here at 9am when we got off the plane with the temperature expected to get into the low 90s by mid-day – a huge change from the crappy start to summer we had so far in June back home.

We spent a little time this morning getting ourselves setup with some local currency, a Thai SIM card for our cellphone and a walk around the neighborhood near our hotel.  We have booked a few nights in at the Raiming Lodge (the same place we stayed last year) as it was a place we knew and would give us a chance to look around before deciding what to do next.  We are patiently waiting for 3pm to roll around so that we can get started on our massage regimen 🙂 so we popped out to one of the numerous eateries for a Thai lunch (Tom Yum soup for me and Chicken with Cashew Nut for Laurie), add a couple of fresh fruit shakes and you are well fed and watered for $6.

We are not certain if it is some additional slowdown of the low season, but it seems very quite here today.  We had heard that tourism had taken some hit from the protests earlier in the year in Bangkok, but it seems VERY quiet in downtown Chiang Mai.  Perhaps it has something to do with the World Cup – lots of pubs here are advertising the games, and with many of them being on at hours that Mrs Columbus and I are well into sleep land maybe everyone is up late for the games and just sleeping off the morning.

Our plan is to head out tonight for the Saturday night market – it is about 30 blocks of impromptu shops, street food, street performers, etc.  Laurie and the girls went last year when we were here and came back reasonably well loaded down with treasures, so we will see what we can find this year.

Tis all I got for now…..

Our time here in Chiang Mai is running short, and our last planned activity for here is to go up into the mountains and take a zip-line adventure called Flight of the Gibbon.  The Gibbon is a member of the primate family, and in times past the jungle around here would have had many of them flying through the tree tops, so we will go and do our best monkey impressions leaping from tree to tree.

Laurie originally stumbled across this activity while she was doing research on things for us to do in Thailand – to be honest I was a little skeptical about the whole thing as I could not initially see how sliding across a few zip lines seemed like a good use of my $65 USD.  If I wanted to fly across a zip line I could just do it over in Vic’s yard for free 🙂

I am happy to say that in this case I was wrong, as the experience was well worth the admission price, and given the chance I would definitely do it again.

For your package price they pick you up at your hotel in the city and then take you about an hour out into the jungle and up into an isolated valley to the east of the city.  The jungle canopy is so dense that my GPS receiver has trouble tracking the satellites us as we climb up the hillside in the van.  In fact, as we make our way upwards I wonder who would even bother to cut a road up into this place it seems so remote.  Well it turns out there is a small village up there (not hill tribe people), and it is one of the areas that a number of eco-tourist hotels are and some of the homestay places you an find in the Chiang Mai area.

The actual tour starts out at the main office where, after signing our injury waivers (Vic, you need to have some of these for your place), we meet our skyguides Mr. B and Ken, and get suited up into our harnesses.  The skyguides are there to assist you along, and enforce the safety procedures, but also to make you at ease and add some ‘flavor’ to the adventure and make the trip more enjoyable.  Our guides are fantastic at their job, and all through the trip they are cracking little jokes or taking about the area and how the attraction was built, or what the locals do in the valley, etc.

The adventure itself begins when you step off the road and onto a trail into the jungle – the rain forest here is about 1500 years old, and the size of some of the trees is overwhelming.  The course criss-crosses a sharp valley going back and forth as we descend a total of about 400 meters from start to finish.  There are 12 zip lines covering a total of over 2000 meters in length, along with 2 sky bridges, and 3 repels – 7 meters, 14 meters, and the final drop of 45 meters at the finish.

The entire time you are literally right in the canopy of the jungle with fig trees, palm trees, banana trees, etc. all around you, and when you stop to look down the jungle floor seems like a long way down.  Part of the procedure they run you through at the start is to secure all of your stuff to your person (like your glasses for example), as they carefully point out that anything that falls off would be lost in the jungle forever.

The whole course takes about 3 hours to complete (we are a small group of 8 people), and each zip line offers some different variant of speed and/or length and different surroundings so that you never feel like you have repeated yourself.  The last platform comes what seems like far too early, and they give us a drink to re-hydrate and then load us up in a van to go back up to the office where we get a light dinner before we have to head back to the city.

Words and pictures cannot really do the whole trip justice, but suffice it to say that it was a very tranquil adventure, and I would recommend it to anyone without hesitation.

This is our last adventure for Chiang Mai – we have one more day here, and I’m sure the girls will hit the market, and we will all just unwind a little before flying back to Bangkok and getting ready to head home.  I will of course make sure to allocate some time to get a massage before we leave, as I am not certain if we can find a reputable massage spot in Bangkok 😉

Actually I should take a second to give a little shout out to Sopa an the Sopa Salon – this was a little shop we found across the street from our hotel in Chiang Mai where Laurie first went to get her hair done.  It turns out that she also owns the massage shop next door, and has the reasonable price of 120 baht for a 1 hour massage 🙂  We make several trips here over the 8 days we are here, and Sopa becomes quite friendly with us, offering information about the area and things to do, and even hooking us up with samples of food items the locals eat (that we don’t normally see on restaurant menus).  If you are even in Chiang Mai you should definitely stop by, it is fantastic value, and some real friendly folks.