Lazy days in Chiang Mai, and getting back on the road!

Where has the last month gone? What have you all been up to while we’ve been being lazy in Chiang Mai?

Since we aren’t moving around every day, our life has been fairly boring, as we settle into a routine. But we have had a few fun and some not so fun moments that I’ll tell you about!

Finding an apartment

It’s a lot cheaper to find a month-to-month apartment in Chiang Mai than to hotel hop, so we did a little searching and found a great place in the Nimman neighborhood. We’ve got a small stovetop to cook our eggs for breakfast, a couch, view of the mountains, and even a clothes washer. It’s cozy but way more comfortable than a hotel. All for the same price as our last hotel, where the room was literally in a (converted) shipping container.

Songkhran

If you haven’t heard of Songkhran, it’s time to put it on your bucket list (pun intended). It’s a nationwide holiday (they also celebrate it in some surrounding countries) that is celebrated by having a huge water fight in every city and every town for 3 full days. One of the biggest is in Chiang Mai. We met up with some new friends and joined in the festivities with some big ass water pistols, and hired a tuk tuk to drive us around the old town moat. Every 30 seconds, a cheerful family poured huge buckets of ice cold moat water into our tuk tuk, drenching us, until we finally cried “Uncle” and set up at a moat-side bar to inflict our own water damage on other vehicles passing by.

Ready for battle…

Incoming!

Water proof camera highly recommended!

Literally dumping buckets of water on strangers!

Catching up with other cycle tourists and friends

As we’ve been touring, we’ve been keeping in touch with several other cyclists we’ve met along the way, either in person, through Instagram, WarmShowers, etc. Once in Chiang Mai, quite a few of these cyclists came through, and we had some great dinners at night markets and restaurants and enjoyed getting to know them better.

Tibor and Laura, waiting in Chiang Mai for their Chinese visa cycling towards Europe.

Our two friends from San Francisco, Tavo and Eric, also visited, and we had a wonderful time showing them the city, hiking, and going to see the famous drag show in town.

Steve went hiking up Doi Suthep with Eric and Tavo and came across this rarely visited temple in the woods.

On a sad note, one of the cyclists we met, Simon, who had just spent the past few months cycling through Vietnam, had a horrible accident just a few days after we met him in Chiang Mai. He is still in the hospital here, and his family has joined him. Please keep him and his family in your thoughts; it was quite a shock for Steve and me, but we are hopeful he will make a speedy recovery.

Getting sick

Getting the crappy news out of the way, I also became somewhat ill (again!). For 10 full days after Songkhran, I was unable to leave the house, having to stick close to my toilet. Frustratingly, I felt perfectly fine otherwise, so I felt like a caged up animal being trapped inside. Finally I went to see a doctor, and a quick course of antibiotics cleared it up immediately. I hope that’s the end of these illnesses; I think Steve is due for one, though I wouldn’t wish that on anyone! Meanwhile I’ve been more careful about bottled water and street food; only go to the busy stalls!

Getting our vaccines

While at the doctor, we checked up on our vaccines and decided to get the Japanese Encephalitis vaccine, which we could not find on short notice in San Diego or Athens when we last tried. It’s not a huge risk here, but better safe than sorry. More important, we decided to get the 3-shot course of rabies vaccines. It turns out, not only are the dogs more likely to chase bicycles here, but Thailand has a high incidence of rabies. One more shot to go, and we’ll be protected against that possibility.

Super dangerous, possibly rabid, dog in Chiang Mai… You can’t be too safe.

Cycling around Chiang Mai

We’ve met up with some local WarmShowers hosts and have joined them on several bike rides. I think Chiang Mai has the best cycling of any area of Asia we’ve been in so far, with endless quiet well-paved country roads, the Ping river with beautiful roads following it, tons of bike shops, hills and mountains if you want them or flat valleys if you don’t, and a strong cycling community of both expats and locals. Coffee stands, restaurants, mom & pop convenience stores, and food stall basically everywhere, so you don’t have to plan food or drink stops. Only problem is, due to Songkhran, my illness, rain, and smog (Chiang Mai gets a few months of smog every year due to burning of surrounding agricultural fields), we didn’t cycle for nearly 4 weeks! Nevertheless, we’re back in the saddle now and getting back in shape.

