Thailand Part One: Chiang Mai

 

In March of this year we had the amazing experience of visiting Thailand for 12 days.  Visiting Thailand is something I never really had thought I would ever do, but We have been blessed with incredible jobs that allow us this chance.  I am going to break this into three posts. We first visited Chiang Mai, then to Bangkok and then to Phuket.

We began our journey with 26 hours of plane travel from Salt Lake to LA, LA to Soule South Korea then to Chiang Mai.  I was worried that the plane rides were going to be really hard and I was pleasantly surprised.  The planes were comfortable, with great food and new release movie.  I would totally travel like that again.

We arrived in the evening and looked forward to resting in our hotel that night.  The next day we headed out on a city tour.  If you think there is a lot of LDS Chapels in Provo, it can’t come close to the number of Buddhist Temples in Thailand.  Every few blocks there is another temple that is super ornate. We visited a few large temples and then took a rickshaw ride around the city. Later that day we went to a tiger reserve and played with baby tigers and very large tigers. Most of them were sleeping except the one large cat that was walking around in the cage with us! Eeek!  Exciting and scary at the same time; their paws are huge!

The next day was one of my favorite days of the whole trip. We visited an elephant reserve, rode elephants and rafted down the river on a bamboo raft. Talk about bucket list.

I haven’t mentioned yet, but food is always a big question when you travel abroad. Well the food at the hotel was great.  A mix of American and Thai food was so great.  I could eat like that every day.  Now that being said, finding food away from the hotel was a little trickery, but we had a few good meals.

I would return to Chiang Mai in a heartbeat.  We really loved the simplicity of life there and the beautiful serenity of the surroundings.