Chiang Mai Part 2 and Koh Chang

On Tuesday we went to the National Park where the highest point in Thailand, Doi Inthanon, can be found. This is at the top of a set of mountains near the city. Up there it is pretty cold and the cloud cover prevents you from seeing too far out.

 A little bit down the mountain is a garden and several stupas which are like towers.

 After the trip up to Doi Inthanon we returned to the hotel and got our stuff so we could take the flight back to Bangkok.

On the weekend following the Chiang Mai trip we went to the beach at Koh Chang for the weekend. The next day, Thursday, was spent hanging out around the beach. There were some showers throughout the weekend but I was able to get a Thai massage on the beach before we left. There are many of these massage places right on the beach which are pretty cheap (200 or so baht) for one hour. They all have a view of the ocean which is nice.

In the afternoon on the second day we headed back to the ferry to get to the mainland and return to CRI.

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In about four hours I'll be leaving CRI for Suvarnabhumi Airport and in about seven hours I'll be flying back to America.

Chiang Mai

I have been negligent about updating. This was mostly due to Facebook not allowing me to upload the ton of pictures I have since Windows is lame. It's been two weekends since the last entry and they've both been pretty busy. I'll be giving a presentation on my research Saturday morning (10 am, first presentation) here at CRI about gold nanoparticles used as a detector for some kinds of small molecules. Since the last presentation a lot has happened and the project has sort of shifted since new things started to work.

Fun Fact: Despite having an entire rainy season every year where it rains each day, people in Bangkok drive like Florida people when it snows. This leads to an hour in traffic on the bus on top of skytrain and even more transportation.

So two weekends ago, on the 24th, we went up by bus to Chiang Mai. That weekend was a four-day weekend since it was the start of Buddhist Lent.

Albums Online:   1 2 3 4 5

Friday night, after our second round of presentations on the progress of our projects, we took an overnight VIP bus to Chiang Mai. The accommodations on board were amazing. They had massage chairs built into the seats and the food was much better than airline food. It takes something like eight hours to get there from Bangkok by bus.

We arrived around eight on Saturday morning and checked into the hotel. Our tour guide took us to an orchid farm first. It is a large greenhouse where they grow a wide variety of orchids - it's a pretty simple idea but it looks very nice.

From there we went to an elephant camp. In Thailand elephants used to be used for all sorts of labor and for war (the king volunteered a few of them during World War II). There was elephant painting, rides, food, and at the end we took rafts down the river.

In the movie American Gangster with Denzel Washington, one of the scenes in Thailand takes place here but was filmed at a river near Bangkok (the northern region by Chiang Mai and Chiang Rai is where opium was/is grown):

After the elephant camp trip we went back to the city to wander the area. Our hotel was in the new part of the city. Chiang Mai was originally built within a moat. It was conquered by the Burmese long ago and then taken back later. A lot of the architecture reflects this. Where we were staying was rather touristy. The place has a much slower pace than Bangkok. There aren't any skyscrapers or massive buildings surrounding you. However a lot of the area gets pretty sketchy at night since the combination bars/brothels open on the street late a night get rather lively. There's a night market right across the street from our hotel but I never had much of a chance to get to hang out there for long.

The next day (Sunday) we went around to see some temples. The first was Wat Chedi Luang, which was built a long time ago and has partially collapsed since then. We would be returning to this temple Monday night for part of the Buddhist holiday ceremonies that go on here.

Wat Phrathat Doi Suthep has twice as many steps as the previous temple-on-top-of-a-mountain in Kanchanaburi - something like 300. It is pretty exhausting to get all the way up there. But at the top the view is very interesting. Until you get to the edge the entire sky is whited out. It looks like the universe just ends right there. Once you get to the edge of the mountain you can look down through the cloud cover and see parts of the city.

There's quite a bit of things to see at the temple. There are many statues and small buildings. People play music and perform dances in traditional clothes.

Sunday night is the night of Chiang Mai's Walking Street Market. It is a must-see for anyone staying in Chiang Mai. They close down several roads in the old city and open them to hundreds of vendors selling handicrafts along with things you might find elsewhere. There's a lot to see here and you can find nearly anything you might be looking for. It's probably smaller than Chatuchak Market but a lot nicer.

On Monday we went to the Chiang Mai Zoo. It's a fairly large zoo with plenty of interesting animals. There was an orangutan who could open and drink from bottles, even using a straw. A few of the park visitors had thrown them in there which probably wasn't a good idea.

