Where’s Megan?

I headed back up to Thailand after my brief visit to Malaysia, and did some sightseeing in Chiang Mai, a major city in the north. The town is dotted with temples, and one of them has a large spire that has been damaged and restored over the centuries. It’s hard to tell in the photo, but its really big and impressive. Just take my word for it.

The other main thing I did in Chiang Mai was take a cooking class. It started with a trip to the market where we learned about the important Thai ingredients (like chili peppers!)

And saw some of the curry pastes which we’d be making later

(Note: Making curry paste is hard. It involves a mortar and pestle, time, and sweat. Buy pre-made paste).

New Game – For 10 bonus points, identify these two fruits:

(Besides the apples)

The class was a lot of fun, and I made several yummy dishes including this “Hot & Sour soup”:

I left Chiang Mai and headed southeast to visit the Elephant Conservation Center. They train elephants to do traditional jobs like logging, and put on a show demonstrating their skills. It was kind of interesting, and apparently you can teach elephants to “play dead”, resulting in a bizarre elephant-massacre scene.

[Random Fun Fact: “The King and I” movie is not allowed to be shown in Thailand, because the Thai people believe it to be offensive, misleading, and disrespectful to the King.]

My last stop before leaving Thailand was to Khao Yai National Park, where I did some trekking and sightseeing. On the evening before the trek, we visited this temple on a big hill with a serpent-like staircase, and made even cooler by the looming stormclouds.

Inside one of the nearby mountains is a big bat cave, and at around 6:30pm, they all started streaming out. Apparently there are millions of these insect-eating bats in the cave, and the trail snakes out over the valley for 2 hours every evening, creating cool spiraling designs overhead.

On the trek the next morning, we totally lucked out and spotted some great stuff, like this White-Lipped Pit Viper:

The photo doesn’t do him justice, but he was a beautiful bright green, and just laying there out in the open next to the river. He was clearly venomous, but once again I only learn the details afterwards: “…The Pit Viper bites quickly and such cases are frequent”. I was close but outside striking distance.

We then went on an “elephant-spotting” drive, looking for some of the wild elephants in the park. I had my doubts we’d see anything, but amazingly we came across a lone male elephant walking along the main park road.

Why did the elephant cross the road? I have no idea, and neither did our guide. He seemed to be annoyed but not frightened by the cars, and walked back and forth for quite a while. I, on the other hand, felt a bit uncomfortable when our truck driver let him get quite close before driving off.

We also saw two pairs of Great Hornbills, these beautiful gigantic birds around 4 feet tall, high up in the trees, and a group of gibbons that made an interesting symphony of noises. Oh, and our good friends the leeches joined along for the ride, as well.

From here I’m continuing east and crossing over to Cambodia. Thailand has a ton to offer, but for some reason it seems to be a primarily European destination. I met lots of Germans, Brits, French… but not a single other American. Maybe we get our tropical fix in Central America, but that’s no excuse! Thailand rocks.

Tags: Chiang Mai, Thailand, Travel

This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 1st, 2007 at 4:00 am and is filed under Travel. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.