This Is A Lake - A travel blog

If you remember, I wasn’t sure whether I was up for a full hike, but I also wanted to get out of the city a bit, so I booked myself a tour of Doi Inthanon National Park. The van was supposed to pick me up “between 8:00 and 8:30”, so of course I was waiting for it in the lobby at eight o’clock, and by nine o’clock nobody had appeared. I remembered a piece of advice I was given about pickup arrangements in Southeast Asia: “It will always feel like they have forgotten about you, but they’ll always appear”. Altogether good advice, it is tempered by the fact that one time in Vietnam they did really forget about me and left me as the only foreigner in the Lao Cai train station at 5AM, but I digress.  Sure enough, five minutes after nine the tour guide walked into the lobby and waved me over. On my group there were three other Spaniards (we’re taking over!) and a Malaysian family of seven. I was shocked to find that the drive to the national park would take nearly two full hours; the distance

Today was my first acquaintance with Chiang Mai! I had originally planned to take the bus from Chiang Rai to Chiang Mai early yesterday morning, but all tickets were sold out and I could only book the 16:15 bus; so I took the chance to do my laundry, hung out at a café, then hung out at the cat café, then hung out at the hotel until travel time. The bus ticket cost me 160 baht (€4), which is not bad for a 200 km journey! It felt really long, though: it got fully dark outside by 18:00, and we would only arrive at the bus station in Chiang Mai at 20:00. Since I didn’t get to do anthing yesterday, this morning I walked out of my hotel (the Golden Bell) and crossed a street to reach Chiang Mai’s Chiang Mai Gate. You see, Chiang Mai’s old city lives inside a near-perfect square delineated by ancient city walls and a moat. A lot of hotels and other lodgings are outside of the old city, so you’ll have to find the nearest gate to cross the moat and get into the city proper. The contrast with C