Our flight to Chiang Mai left Bangkok at 4.35pm and arrived just before 6pm. Our AirBnB apartment was a lovely 2 bedroom apartment on the 6th floor of a high rise apartment building with a rooftop pool. We decided to head into the old town and found a lovely Italian (with a Thai twist) restaurant for dinner.
On Friday, we had a lazy first morning in Chiang Mail and spent most of it at the pool catching up on some work. Later that afternoon we ventured down the road for our first Night Bazaar experience. The salls start to open around 5pm along many of the streets with so much to choose from as well as a few food courts. We stopped in one and each of us chose a different food stall for dinner – Thai noodles, Indian and pizza!
We had been looking at visiting some of the temples just outside the town and decided to hire a car. So on Saturday afternoon we headed to Budget Catcher to pick up a little Suzuki Swift for the next 24 hours.
We read that Khao Soi Lung Prakit Kad Kom is a must-try Khao Soi restaurant for anyone visiting Chiang Mai. This restaurant (well, it is more like a little local street eatery with some plastic tables and chairs) has the most famous Khao Soi in Chiang Mai, and it’s been featured on a Netflix show – Somebody Feed Phil – for being the best Khao Soi in Chiang Mai.
Khao Soi is a classic dish of northern Thailand and is particularly well-loved in the city of Chiang Mai. It is a creamy, slightly spicy yellow curry dish combined with tender braised meat (chicken and beef are favourites) in a coconut curry broth with boiled and fried noodles. So, that is where we headed first and with nothing else on the menu, we ordered 4 chicken bowls. The dish was very tasty, but even though we specifically asked for it to be NOT spicy, our eyes were watering after the first bite! The kids couldn’t cope with the spiciness, so we had 2 bowls each!
After our very first Khao Soi experience, we drove to Wat Pha Lat, a temple in the jungle just outside of town. The plan was to also visit the more well-known Wat Phra That Doi Suthep that afternoon, but the torrential rain changed our plans, and we headed back to the apartment for a take-away dinner.
Sundays are well known in Chiang Mai for the Sunday Night Bazaar – a vibrant and busy market spanning 1.5km with many little food courts dotted all around the place. Our taxi driver dropped us on a corner, and we just headed in a direction. We found a very quaint little food court set up in the courtyard of a local temple and had some delicious street food.
The weather wasn’t great on Monday morning, so the girls had a lovely manicure and we all just chilled until dinner time when we headed down the road to the Night Bazaar again for some typical street food.
We decided to pick up a hire car again on Tuesday morning and then headed to Wat Phra That Doi Suthep – one of northern Thailand’s most sacred Buddhist temples reached via a 306-step staircase. That evening we headed to the old town area again and found a lovely little cafe for dinner. That evening we got a message from our AiBnB host warning us that the water levels in the River Ping were rising and that it would reach a critical point at 5am the next morning, which meant that our area would be completely flooded.
We had arranged for a late check out at 2pm as our flight was only at 6pm, but when we saw the flooded streets the next morning, we decided to head out straight away. Luckily the old town area was dry, so we had a nice, long breakfast-come-lunch and then headed to the airport for the first flight to Bangkok and then back to Perth.
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