Chiang Rai is a city that sits three hours north of Chiang Mai. It was the old capital of the Lanna kingdom (one of the kingdoms within old Siam), and the city's name literally means "old city", with Chiang Mai meaning "new city". I knew none of this, by the way, when the day started, but this was the history part of a wonderful day visiting three spectacular temples in Chiang Rai, the white, blue and red temples, so named for obvious reasons when you see them.
Now, the day wasn't without issue, primarily the fact that the tour was sold on Viator as taking ten hours, meaning a 7am start would roughyl equate with a 5-6pm finish, but as the guide mentioned at the start of the tour of the 12 of us in the sprinter van, it would take closer to 12-13 hours - which admittedly makes a whole deal of sense just mathematically. 6 to 7 hours of this day would be spent just driving the road to Chiang Mai and back and between the temples themselves. Then there would be the time at the temples, which you know in these larger group tours is always longer than you realistically need, and finally add in the couple of stops to visit local shops and wares. Add it all up, and we should have known the ten hour estimate was bunk, but this resulted in us knowing pretty early our 7pm dinner reservation at Chawee was kaput. By the way, I don't blame the actual tour company here, but Viator for misleading us. Anyway, luckily the tour itself was more than worth it.
As I didn't bring my laptop with me, I'm writing this a day later at our layover in Bangkok airport, and I can confidently say that we should've looked into spend a night in Chiang Rai, which seems like a lovely city even outside the temples. My parents also swear by it a bit. Anyway, just adding it to my list for next time - which similarly the ill-fated Chawee gets bumped to as well.
The first stop on the tour was probably the weakest, about thirty minutes in, the visit a "longneck" peoples village - a village of the community that migrated from Burma (chased out, in reality) and now number around 10,000 around Thailand. This village had about 200 at peak, but most have actually started to integrate into Thai society and thusly leave for the day. The ones staying behind are all pleasant, dressed well with the crazily heavy gold rings around their necks, so heavy we would learn the reason they look "long" is because they push down the shoulders (which makes far more sense than the alternative, I guess). The stuff they were selling was all fairly plain, so if anything it was more of a stop just to see these peoples. Seems voyeuristic, but you have to pay extra (~$10) for this part of the tour, and as we would learn by stop three or so, the same four or five sprinter vans and one large coach bus were all partaking on these stops.
The next stop was more of a pure rest stop at a coffee shop which was also near a natural hot spring, which looked nice but smelled awful (read: sulphur). By this point, we were roughly an hour into the trip and ready for the long stretch on the way to the first of the temples, a 90-minute car ride, the beginning of which was through the hills and mountains. The last half of which was twisting and turning through various offshoots to get aruond a massive construction project to build a proper highway.
We finally reached the white temple around 11:30, and it truly is hard to describe. Granted, the blue temple is similarly hard to describe, but the white temple complex is surreal. We would learn that this temple was built just about 30 years ago, by a famous Thai artist, who took the chance to build a temple to really show off. The main area has a series of four connected mini temples with a bridge between them and all of it (the temples, the bridge, the sides of hte pond below you) are crazily carved with angular edges, dragons, haunting imagery, and so much more. It is like you are in a gothic cathedral meets something in Star Wars meets pure white. It's incredible. Yes, it dulls the experience a few percentage points to know how new this is, but after a while you realize that's silly, we should just be taking this in for what it is, which is magical.
The rest of the White Temple complex is similarly so, with the other main attraction being a man-made cave with tons of carvings inside, of dragons, fish, buddhas, other imagery. Yeah, it;s fake, so it's no Ellora Caves, but who cares, its still stunning. As was the large gold pagoda on the side, which if it was not connected to the larger White Temple and was a standalone sight would probably be seen as might impressive on its own right - Chiang Mai's answer, I guess, to the Kinkaku-Ji. On the whole, the White Temple was so memorable, and an excellent way to start the tourism part of the day.
