Chiang Mai

Day 3
I got up early to pack up my stuff and grab breakfast at the hostel before getting a taxi to the airport. My flight to Chiang Mai was at 10am so I went to the counter to check in and because it was 9:17am they wouldn’t let me because the counter closed at 9:15am. Even though I could have easily made the flight, they made me pay for a ticket on the next flight which was at 12:20pm and I didn’t get a refund. I was really annoyed not only because I could have made the flight but now I also had 3 more hours to kill before the new flight. I called some people to catch up and made sure that I was at the counter right when it opened this time. The flight was quick and before I knew it I was checking into my hostel (The Islander, which had great reviews on hostel world). The owner is originally from the UK and after I brought my bags to my room, he sat with me and went over the map of the area and pointed out the must do things. I took my map and made my way to check out some of the temples that he had pointed out, the first being Wat Phra Singh, also known as the Gold Temple. It was a pretty temple with a giant gold building, it was a small temple compared to some of the others I had seen. The next temple that I went to was Wat Chedi Luang, which was just beautiful; the detail in the buildings and statues were just unbelievable. There was one temple here that said “Men Only”, apparently monks are forbidden from touching or coming close to women’s bodies and therefore some temples, especially the non tourist ones, do not allow women. I was able to go into all the other ones which were bigger anywhere, but this was something that I found interesting. When going into the temples you obviously needed to have your shoulders and knees covered but you also had to take off your shoes, luckily I had slip on shoes which made this easy. It was very hot out, so after finishing at this temple I went back to the hostel to shower and the owner of the hostel booked my excursion for the following day. I met some people at the hostel who I went to the Chiang Mai Night Bazaar, a huge night market that is probably 5 blocks and one of the biggest in Thailand. The streets were filled with clothing, soaps, souvenirs, food and much more. We grabbed food from one of the street vendors, I got pai thai which was amazing, and then we walked around and looked at the vendors. I didn’t want to buy anything at that moment because I was still planning to do a couple more months of traveling and planned to buy the famous thailand elephant pants another time. At the end of the market there is a big sidewalk area where there were street performers dancing and eating fire. We watched this for a little and then headed back to the hostel because most of us had to get up for excursions the following morning.Read more