A continuation of the busiest holiday ever... October hol Part 2

For the rest of our October holiday, we had decided to do a bit of a tour of Thailand with visiting family. It seems that every opportunity we have we are leaving the country to go visit some other countries point of interest instead of enjoying what we have right here. According to many people who have traveled around Thailand, all the best stuff and friendliest people are 'up north', yet in 5 years I've not made it up there. So with Nick's mum and step-dad, and my mum visiting it was a good excuse to go see the best bits we've not been to.
As well as visiting Chiang Mai, we planned to go to the beach, visit the bridge and Museums in Kanchanaburi, and do all the normal tourist stuff in Bangkok, all in about 10 days.

All three of our guests had been here before, so they kind of new what to expect. Nick's mum Val, stayed with us last year so already has the hang of Bangkok and the other two had visited the islands. Sadly my mum's previous experience of Thailand was not so great and left her jaded and 15lbs lighter. She didn't like the food, got seasick for the first time in her life, got chased by trigger-fish on every dive and was subjected to my idea of stylish accommodation (a thatch hut....with it's own toilet). As well as that, the night before we flew back to Bangkok for her connection to London, our room got over-run by cockroaches in a rain storm so we walked out and caught a taxi in the rain to the airport (a taxi which stopped in the middle of nowhere and demanded lots of money off us to take us any further). The airport was closed so my mum spent her last night in Thailand sheltering in on open-sided motorcycle taxi stand outside the airport gates, sleeping across two wooden chairs. Very glamorous indeed.

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With so little time, this holiday was always going to be a little hectic and we had pretty much cram-packed every day as full as possible. That is apart from the first day, which was a good job as my mum put her bags down and promptly fell asleep for the day. That evening we went out on one of the old rice barges for a dinner cruise. Starting at the Marriot Riverside it has sufficient parent 'wow factor' and then heads up river past all the glitzy hotels and the Grand Palace. The nice thing about the river by night is that you can't see how dirty it is and only see the lights shining on the surface instead of any unidentified odd stuff floating by (the occasional dog or cow has been seen in the past). Also the constant supply of slightly spicy 'fragrant' Thai food helps to mask the odd river smells.

The next day we were back on the river in all it's brown, murky, and daytime, smelly splendor, heading up to the Grand Palace and Wat Po. With guests in tow it's always best to avoid the roads at all costs, there's nothing quite like the horror of Bangkok traffic to put a person off the city. The Grand Palace is a truly beautiful place and is a 'must visit' site for anybody coming to Bangkok. However, for those visiting us in the future, you are on your own for this trip. Twice, or in Nick's case three times, is more than enough to get over the 'wow' of the place and replace it instead with great annoyance at the heat and all the people walking into the perfect picture.

After the Grand Palace and a very brief look at the reclining Buddha in Wat Po, we hired a long tail boat to take us on a tour of the canals and through old style Bangkok. This is the only time you get to understand why people call Thailand the Venice of the east, and it's a really great way to see how life used to be. Shops that you pull up to in a boat, kids jumping and playing in the water, and little old ladies with boats full of junk that try and sell you everything you don't want or need.

After a few days of exploring Bangkok, we flew up to Chiang Mai for the 'cultured' part of the holiday. We stayed in De Naga Hotel, a really nice new boutique hotel. Staff are really helpful, rooms are amazing, and the food is really good (even though nobody seemed to eat there in the evenings).

http://www.denagahotel.com/

Our days in Chiang Mai were mainly spent eating, drinking, shopping, playing with animals, and trying to get 5 felangs and a driver in a tuk tuk. The first day we went out to one of the elephant camps outside the city. Here tourists get to feed the elephants and watch them perform all manner of tricks. I'm not usually a fan of anything like this, but in Thailand, although the elephant is a national symbol, many elephants are badly treated. People breed elephants in the hope of getting a rare white elephant (all white elephants belong to the king), which the king will purchase and then make sure the family have money for many years. This means that there are a large number of gray elephants are bred by default and usually end up being brought into the city so their owners can take money of tourists foolish enough to pay to pat and feed them. The mahout camps in Chiang Mai are a safe way for locals to make money while ensuring the elephants are really well cared for. Each elephant has it's own mahout who looks after it and helps train it to do various things like kick a football into a goal, play basket ball and even paint pictures. The odd thing about all this is the elephants actually look like they're enjoying themselves.

After the elephant camp, we enjoyed a leisurely float down a river on a bamboo raft before being taken to a hill tribe village.

Perhaps the best thing about Chiang Mai for me was the 'Tiger Kingdom'. At 5 months old, this a reasonably new addition to the well trodden tourist loop of attractions. It is a centre that allows people to interact with tigers. Again, this isn't something I would normally agree with but I am sorry to say that the draw of baby tigers is too great for me to make my moral excuses. Also that and the fact that Asiatic tigers are very nearly extinct in the wild, so if they can help breed them in a reasonably nice captive environment, hopefully one day they can start a breed and release program.
The centre is a collection of large compounds where tigers of different ages are kept. You can choose to go in with the babies, the 4 month olds or the 1 year olds. The tigers aren't doped and you have to sign liability waivers before you get anywhere near them, but at the moment as it still new, the centre is being really professionally run and you go in with the carers of the tigers.

The baby tigers we went in with were only 4 weeks old and have to be some of the cutest animals I've ever handled. They were squawking for milk when we got in there, and quickly fell asleep after they got fed. Mum, Nick and I liked the little ones so much we decided to go in with the 'big ones' while Bill and Val watched from the safety of the coffee shop. It's quite easy to forget, when playing with 4 week old tigers, just how big and powerful they get. We had been quite blasé about going in with them, but when you get to the entrance and you see them tearing around after each other and play fighting, all teeth and huge great paws, it is a test of your nerve. I have seen doped animals many times before, and these were definitely wide awake. It was an incredible experience to walk around and sit with such beautiful and powerful animals.

On the last night in Chiang Mai I got to do something I've wanted to do for a very long time. After dinner at a restaurant on a hill overlooking the lights of the city, we had arranged a surprise for the others with our taxi driver of three days, and had him take us to a place where we could let off paper lanterns. He took us to a deserted car-park, not my choice of venue, but when I saw how awkward it was to get them off the ground without bursting into flames, especially in the wind, I realized a wide open car park was not a bad idea. It was a bit of luck and a lot of running and jumping from our driver that got all 5 lanterns away successfully. Our folks liked it so much we had to go shopping for some before we left the next day. Ten lanterns taken back to the UK with the aim of being released on New Years eve. Not sure how easy that's going to be with all the alcohol that's generally involved!