This was followed by a buffet lunch at the type of place you expect from this type of tour, but it was conveniently located right next door to the White Temple, and honestly the food was fairly good, but more importantly there was quite a spread. The only meat was chicken (I guess playing it safe given the amount of international tourists) but in many ways, from a really nice, sweet pad thai, to a ginger stir-fry, to a spicy, sharp mince / larb type thing, to of course their own preparation of Khao Soi, which was nowhere near as good as Euang Kai Sam, but was honestly quite good itself. On the whole, for the biggest question mark on these types of tours, the food was good.
Better was the Blue Temple, the next stop on the tour, which is essentially what happens if you take the White Temple, strip away the bridges and ponds, and squat it right in the heart of the city - and of course paint it all blue instead of white. While this description probably makes it sounds worse (and it probably is like 10% worse) it is still incredibly impressive and picturesque, featuring a bit more greenery and dynamism in the carving (the colors help) from tigers, and various other animals. Also, the inside of the main temple, with its giant large light blue buddha and frescoe and tile work aplenty everytwhere was just incredible. That they packed all this decoration and brilliance into a basically tiny city block is amazing.
The final stop was the Red Temple, and while it was also quite nice, if they follow my spirit of "save the best for last" they probably would've reversed the order of the visits. The odd part is the main attraction is not red, it is a giant 30-story tall buddha statue where you can take an elevator to walk inside the top of the head - as in you can look out the eyes for windows. What is incredible though is the inside hollowed out top of the head is as intricately carved as any of hte prior temples - and in a way much like the White Temple at the start, with angular carvings and beauty everywhere. The "red" element is a large pagoda (in the classic sense) off to a side hill which is indeed red, but honestly not all that intricately carved or interesting compared to the buddha or definitely the blue or white temples. Still, the temple complex itself is situated at a really nice clearing where you get a good view of the sprawl of hills in every direction. On the whole, the temples as a combination are incredible and easily worht the six hours of driving to get there and back (or, you know, just plan it differently so you can stay there...).
We did reach back on the early end of the guide's guesstimate, but were left with a bit of a conundrum of where to go. The last thing I hate not really having planned is meals, and while I had a few alternate options shortlisted during my research, one required reservations and the other was unexpectedly closed, so we walked 10 minutes away from the closed spot, past a series of massage spots (50/50 legitimate vs. rub and tug) towards a really nice street of a ton of bars and eateries, and absolutely the type of place I want to stroll aroudn more if/when I come again. The place we went to was called Alice, which was decent - serving not as good but still generally acceptable versions of the key dishes we'd had at a Euang Kam Sai, like Khao Soi. The best dish was a glass noodle seafood salad which to be fair was excellent, but I think they took our "make it medium spcy" to mean don't make it spicy at all. That said, probably not the worst thing given my stomach had been iffy for a couple days and we're about to spend much of the next morning flying.
That was the end of my time in Chiang Mai, as I had to play adult for a few hours and take a work call at 10:30pm local time. We have to get up at 5am tomorrow for our flight, so this already was not going to be a late night, so it was a nice alignment to have this bethe one night I had to basically give up. The rest of the group went back to Bar Not Found - I will say, there wasn't even a thought of them staying in, but even had they given that a thought, I probably reject it outright. They had their fun, my call went fine, I slept at 12, I'll take their word for it that they came back by 1, and we all got up for the flight (spoiler alert).
In the end, my time in Chiang Mai was fantastic. I got more or less four full days here (especially since we got in early from Bangkok compared to the ETA) and loved nearly every second of it. The biggest "miss" wasn't really Chiang Mai's fault, but when we had to call an audible for dinner on the last night, or dinner on the first night when Euang Kam Sai was too full, but in both cases our quickly ID'd backup was more than fine, especially the first night where the fish larb was up there. The city is lovely with its old town in the middle but still built up in many ways. The food is amazing, but that was to some degree to be expected. What was not as expected was the cocktail bars, the breweries, the clubs, the late night food, the sense of place and more than anything how amazing all the sights were. I talk in this entry about how spectacular the White, Blue and Red temples were, but to be honest, the Wat Ben Den two days back or the Twin Pagodas yesterday were nearly as good. Chiang Mai is a special place, and while I'm both annoyed that it took me this long to visit, and that I wasn't able to spend more time just wandering around the city, I'm more overjoyed knowing that I'll figure out a way to come back.
