Profile
Blog
Photos
Videos
Meeting the Chiang Mai Pandas
We arrived by sleeper bus in Chiang Mai at 4:30am earlier than expected in a random part of town. We paid a lot for a tuk tuk to our hostel. The gates were locked, luckily a girl came out and opened the gate for us, she was an insomniac and heard us. We slept in the cold outside in a wooden pagoda and woke up at 7am once staff appeared. As we couldn't check in until later we had coffee and went to explore Chiang Mai.
We were staying in the old town in Chiang Mai, which was surrounded by an old wall. We spent most of our time strolling around the lanes within the walls. A lot of the old style wooden fronts were still intact. Lots of little guesthouses and restaurants.
We managed to find a reasonably priced tuk tuk to take us to the zoo, which was a few miles from the old town. The zoo was huge and hilly. We got to see a lion, tiger, bears, hippos, elephants, giraffes and camels and lots more but best of all the pandas. The zoo had 3 pandas behind big glass windows.
We finally got to meet up with Neil's cousins Aisling and Ciaran and Aisling's boyfriend Olly. Meeting them by the main entrance to the Old town just outside was a McDs and Starbucks; old and new opposite one another. We had a great night in a karaoke bar drinking Mug-a-Rita's! I definitely got mugged lol!
The night market in Chiang Mai was pretty mammoth, stretching along a road and into the lanes and buildings around it. We had a great evening weaving in and out of the stalls deciding what we would buy when we returned after visiting Pai! Haggling was common practice and prices would drop considerably if you kept with it.
Chiang Mai was a great place for a couple of nights however the hostel we stayed in had bed bugs and i got bitten to s***, which turned me into a miserable paranoid irritable b****. I thought it was a killer mosquito until the pharmacist told me I had too many bites for Mosquitos. Recovered in beautiful Pai.
- comments