Day 7 - Chiang Mai — Wayfaring Abroad

Today was a travel day. We began in Phuket and wound up in Chiang Mai. Our flight took off at 10:30 am but first we had to get up early in Phuket, pack our things, grab breakfast and take a taxi to the airport. We were overly cautious in booking our taxi, so we left at 8 for our flight. This turned out to be a good decision as there was an accident and our driver took us through more of the countryside. In the end it took us around an hour to get to the airport.

We had been assigned seats for this flight, I cannot remember if we just did not choose seats or we weren't allowed to. Regardless the three of us were split up across the plane. One in row 8, one is row 21 and I was in row 31 in the last seat on the plane. I was quite annoyed as this seat is even smaller than a normal one due to the curvature of the plane. Not only did the seat not have as much width as a normal seat but the seats were packed close together and my knees were jammed into the seats in front of me.

I sat there stewing in frustration and thinking if my knees could take 2 hours of constant pressure and jabbing. Luckily for me, there were two empty seats on the plane and one of them was next to me. I immediately spread out and took up both seats.

After finally setting down in Chiang Mai, we grabbed a taxi and rode the 5 km to our Airbnb near the Nimman neighborhood. Our apartment is in a condo building on the 9th floor. It has a big kitchen, two bedrooms and a large living space. We were all pleasantly surpirsed that it was as nice as the photos implied. We set down our things and began to look over some maps of Chiang Mai.

After discussing it for a little bit we decided to grab some lunch and walk through the Nimman neighborhood before walking over to Old Town and checking out some of the temples and the Saturday Walking Street.

We made the short walk to Nimman and meandered our way through the streets checking out the different coffee shops and desert places before eventually settling on a lunch spot. After we ate, we headed back through the neighborhood to a park where we slowly walked through on our way to Old Town.

A small gazebo in a small park near Nimman.

The walk from the park to Old Town was a little longer than we'd though with the harsh heat. We slowly made it to Old Town and over to Phra Singh Temple.

After removing our shoes, we walked into the temple and sat for a little while, observing the different people praying to Buddha and others taking various photographs. We headed out of the temple to walk around the grounds and were stopped by a man from Bangkok who was interested in what we were up to in Chaing Mai and wanted to talk a bit. We stood there for a little over 10 minutes while he told us of different sights we needed to see and activities to do. It was a little strange but he was a very nice man.

As we crossed the street from the temple, headed for a 7-11 and a couple liters of water, a woman began speaking to us about our trip. She repeated some of the things we had heard from the man from Bangkok.

Further down the road we slowly made our way to Wat Phan Tao before getting to Wat Chedi Luang Worawihan. At Wat Phan Tao, one of the staff there asked us if we knew of the Silver Temple and bout Saturday Walking Street. We informed him we did and talked momentarily about what to do in Chiang Mai before heading down to Wat Chedi Luang Worawihan. At the Temple we walked around the Chaing Mai Pillar City Shrine, which is off limits to women, and made our way into the temple and around the ruins of Wat Chedi Luang Worawihan.

From the temple we walked down the road and out of Old Town right into open air stalls of food being sold by the moat around Old Town. We meandered through the different stalls of food and clothing before heading across the main street to the Saturday Walking Street.

Saturday Walking Street is the closure of a kilometer long block to food stalls and other goods. We slowly made our way through the many people walking the street and stopped at differnet stalls to look at their goods. Eventually we made it half way down the street before deciding that we were exhausted and needed to get off our feet. We left the market and found a tuk tuk back to our apartment where we proceeded to flop onto the couch.

Only after an hour and some serious will power did we get up and make it back to Nimman for some dinner and the end of our first night in Chiang Mai.