Eating

What can I say? Gin khao soi tuk wan! (we eat khao soi every day). Well, almost. We still aren’t tired of it; it’s that good. We’ve tried a number of places, but our favorite is still Khao Soi Nimman, partly because it’s close, but mostly because it’s really friggin’ good. The Nimman neighborhood is great for food because there’s everything from 35baht made-to-order mini restaurants and noodle shops to high-end Thai places to street food to all sorts of Asian and Western food, all within a few blocks. It really is a foodie paradise here. I think we will have sticker shock when we come back to the US, though; we often spend just $3-5 for the two of us to have a sit down lunch in air conditioning with excellent service.

Khao soi ข้าวซอย one of the best dishes in the world combines a rich spicy curry with tender noodles and crispy noodles on top. Add fresh onion and pickled cabbage, a squeeze of lime, and OMG!

Combining our two favorite northern Thai foods, here is Khao soi with sai ou-a ไส้อั่ว, a northern Thai sausage.

Som tum ส้มตำ spicy green papaya salad, super popular in the north and super delicious. We like it with 4 or 5 chiles, but very few places will make it with more than one or two for foreigners. Some Thais like it with 20! 🔥🚒😲

Geng hinglay แกงฮังเล an amazing rich pork curry inspired by a Myanmar curry.

Lots and lots of pad Thai! It was really good, too!

Anchan noodle uses a natural blue coloring (I think from a flower) to make their noodles. Otherwise it was just a typical Thai chicken noodle soup that looks pretty.

One of our favorite street food vendors at the Bumrung Buri Street market at the south gate of the old city has some excellent sai ou-a for 20 baht that he’ll grill and slice on demand, plus lots of other grilled and fried food.

Point and choose curry street vendor.

Mango sticky rice ข้าวเหนียวมะม่วง is so good here. The mangoes are sliced fresh each order and melt in your mouth.

A really delicious pineapple fried rice at a fancy Thai restaurant in Nimman.

Egg and cheese roti โรตี, kind of like a Thai crepe.

Making a banana roti.

Durian is in season and it’s everywhere. The model behind us is a 10x actual size mockup. You can see the real fruit hanging over Steve’s head. It smells absolutely horrible but the locals and Chinese tourists can’t get enough!

The local stubby bananas are super tasty! I buy a bunch like this from a fruit lady on our street corner every week for 15 baht (50c).

For Easter Sunday we had a great Western brunch at a California style restaurant Rustic & Blue. The chicken and waffles are a-ma-zing!

There’s a really good Italian pizza place in town too, called Why Not?

Nope, we haven’t been to McDonald’s, but we walk by it often. Actually they have pad ga prow ผัดกะเพรา (Thai basil stir fry) at McDonald’s here; it’s not just burgers! So maybe we should check it out?

Learning Thai

And I’m happy to say my Thai lessons are going great! I can now read and write the Thai script (slowly), and I can order food, count numbers, and a few other things. Although yesterday, I used the wrong word and got 1 Coke with two glasses instead of 2 Cokes. But everything else came out right. Practice makes perfect.

Finding other cycle tourists

Wouldn’t it be cool if there was an app to see other cycle tourists nearby? Tell me what you think; I have an idea…

Extending our visa and visa runs

The Thailand tourist visa that we got in Myanmar will expire soon, but it’s extendible by 30 days, so we spent half a day at immigration applying for and waiting for that to be processed. Overall it was pretty painless, but a bit pricey. Now we have until the beginning of June.

Planning our next steps

Steve’s big 5-0 birthday is July 2, and a number of friends and Steve’s sister will be flying to Phuket to celebrate with us. We would love to be cycling again when they arrive, so we are starting to plan the 1,600km (1,000 mile) ride from Chiang Mai to Phuket. It’s making us excited to think about cycle touring again, and we are eager to see more of rural Thailand and more of the Gulf coast, which both of us love here.

We are a little concerned that it will be peak rainy season, but I think we’ll be able to find enough dry periods over 28 days to make it all the way. If not, there’s a train and bus that we could hop on to make sure we arrive before our friends! Here’s a preview of our planned route.

A different rural route down to Kamphaeng Phet, avoiding the busy Highway 1. We’ll go see the ruins in KP that we skipped last time.

Getting away from the main Highway 1 corridor, following the mountain foothills towards Kanchanaburi, a town we really enjoyed last time and look forward to seeing again.

Head to the coast, stopping at the Amphowe floating market again, and then retracing our route down the coast, but perhaps stopping at new places or re-visiting our favorites.

All new section of coast for us, looks very rural and undiscovered, then cutting across towards Phang Nga, where we will remember what farangs look like and get ready for Steve’s next decade.