Chiang Mai, Thailand: Finding my love for flowers

One thing about travel I love is that you’re always learning something. With so many temples around Chiang Mai, we learned about Buddhism and the history of the city. You also often learn about yourself and I had no idea how much I would love botanical gardens!

Temples, Temples, and more Temples

Today our van picked us up at 9am and we started with the Wat Phra Singh temple just a few minutes down the road from our hotel.These temples required respectful clothing, No short skirts or shorts above the knee, no shoulders, and you needed to take your shoes off before going into any of the buildings.  This one had several buildings to go into and a large golden chedi where relics are kept. 

In one of the buildings there were wax figures of monks, just sitting and staring into your soul. I didn’t realize until later when Mr. Wander mentioned they were wax, I was convinced they were real!

The second temple of the day was Wat Chiang Man, which is the oldest of the city of Chiang Mai built in the 1200s.

This temple is known for its Elephant Chedi, shown below.

Most temples have a series of drawings, carvings, or paintings depicting the life of the Buddha, and this one had beautiful and especially colorful paintings.

The image below shows the area where Buddhists would come to worship. To come inside you needed to remove your shoes and couldn’t point your feet at the Buddha. Most sat down on their knees or cross-legged.

This third temple was Wat Chedi Luang, and had partially collapsed on the top due to an earthquake in the mid 1500s. It was also one of the homes of the Emerald Buddha until the earthquake when it was moved to Laos, and eventually it was brought back to Thailand. We were able to visit its temple while exploring Bangkok, but more on that in the next post.

I really love that outside many of the temples there are pots with lotus flowers, so pretty!

Wat Lok Moli was the last stop for the morning, and I really enjoyed the elephant and dragon carvings on the back of the temple.

This is inside the temple, so many intricate wood carvings on the ceiling, walls, and windows.

There are many Buddhas outside the temples as well as inside. The one inside is seated with hands in the lap is the meditation mudra, or hand gesture. Those below with the right hand up, palm out, and thumb and forefinger touching is the protection mudra.

Rice of Many Colors

It was time for lunch, so we headed towards an art market street at which the end of it is Meena rice cuisine restaurant. It was tucked into the trees, some built over the stream. The food was so colorful and delicious!

We had pork curry with puffed rice crackers and one of the best masaman curries of the trip. Mr. Wander’s Aunt explained that most northern food was made rich with fat, because it is “colder” to keep people more warm. 

The owner of the restaurant’s father is a friend of Mr. Wander’s aunt. He walked around with us after the meal a as we looked at the various shops and stalls where different artists were selling their creations. There were some pretty photo spots too.

After lunch we had about a 30 minute drive up the hill to our last temple of the day, Wat Phra That Doi Suthep. We rode a funicular up the hill and walked around inside. This one had the most tourists of all, and to me felt more commercialized than as much of a place for worship. In the corners there were tons of additional statues tucked out of the way, like they didn’t have enough space for it all. In the center there was another chedi but they were actively guilding with gold. It was interesting that the scaffolding they used also looked like gold.

Outside the main temple there was an overlook that you could see the city, especially the square with the moat and where the city walls used to be.

We went back down in the funicular and took the van back into the city. The van took us on a small detour to view the night market but we decided on Italian for a little change of pace at somewhere closer to our hotel.

Summit of Thailand

Today we ventured up to the top of Doi Inthanon, the tallest mountain in Thailand at 2565m (8415ft) above sea level. The mountains here are part of the Himalayan range. It took us about 2 hours to drive to get to the first stop, the Lady’s Slipper Orchid Conservation Center.

The goal of the center was to educate about the wild orchids and ferns that were endangered, and to propagate and reintroduce them back into the wild. I loved walking through the greenhouses with streams, bridges, waterfalls and ponds, making it feel like you were in a special forest all built for ferns and orchids to thrive.

Around the small reservoir, many people were there taking pictures in fancy dresses with the wild Himalayan cherry trees that were just starting to bloom, we were apparently a few days early from the peak color.

The driver brought us up to the summit next, but there wasn’t really a view because you were in the middle of a forest. 

There was another structure you could climb up to a deck in a more open area but it was too cloudy and still too many trees to see much. We walked down towards a boardwalk hike through the cloud forest.

Next was a ride in the back of a pickup outfitted with benches and covering to go up a steep hill to the two Royal Pagodas, Phra Mahathat Naphamethanidon and Naphapholphumisiri:

They were built in honor of the King and Queen’s 60th Birthdays. There was a beautiful view of the mountains from the top of one of them.

And there were lovely gardens surrounding the purple one, which was my favorite of the two.

Feeling peckish, we decided it was time to eat, so we stopped at the Royal Project Restaurant, where they grow much of the food used on the menu in nearby fields and we were sat near the tops of banana trees. The food was delicious, Mr. Wander got a fried shrimp and fruit salad, and I tried a new dish that I wish I could remember the name, but translates to roast pork with fried Chinese bun. Yum!

The last stop before heading back to the hotel was the Wachirathan Waterfall, we all got a bit of a shower from the mist when we got close.

We ate dinner near the hotel and then headed to a special walking street market that is only there on Sundays, it was just Mr. Wander, myself, and our hosts. His uncle found a few pairs of what he called “house pants”, those that he wears most of the time for only 130 Baht (about $3.72 at time of writing). I found a wrap that I could use to cover my legs or head when I go to different temples throughout our travels for just 100 Baht. I somewhat wish we hadn’t eaten before because there were many interesting food vendors.

A Few of my Favorite Flowers

Since our flight was in the afternoon again we decided to visit the botanical gardens outside Chiang Mai that morning. I was so impressed, they had a lovely rose garden, many greenhouses for specific families of plants, and three bigger greenhouses that were setup for the specific climate.

The first climate was the desert, they had so many cacti from around the world, and several of the big tall ones had santa hats.

The rainforest was my favorite, they built a 2 story tall waterfall inside the building and had many fish. You could walk around the outside or right through the middle.

Another water feature dominated the third building because it was for orchids, ferns, and water lilies. Absolutely gorgeous.

We headed to the airport to get some lunch, but we were still too early so we had to wait to be checked in. Mr. Wander and I were able to get into a lounge after we got through security and I got to try some Thai tea ice cream and more pork buns! Nothing has beat the one we had in Japan yet, though I’ll keep trying. We did find this familiar face in the airport, saying a Thai hello (Sawasdee Khrap):

We made it to Bangkok and to our hotel, Lit Bangkok, for a quick easy dinner before I could start dreaming about those flowers.