18th April 2010 – 2nd Day in Chiang Mai

Once again an early morning we left the hotel at 6.30am. Lily is definitely getting sick. I am praying hard that she can make it through today.

We set off to Bonus Challenge D it had many parts and was far out of the city

It stated: - Get to Lampang and do all of the following
Take a horse carriage ride of the village
It was Sunday so the town was very sleepy and not many things were opened when we first got there but we found 3 horse carriages hanging around in the centre of town. We arrange for the driver to take us around the small town and to carry us to Wat Ming Meug.

Wats are temples and by the end of this day I think we actually visit about 8 in all. I am not going to go into great details about all.

Buy a small piece of locally made pottery. This village is famous for blue and white pottery. It took some time to find a shop open but we managed to buy a small dish.
They were a couple more challenges here but keeping with time I am going to skip to our second scavenge for the day and the best so far in this trip
Visit the Elephant Conservation Centre! What is your mahout's name? Hoon Nah

This is the most amazing place. It had an elephant show where the elephants played musical instruments, they danced, they responded to voice commands and then the highlight. Three elephants painted pictures; yes I saw them paint the pictures with my own 2 eyes. One paints elephants, from the front, the side or behind.

Another elephant paints flowers on a bush, he manages to shade the flowers and the leaves and the last elephant paints abstract. The mahout helps get the paint on to the different brushes and then they paint real pictures. I bought the one of the flowers and Zoe bought the elephant one.



This Conservation Centre has the "Only elephant hospital" It was so neat little did we know that we were about to have big troubles. On Great Escapes there is a 2 stop rule. Your mode of transport can only take you to 2 places then you have to change drivers. Well we had left the hotel with one driver that took us to Lampang and to The Elephants well we had to send him away. Little did we know that there is NO, ZERO transportation from this point. There was a bus but being Sunday it was running every hour and nobody knew what time to expect the next bus. The bus hut was across a highway with a concrete barrier in the way, no way to cross over safely. Well yours truly started to beg people in the parking lot for a ride but remember there are four of us. Finally a lady with a pickup truck offered us a ride to Lamphun

It was so hot; the pickup tray was painted black. It was so hot that it burnt the back of Zoe's thigh. I was worried about Lily in the heat because she was starting to get sick and I knew that that amount of heat was not good, but there wasn't much I could do about it.

The lady who was driving the truck very nicely dropped us to the next WAT we needed to find. This is the nice lady who drove us to Lamphun, Bill always encourages us to "Trust strangers in strange lands" and this was one of those challenges.

We scavenged all over Lamphun, which was very difficult because Lamphun has NO modes of transportation. We beat the largest gong....

They are a couple of rickshaws, the bikes with a basket behind for its passengers but they only hold 2 people and there was 4 of us so we had to walk, poor Lily was feeling like hell. We kept stopping and giving her copious amounts of water. We had planned to go zip lining from here but there were NO TAXIS we took the blue bus (the only bus) back to Chiang Mai.

This took well over an hour so Lils got some sleep and we split up from Zoe and Rainey and completed just about all the challenges that afternoon

Here is a brief list of things:-
i) Lily climbed a rock wall; she got almost to the top the first time before she fell and made it all the way to the top the second time. Well done Lils!!!

ii) Went to 3 different markets; - Sunday Market, Tonlamyai Market and Waroro Market

Went to Khamtien plant market and we found the Balinese style gardens. Once again we let our Tuktuk go and could not get another. We had to walk far to a main street before we got one.

Visited the oldest Wat

Visited the oldest Buddha

Went and spent time talking to a Monk, this was our last for the day and we spent a long time with him. Lily asked him lots of questions about Buddhism as she has a Religious Knowledge exam to take shortly after returning home.

We went to the night Market for ME to eat Bam Boo worms and fried maggots YUCK!!!

Finally we were finished with our challenges for that day. We walked around the Night Bazaar and tried Fish Foot Spa. It is the craziest thing. You put your feet into a fish take full of little fish and they come and suck on your feet and eat off the calouses etc. Well it felt indescribable at first. The fish rush at your feet and it tickles beyond description. When you can get a hold of yourself and just leave your feet in the water it starts to feel like thousands of bubbles. It was a crazy thing to try but when we were finished our achy tired feet felt rejuvenated.

Then we went for foot massages. That was wonderful. Then home to say good-bye to Aril and Travis and then bed!!!