Burrito West Blog

We were in Thailand/Cambodia for 4 weeks. This is the first of 3 blog posts summarizing our trip. Photos of Bangkok are here.  Photos of Northern Thailand are here.

Peter and I arrived in Bangkok (Feb 28) and got ourselves to our hotel with our enormous quantity of suitcases. I was sick - apparently as soon as the stress of leaving Poland was off my immune system went down. By the time we landed in Bangkok I had lost my voice. We were pretty exhausted and hot so upon arrival at the hotel we went against all travel advice and showered and took a nap. It was lovely. We discovered that the property next to the hotel had roosters in residence. That was unexpected.

We eventually realized it wasn't ever going to cool down (it was about 33C), so we headed out to find supper. We walked (as we always do in a new city), which was kind of a challenge because sidewalks in Bangkok are not really for walking, apparently, they are for markets and seating, and parking and anything other than a clear path for pedestrians. On the one hand - how interesting and different, on the other hand, how annoying.

We found food and a nice cool place to sit in the form of a cheap restaurant below a mid-price hotel.  We dined with the other white tourists and then continued wandering all the way to the water and found ourselves in a park where a krump and break dancing competition was going on. After watching dancing for a bit we found our way to Khao San Road - the centre of the expat/tourist community in Bangkok. We walked the length of it, sat on a patio (on Soi Rambuttri, actually since Khao San Rd is insanely busy) and had mango and sticky rice and thought about what a funny place we were in. A community of non-Thai people in the heart of the Thai capital. Very strange.

Mar 1: After a tasty Thai breakfast at our hotel we headed to the Grand Palace by  tuktuk. It was really hot and we were not yet hip to the idea of getting up insanely early to avoid the heat, so we toured the palace in the hot hot hotness. (The palace loaned me a long skirt to wear to make up for my short skirt.) The palace was pretty incredible - probably the shiniest place I've ever been. I took approximately 40000 photos, as did the other million people who were there at the same time, so I'm sure my photos are super unique.

After the palace we caught the river express boat back to our hotel and recovered from the heat. Later we took the boat back up the river to an area with shiny, fancy hotels thinking there would be pleasant places to stroll. There were not. But we found a market and a nice restaurant (Curry Queen) for dinner, so success! We then walked to River City mall and sat on a patio by the water, watching the dinner party boats return to dock and unload their partiers. Caught a cab back to the hotel. We were quickly learning that doing anything in Bangkok was very very tiring.

We had one more day on our own, part of which we spent getting our giant suitcases to a self-storage place (didn't want to drag them around all of Thailand for 4 weeks) and a trip on their Skytrain. Then we moved to a hotel on Khao San Road where we met up with our tour group (16 total). Our first organized tour ever (with Intrepid)! We met in the evening and were off early the next day - to the bus station to head north.

Mar 3: At the train station we learned that in Thailand they play the national anthem every day at 8am and 6pm(?) and everyone stands for it. We caught a bus (with AC, yay) for the 6hr trip to Sukhothai. The trip included a stop at a roadside place for food where our guide Tony warned us that any spicy dishes would be Thai-spicy, not tourist-friendly spicy. The food was quite tasty, certainly better than road-side bus stop food options in Canada.

After our arrival in Sukhothai we piled into songtaews (open air trucks) to get to the hotel.  Songtaews are really fun for short trips. The hotel was lovely. We spent the evening by the pool and getting thai massages. This kind of travel is hard, eh?

After a buffet breakfast at the hotel we were off early via 1 super-long songtaew to the Sukhothai Historic Park to tour some temple ruins via bike.

We rode from temple to temple - they were all amazing. It was 36C out, so we did our best to stay in the shade. We stopped for lunch in a shaded picnic area and had homecooked food served to us by a local family that Intrepid hires. It was really good food. Also cold water. So good. The afternoon is spent back at the hotel, napping, swimming, chatting with the other nice people on the tour.

Then we piled in the back of a pick-up truck (12 in the back, 3 in the truck) and got a lift into the centre of town where a festival/fair was going on. We paid our entrance and wandered the whole thing - sampling foods and enjoying the entertainment. It was really nice to see what a local fair looked like, rather than a market aimed at tourists. We attracted some attention, as a big group of white people wandering around. Afterwards we stopped for dinner at a roadside cafe and had okay food. (Everyone told me the food in Thailand would be amaaaaazing, so I think my expectations were rather high; mostly I found it to be okay.)







Our time in Sukothai came to an end. On Mar 5 we split into two minivans and headed to the FAE Elephant Hospital (with a pit stop in a mall for lunch - that was an adventure). The Elephant Hospital was pretty crazy - there are elephants there that have lost limbs due to land mines and they have given them prosthetic limb replacements. Incredible to see. Still sad, since these elephants can't live in the wild and some of them are chained up because the enclosures can't contain them. :(  I got to touch a little one, and he grabbed my hand with his trunk and pulled, almost pulled me off my feet. Amazing animals. We purchased one of the artist-painted elephants from Elephant Parade as a souvenir (funds go to help the elephants).



