Blog: Chiang Mai

Day six of our Asia trip was the only one not scheduled in advance. On a recommendation from a friend, we signed up for a half day cooking class at Chiang Mai Thai Cookery School which was one of the highlights of the whole trip.

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For our second day in Chiang Mai, we went to the Chiang Dao elephant camp. This was definitely on the touristy side, but also a lot of fun. Each elephant has a mahout, or trainer, who works with the same elephant starting when the mahout and the elephant are both very young.

The day begins with an elephant show, where the mahouts demonstrate how elephents can push, pull, roll, and lift huge logs, which was how construction materials were transported and manipulated before trucks and forklifts. They also show off various tricks, such as starting the show with one elephant raising the flag on the flagpole, having the elephants pick up the mahout's hats off the ground and place them on their heads, and doing "elephant paintings" where the mahout holds a paintbrush in the elephant's trunk and the elephant waves it up and down or makes dots.

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In the hills of Thailand reside many ethnic minorities in small villages. These villages are poorer and less economically developed than the cities (something true in Western nations too, of course). Many of the male villagers farm for subsistence while the women make handcrafts to sell to tourists in markets down in the cities.

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After our disappointing second day in Bangkok, we flew to Chiang Mai and resumed having a wonderful time. We checked in to our extremely cute hotel, Yaangcome Village, then headed up the mountain to the temple of Wat Prathat Doi Suthep.

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