Coming in hot

I feel so incredibly strange now starting a fabulous tour of Thailand right after our experience with the kids yesterday. I thought about it and felt a little guilty for most of the 4 hour van trip to Chiang Mai. What took my mind off it was watching The Rise of the Planet of the Apes on the van's movie player. This movie was the worst writing I have ever heard. So hokey. Then we spent the last hour listening to the driver's collection of English Top 40 with his overpowering bass. Not to mention we weren't sure we'd survive the ride with our driver's propensity for overtaking during blind corners. They like to do that here.

The hotel in Chiang Mai is amazing! So gorgeous, I wish we could stay here the whole time. But thankfully we have a week here. It is a legitimate hotel, and the best part is there is a McDonald's on the main floor and an everything restaurant a few doors down. Our first night I had pizza and a margarita there which weren't bad at all. Definitely going back for a chicken burger and tacos while we're here.

We are directly across from what looks like a major tourist attraction. I think it's the Thapae gate, though I don't know what it is besides that. Falong EVERYWHERE. As soon as we arrived in Chiang Mai we got lunch at a coffee shop/cafe chain that Ava told us had won awards for the best phad thai. It was pretty fabulous and we ate at an outdoors bar watching white folk cross the street in front of us. We played a good long game of "where are they from?" The people watching was fantastic.

After dinner at the everything restaurant we went to a bar around the corner, just steps from our hotel. This place opened right onto the street, was dark and eclectic and had pool and live music. Pretty decent live music in fact. I can't wait to go back there. We started as the first group in the bar, and by 10:30 it was full of falong. I mean every table taken by foreigners. But I didn't stay long after that knowing what we had planned for Friday.

The next morning we were up and out by 9am to head out to zip lining. Even though today was our free day everyone decided to sign up to zip line together, all 20 of us. We opted for the intense package that included 34 stations of zip lines, abseiling, suspension bridges etc. It was planned for a 6 hour activity and it definitely was. I was excited to zip line, having done it in Mexico I wasn't nervous this time. But I was scared to abseil having done it off Table Mountain in Cape Town. Thankfully their version of abseiling wasn't self-controlled repelling but was being lowered straight down on a pulley system by a guide at the top. I just kept telling them not to drop me too fast and things were fine. We did a 20 meter, 25 meter, and 40 meter drop.

When we first got there they suited us up on full body harnesses and super adorable hair nets. Then they handed us sticks. I kid you not my whole group was convinced it was for beating back monkeys in the trees, likely a result of our previous monkey experience. We may or may not have scared the crap out of the other group by telling them this. However we later learned that these weird hook shaped sticks were our breaks, and we would hook them onto the wire and pull down to slow down when instructed. But I still like the monkey stick idea better.

At one point, probably 20 zip lines in, the guides told us the best view of the area would be on our right. I decided not to video it and to enjoy the long line and awesome view instead of futzing with my camera. Thankfully many people did video it since it ended up being a truly incredible view. I was going down the zip line through the trees, yelling and enjoying it, then when I cleared the trees I looked right and went quiet. Then apparently I was pointing at the view all awestruck, which everyone on the platform informed me was pretty entertaining to watch.

Coming in hot

Almost immediately after we got back from zip lining we had to go to our Thai cooking school activity. We toured [another] market, talked about different kinds of rice and noodles, then went to the cooking school. Our instructor, Gae, demonstrated first how to make phad thai, which we all stir fried and ate our own. Then we rolled and fried spring rolls, which turns out I'm pretty excellent at, followed by chicken salad, cashew chicken stir fry, and coconut-mango sticky rice for dessert. I was so full by the end of it I couldn't finish much after the spring rolls. I didn't like my phad thai, I need to keep working on it, but the cashew chicken and spring rolls came out amazing. It's fantastic how simple all the recipes were, just the fresh ingredients like meat, noodles or veggies, then sugar, fish sauce, and oyster sauce in different combinations for all the dishes. We went home with cook books so I'm going to get myself a proper wok and start practicing.

Perfectly folded spring rolls right?

It's an early night for us now as we have another intense day planned for tomorrow. We'll be caving (which was memorably difficult in Africa), rock climbing, abseiling, and doing a zip line-like traverse. I almost feel athletic describing all that, should be tough.