After the Elephant Hospital, we arrived in a village in Mae On District where we would be staying. We sat outside in the large covered area and enjoyed some relief from the heat via fans (it was generally 36-38C every day). Our host's son enticed us all into a game of jenga before turning his attention to a game on someone's phone.

In the evening, our hosts cooked us an amazing meal and played music on traditional instruments for us. Then some local girls performed traditional dances for us (pretty adorable). As if that wasn't enough, they provided a giant lantern for us to write our wishes on, which they lit and we all released. It was a very wonderful, full day. (The only downside was that I had my usual post-illness persistent cough and was prone to middle of the night coughing fits which I fear bothered my roommates all night long, instead of just keeping Peter up.)

We had a wonderful breakfast at the home stay and took off on bikes they provided for a tour of the village.

We stopped at Malee Handicrafts - a sewing business started via micro credit that employs 30 people in the village now. (Their sewing building is CRAMMED with fabric - it took me a while to realize, as we walked through, that it was a work space!) Then we visited a school where we sat with 7 year olds, quizzed them on some English letters, played duck-duck-goose and danced the hokey pokey. We all had to sing our respective national anthems (Canada, USA, Australia, New Zealand) which the kids found amusing. They were very energetic kids and seemed to enjoy having us stop by.

We rode by the ceremony for a local senior monk who had passed away - they built this incredible cremation pyre and there was a huge tent full of monks and others praying. It was quite the production to come across in a farm field.  We continued on to a mushroom farm and then a stop where someone showed us how rice used to be processed using manual traditional techniques (hint: it was harder back then).  We returned to the homestay for lunch and then loaded into songtaew buses for the drive to Chaing Mai.

After cleaning up at our hotel most of us headed out on a privately booked minivan to Wat Phra That Doi Suthep which is a very shiny temple at the top of some cool stairs. We got back from that in time to join the others for dinner - since our hotel was just down the street from the night market, we had dinner on a patio there, did a bit of shopping, and called it a day. Another very full day.



May 7 was a bit of a missed opportunity for us - it was a free day in our schedule and we didn't research in advance what one should do in Chiang Mai, we thought we would wander and explore like we always do in cities, but it's just too hot and too unpleasant to walk around Thai cities so we ended up joining a few others on a tour of Doi Inthanon National Park. We would have been up for a hike but it sounded like a bus from destination to destination kind of trip which is what it turned out to be. The other more interesting tours involved elephant rides, which was not an option for reasons, so we ended up on this waterfall tour. It was nice, but it's really hard to be impressed by waterfalls when you live in BC. We also visited a hill tribe village which was shocking in it's lack of amenities. We bought a bed covering there to support their weaving industry because, wow, that looks like a hard life. Note: they do not haggle - the lady there did no budge on price even a tiny bit (we had to borrow some cash from a fellow tour group member). Anyway, the tour was okay - visited the highest point in Thailand! - mostly it was nice to get into the cooler forest area and to get to chat with the people on the tour with us.

Peter and I did go for a wander around the city later that day. Found a lovely courtyard area away from traffic with a bunch of shops and restaurants and had some good food. We got lost getting back but managed to find the night market with enough wandering.

We did some shopping at the market then met up with all the others for the ladyboy show at the local club.


Our tour guide arranged front row seats for us and Peter and I were the last to arrive so we got the very front and centre seats. The girl sitting next to me got all the attention from the acts that came off stage, fortunately. She even got pulled on stage to dance at one point. Narrow escape for me, that one. She got off easy compared to the guy who got pulled on stage and had his shirt removed (pic here). It was an entertaining evening - definitely memorable!

We ended the evening in the night market at a cool ice cream stall that makes the ice cream in front of you on a super cold plate, it was very fun to watch and tasty.





Our last day in Chiang Mai we all went for a cooking course at Baan Thai. Our instructors took us down the street to the local market and explained the main ingredients to us. We brought the market purchases back to the school and divided up based on the dishes we were interested in learning. We did several dishes, and made an enormous quantity of food (far more than we could eat, which felt wasteful). It was all very tasty. We had a good time - definitely a good thing to do when in Thailand!

We were delivered back to our hotel via songtaew, very full. All that was left to do was to clean up and head to the train station for our overnight train to Bangkok (arriving May 9). The overnight train was nice. We were in 2nd class sleeper seats which are seats for the beginning of the ride, then someone comes along and converts the seats into beds for the evening (pics here). The biggest complaint really was that the ac was too powerful!

We quite enjoyed our Intrepid tour - we definitely did things we wouldn't have otherwise (particularly the homestay in the village), and it was very relaxing to have someone else handle all the details like arranging hotels and transport to/from. It was a bit of a switch when we were on our own once more - had to reengage that part of our brains. Because we had a night to relax in Bangkok and then we were headed to Cambodia!  That will be a whole other blog post....