Day 4: Explored Chiang Mai city and temples.
Day 5: private tour of North Chiang Mai with a native Thai taxi driver recommended to us by our BnB hosts. We visited temples, the University of Chiang Mai coffee bean plantation and then an native Eco mountain village. To get to the last two, we took a steep, bumpy dirt road through the mountains that was one lane but was apparently meant to fit two-way traffic. So when a car was trying to get through it was a nail biting experience, but the streets of Bangkok prepared us for the worst anyways. Good thing we weren't driving.
Day 6: Zip Lining! It was Leslie's brilliant idea and we had a blast. Our two Thai zip line instructors had the same sarcastic corny humor as Leslie and I so they were playing jokes on us throughout the day: yelling out "Oh my Buddha" every time her and I said "oh my God", dropping us as fast as possible down the lines, and confusing us on instructions to make us even more nervous.
Day 7: Happy Elephant Home We were picked up from our BnB and took a 1.5 hour ride with 5 other passengers to an elephant sanctuary to the North of Chiang Mai almost near the Myanmar border. We passed lots of cyclists and motorbikers along the way that was giving me the fever for a motorbike trip! We arrived in a gorgeous valley in between the mountains and changed into similar clothing that the instructor was wearing so that the elephants would warm up to us and not be shy or scared. Between the small group of us we got to spend time with four elephants - a greedy mommy, her 10-month old baby, a well trained male elephant rescued from the circus, and an half-blind grandpa elephant who was old and slow but the sweetest. We filled our bags with cantaloupe, tamarind and bananas and fed them during the walk down to the river. The mother kept trying to push her trunk into her bag the whole way, and the baby stopped once for some milk from her. The grandpa was so sweet and slow and I spent the most time with him in the back. We got down to the river and the elephants went bananas in the water, they rolled around and loved it so much! The baby was fully submerged underwater a few times and was trying to cuddle up against the mom. The grandpa was too old to get in so he just hung out with his trunk out next to the river. After the elephants got out, they gave themselves a sand bath and the baby rolled around in the dust and continued digging a hole he had apparently been working on for a while. Everything was a darned Kodak moment as you can imagine and you couldn't help but smile and coo the entire time.
On the walk back up to the camp, the mom misbehaved again and tried eating the tall sugar cane crop from a farmers land next to the trail. The two Thai boys who were assisting the instructor tried yelling at the mama beast who again took a second rip at the sugar cane and ate it. The instructor yelled "you eat it you pay farmer for it!" As if that was helping. Meanwhile, the baby elephant got a wild hair to run head-on into the field and all you could see was the tall sugar cane stalks zigzagging in one big swoop with the baby elephant somewhere underneath out of sight. All of us in the group were laughing and after a while the Thais got the elephants back onto the path.
Day 8: Checked into Little Village Chiang Mai, a small, homey "resort" ran by an expat and his Thai wife. It was away from the city with teakwood bungalows and wonderful hospitality. There were bikes to use there so we took the bikes and rode around the countryside, definitely something we needed after a week the city life. The owners of place recommended we check out a giant quarry nearby with lots of cliffs to jump off of and wooden rafts in the water to sit on. So cliff jumping and sunbathing all day was perfectly fine with us.
Day 9: Flew from Chiang Mai to Surat Thani, then ferry to Koh Samui for overnight. Koh Samui was too big and touristy, as we expected, so it was good we only stayed there one night. Perhaps it has something to offer, as it is quite a big island, but we didn't see those parts as we wanted to explore
Throughout the trip we had heard a few people talk about visiting Pai, a small village just north of Chiang Mai. While 4 days in Chiang Mai was enough, if we had a 5th day then we probably would have taken a look up that way to Pai or one of the villages around it.
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