After a night in Phuket, I got on a bus and headed to the north of Thailand. Everyone online said that Chiang Mai was awesome, so I headed up there to check it out.
The bus ride to Chiang Mai was very long. It took about 24 hours to get there.
Luckily for me, the bus was actually very comfortable. There was a ton of leg room, and no one sitting next to me. It wasn't as nice as the buses in Peru, but I was very happy with this bus ride. The seats also had built in massagers. You'd press a button and the chair would massage you for a few minutes.
A cool thing that I enjoyed about this trip was that a meal was included with the trip. We stopped at a roadside restaurant and everyone got out. They had us all go to a big table in the back of the restaurant and we all shared the food. I was the only non-Thai person in the group so I asked the lady next to show me what I was supposed to do. She showed me how to eat the different dishes. It was a new experience for me to do the communal eating thing with strangers. I'm used to everyone sharing dishes with friends and family, but doing it with strangers was new to me. It was a really enjoyable experience for me.
I finally made it to Chiang Mai and found a hotel for myself. I wandered around a little bit and had an awesome spicy papaya salad at a bar. I also had a few beers then went to my room to sleep. One funny thing that happened was when I was half asleep in bed, I felt like I was still on the boat. The room felt like it was floating on the sea.
I didn't take many photos of Chiang Mai. The city was OK, but it didn't live up to the hype. It just seemed like another Thai city to me. It was better than Bangkok and Phuket, but it was definitely still a city. I just wasn't in the mood for cities.
And the bars seemed the same in Chiang Mai as in Bangkok and Phuket. I would try to sit, have a beer, and read or look at my phone. Then bar girls would come up, always asking the same questions "What's your name? Where you from? How old are you?". I wouldn't mind talking with real girls, but it gets annoying to be bothered by prostitutes every time you go out for a beer.
Chiang Mai has an immigration office and you can have your visa extended there. So I went and spent a few hours doing all of the paperwork, photos, payments, etc to get my visa extended. While I was there, I ran into one of my classmates from Scuba school! I hadn't seen her for a week or two and we randomly ran into each other at the immigration office. She told me that she was going to Pai the next day and that her brother was up there. Since I wasn't really feeling Chiang Mai, I asked if I could go with her.
That night the two of us went to the main night market in Chiang Mai and that was pretty fun. It was absolutely packed though. There were so many people on the streets. I used to love big crowds like that, but at this point I was looking for something a little quieter and more relaxed.
My classmate showed me where she was staying and where to meet her in the morning. I returned to my room to sleep and get ready to move to the next destination.
I've read so many blogs, posts, articles, and comments about Chiang Mai. It seems like I'm the only person on Earth who didn't love it. I barely saw any of it, so that's probably my biggest issue. I don't think I gave it a fair chance. But nothing really stood out as being super cool or pretty or... worth spending a lot of time on. Lucky for me, the next place that I went to spoke to me instantly and I ended up stuck there for about a month.
I hope you'll join me tomorrow as I make my way further north to the cool little backpacker haven of Pai.