Chiang Mai and the northern tribes

Chiang Mai - Day 5

In the morning transfer to the airport and flight to Chiang Mai, the most important city in northern Thailand. Meeting with the guide and first visits in the surroundings The characteristic of the city, besides the numerous temples scattered about, is the commercial area, where in a few kilometres you can visit craft workshops famous for many types of workmanship: paper or silk umbrellas painted by hand, silver, teak and lacquer. Their visit proves interesting. What strikes you in this area is the cool and pleasantly sunny climate, spoilt by the hotels that use air conditioning indiscriminately. After dinner we take a walk around our hotel, where there's a covered little market selling products for the locals, a good opportunity to observe their lifestyle up close. Every 3 metres there's a stall cooking every kind of thing, in fact it's the habit of the Thais to dine out and quickly.

To make this easier, the street vendors cook and pour the contents into a plastic bag with a straw, so you can eat your meal while walking, but the look of it isn't very inviting. We then observe lots of stalls selling mountains of fried noodles: we'll later learn that it's a speciality of this region.

Chiang Mai - Day 6

Chiang Mai lies in a hilly area, and right on a hill near the centre stands the most important temple in northern Thailand, Doi Suthep. We set off with the guide to discover this part of the city, but before stopping at the temple, we continue by jeep along a rough road in the middle of lush vegetation, to go and visit a village of an indigenous community. Thanks to our guide, and seeing that it's only my wife and me, we don't just stop in the commercial area, that is, where the inhabitants wait for tourists with a little market, but we slip right into the middle of the village and its dwellings, to observe the daily life of these people, made of simplicity and partly far from economic development. Traditions are kept up and the women still dress in colourful, handmade clothes, though the proximity to the city has brought some inevitable change.

We thus also find a few televisions, the houses aren't extremely poor but have a few appliances. The view is splendid and from up here you look out over a mountainous area covered in dense tropical jungle, and the green meadows near the dwellings are cultivated by the local population; a truly pleasant and relaxing walk. After the visit, we retrace the road we came by to stop at the temple, Doi Suthep. You can reach it by a funicular or a spectacular flight of steps, which begins with two enormous serpents whose tails follow the 300 steps up to the top at over 1600 m. We obviously opt for the staircase, which is not at all tiring. Everywhere stalls sell flowers to bring as offerings, and the majority of the people are not tourists but truly devout people going to pray.

Once at the top, from the terrace you see a splendid view of the city of Chiang Mai, but what strikes you most is a splendid golden pagoda rising above the typical Oriental temples with sloping, finely decorated roofs, the vivid colours of the splendid Wat, as well as the spirituality of the place that you breathe in, with so many faithful kneeling before the numerous statues of the Buddha, with a strong scent of incense and the classic floral offerings. We're also blessed with water by a very likeable monk who asks us a few questions in English. We leave these magical places to return to the hotel and, after a refreshing swim in the pool, we decide to take a wander in the centre to discover the city's temples.

All the pavements are half broken and the walk isn't very pleasant because of the traffic; some temples, though, are very beautiful and worth visiting, so we return to the hotel by tuk tuk. For the evening, instead, a typical dinner of northern Thailand awaits us; the guide takes us to a nice typical restaurant, for tourists only of course, where you dine barefoot sitting on the floor, tasting the specialities and watching a dance show. The evening can end at the Night Bazaar, where there's the chance to buy a bit of everything in the bustle of stalls and little shops.

Chiang Rai - Day 7

After the best breakfast since we've been in Thailand, we leave Chiang Mai heading north. The day involves a transfer by car to Tha Thon, then continuing to Chiang Rai by longtail boat along the river, where there are some tribal villages practically isolated and reachable only by river. The roads we travel are spectacular, and they cross a mountainous area entirely covered in jungle, with gentle hills alternating with very characteristic mountain peaks. We stop for a break at an elephant training centre, where the elephants are used both for work and as a tourist attraction. Here we take an hour's ride through the jungle on these pachyderms, fording rivers and making our way through the dense vegetation. Then we watch a short presentation on the potential and abilities of these animals, truly exceptional and agile despite their size.

We continue until we reach the river, then, having left the car with the suitcases that we'll find directly at the hotel, we board for the cruise.>br>In the initial stretch the river flows slowly in the middle of a green valley, then you encounter rapids until you enter a kind of canyon, where it even starts to get cool and a sweatshirt is necessary; the landscape is very beautiful, it recalls the film "Anna and the King" when they sail along the river; we're practically in the middle of the heights we'd seen earlier from a distance. Now and then you glimpse some villages on the hills. After an hour and a half, about halfway, we stop to visit a village: unlike the one visited near Chiang Mai, here progress has not arrived at all; the children come towards us eager to receive sweets, snacks and pens that we had previously bought on the guide's advice.

Scattered around the village, animals that serve for the community's self-sufficiency roam freely: chickens, pigs, cows. The huts are built of straw, and the furniture is sparse, consisting only of camp beds, a table and a few other things. We continue the cruise until we enter the city of Chiang Rai, where our hotel, very beautiful, has a pier on the river, so we get off and go directly to our room, where, magic, our suitcases are already there

Golden Triangle - Day 8

Last day of the tour: we continue to the northern border of Thailand, with a brief "extra" detour by our guide that will prove very pleasant: "the king's mother's garden" It's a project to try to divert the populations living in this area from opium cultivation, the only source of livelihood until a few years ago; for this purpose, on the slopes of a mountain, a very spectacular botanical garden has been created, made up of little waterfalls, ponds, orchids and other splendid flowers. After visiting another village, we continue to the Golden Triangle, the point where the river marks the border between Thailand, Laos and Burma.>br>Then we continue to Chiang Rai airport where, via Bangkok, we reach Phuket in the evening. After an hour's transfer we reach the pier, where a speedboat, in another hour, reaches the island of Maiton, where the Ventaclub of the same name stands.