Monday night we returned to Wat Chedi Luang temple to see the candlelight procession for the holiday. They light candles out front and walk around the structure three times. There are bells lined up so people can ring them and a large number of monks gather in the front of the temple. I took a lot of pictures here because the sky was a very nice color.

It is very late right now. I will post about Tuesday and about last weekend in tomorrow's entry.

Last Weekend: Trip to Kanchanaburi

Last weekend we went west to Thailand's Kanchanaburi province! To explain how Thailand is divided up, here's a map.

Depending on how you count it, Thailand has four or six regions. This map shows the six region system as follows:

Orange - Western (Kanchanaburi is here, noted as #1)
Green (upper) - Northern (Chiang Mai is here)
Yellow - Central (Bangkok and Ayutthaya are here)
Red (right) - Northeastern
Green (lower) - Eastern (next weekend we'll go here for the beaches)
Red (lower) - Southern (Phuket is here)

Each of these regions feature different climates and they've all developed different cultural traits. Early on in the cultural class during the second week, we saw different dances and traditional clothing styles from the main regions of the country.

By the end of the trip, I'll have been to the Western, Northern, Central, and Eastern parts of Thailand. Initially I wanted to see Phuket and its beaches to the south but they're rather touristy (it's not the tourist season right now, however).

Picture Collections (Facebook):

Album 1

Album 2

Our first stop early on Saturday was Wat Tum Seu. This area is pretty mountainous with some wide stretches of farmland where they grow things like rice. The temple was built at the top of a small mountain and displayed a very large golden Buddha along with very ornate buildings. To get to the top, you have to climb a ton of stairs (something like 150 steps, each one is sloped downward slightly):

If you  think taking these steep stairs is too safe, then you can try what I like to call the Death-coaster. It's apparently a tram that's been converted into something like an escalator.

At the top is the massive Buddha. In front of it is a small alter and some automated conveyor belt. You can put coins in the little cups on the belt and it drops them into a collection jar.

The architecture around the statute is also pretty impressive:

Since it was high noon and we were up on top of a hill the heat quickly became unbearable. From here, we left to go to the Don-Rak World War II memorial cemetery. This is a cemetery for POWs during WW2 who were forced to work on the construction of railways in Burma from 1942 to 1945. (Click picture to zoom in)

There are rows and rows of stones in this hedged off part of the city.

Picture of me, Nun (right), Amm (middle), and Joy (left) in the entrance to the cemetery:

From here we went to the bridge on the River Kwai which was the name of an American movie that I haven't seen before. The JEATH War Museum is here, but its kind of spread out across the area. JEATH is Japan, England, Australia, Thailand, and Holland which were involved in WW2 in this area. Prisoners of war were used to construct the infamous bridge on the River Kwai as part of the death railway into Burma to aid the Japanese at the Burmese front of the war in that area. More info on a lot of the sites can be found here: site (we went to the War Museum at the Bridge).

Here is the bridge, which is black and spans the width of the river. Apparently the curved pieces on the sides are still the original metal.

Camera does panoramic shots (this was shrunken down but made from eight separate pictures):

There was also an exhibit near the river to advertise a local zoo:

From the river we went to board the raft house we'd be sleeping overnight in. These rafts are large rectangular things which hook up to one another like train cars and get towed around by a small boat. I never got far enough to take a picture of our own boat but this is one that passed us:

There's another raft house in front and they're hooked up to a pair of tow boats. After dinner on the boat we docked at an island where they had some showers we could use. There were many other raft houses docked here and the island has its own sets of houses which are probably for rent.

One half of the raft house had something like a bed room on the second floor:

While the front half was the entertainment deck and dining hall. They had a DJ on one side of this deck and they played music until midnight and there was dancing. The main attraction here was that you could request karaoke songs. They had a lot of older stuff and a lot of Thai stuff but everyone had a lot of fun that night. Without any A/C, it was hard to sleep and sleeping on the floor didn't help much.

On Sunday we went to the Erawan National Park where there are seven tiers of waterfalls that you can swim at. I only went as high as the fifth one because it was going to rain and I'd have to go up and down two more trails to get to the top.

They had more of those fish that eat dead skin at the fifth level in a pool below the waterfalls. These ones were much bigger and held on when you tried to move away.

On the way up, we saw monkeys in the trees overhead. There were a bunch of them and they looked like they'd be up to no good if we watched them for too long.

After the waterfalls, we went back to CRI and stopped at a marketplace to have dinner.

Today, after we give our presentations on the current status of our summer research, we will be leaving for Chiang Mai via an overnight bus. There is a four-day weekend this week so we won't be getting back until Tuesday. I don't know what we have planned but one day will be at an elephant park.