Day 82: Down to Chiang Rai

Time to bail on Chiang Khong. Vaguely interesting little border town, but very little happening so we weren't super sad to leave. Had a standard 7-11 breakfast of packaged croissants and yoghurt, then packed up quickly and headed for the bus station to grab a local bus down to Chiang Rai.

We got to the bus station just in time, as the bus was waiting with its engine on. They run hourly, so it wouldn't have been a ridiculous wait, but annoying. Anyway, we piled on and headed off fairly quickly. The bus itself was a clapped-out relic of the 1950s - hard seats, no air conditioning, rusty holes in the ceiling, wooden floorboards and so on. It was also a bit cramped leg-room wise, but at least the trip was only going to be a couple of hours.

It wasn't that full either, only a handful of people on board when we left, but it gradually filled up as we went along. Very green rice paddies on either side as we wound our way along the back roads (it's a local public bus, not an intercity transport one, so it picks up and drops off people fairly continually).

Arrived in Chiang Rai about 11:30am, and walked the few hundred metres to our hotel after waving away the horde of taxi drivers. The room is pretty basic and unadorned - literally everything is white aside from the polished pebble concrete floor. But it's clean, cheap, and comes with air conditioning, wifi and breakfast, which covers the base of Mazlow's heirarchy!

We rested up for a little before heading to a western-style restaurant across the road, which was full of expats chatting loudly and working on laptops. Service was very slow - our food took nearly an hour to arrive and when it finally did arrive my chicken cashew nut was disappointingly bland. Shandos's chicken wrap and my Oreo frappe were both good, though the whipped cream was a bit excessive and went straight through me.

After lunch we decided to check out the two main tourist attractions in Chiang Rai - the Black House, and the White Temple. We found a taxi driver who agreed to drive us to both and wait an hour for a reasonable price, so off we went. The Black House is a complex of Buddhist temple-style houses, all painted black which is quite unusual. Rather than a temple though, it was home to a famous Thai artist who did a lot of painting, and sculpture work using animal parts (teeth, skin, furs, horns and so on). Although the grounds were nice, it was quite creepy seeing entire throne-style chairs crafted out of buffalo horns and so on. There was a huge python in a cage too - easily a foot in diameter and probably over 10 metres long!

Sufficiently weirded out, we headed then for the White Temple on the other side of town. This is basically Thailand's version of the Sagrada Familia - it's been under construction for nearly 40 years and still isn't finished. This is a Buddhist temple complex done by Thailand's second-most famous artist, and the building, the sculptures, the grounds, everything is entirely done in white. The cornices and detailing are incredibly intricate, and they're detailed with small bits of reflective glass so that the entire building sparkles constantly.

Unfortunately these sights are completely on the tourist trail, so despite almost having the town of Chiang Rai to ourselves, both the Black and the White temples were swarming with tourists. Busloads of selfie-stick wielding Chinese at the Black House, hordes of selfie-stick wielding Spanish at the White Temple. I really hate selfie sticks.

After surviving a brief tropical downpour at the tail end of our visit to the White Temple, we headed back to town around 5:30pm. Our driver spoke reasonable English so we had a good chat with him about life in Thailand and the history of Chiang Rai and so on. Although he was ethnically from Laos! He was fluent in four languages though (his tribal language, Thai, Mandarin and English), which still kind of blows my mind.

In the evening we headed to the night bazaar for dinner, where we settled for cheap standard Thai dishes. Had a stroll around the markets too, where Shandos bought some new thongs to replace her existing pair which had broken at the White Temple (she had to walk back to the car like a shoe-less hobo!). Off to bed after realising that Chiang Rai is very dead in the evenings, aside from a couple of very dodgy looking bars we found that seemed to be populated entirely with sexpats and hookers. No thanks!Read more