Bangkok is a sizzling city. It is hot, huge and their are millions of people (all going somewhere). But there are places of tranquility (temples and expensive brand- shops). We fund Cow, a tuk-tuk driver to drive us around trough the city. The traffic isn't that chaotic as you would expect: no honking at all. Everyone is very courteous.
Our last morning in Chiang Mai we spend by riding our motor bikes in the mountains. After that we flew in just 1 hour back to Bangkok.
Thanks to my friends at alltunes.com I downloaded the latest album of Koop: Koop islands. It is one of their best. I especially like the track: I see a different you with vocals from Yukimi Nagano who also sings Come to Me. It is a girlish innocent voice. Check it out in my audio corner here on VOX.
Meet my new buddy Bhumibol. First I wanted to name him Mohamed, but that is not a proper name for a bear lately...
The Chiang Mai zoo is amazing. It is a very large mountain based zoo with a modern set up and can easily rival some other great zoos I have been to (e.g. San Diego or Animal World). They have Giant Panda's which you can see really up close (and hey: they really move as well). Lot's of animals you can feed - which we did with the Giraffes and the Hippos. It was almost 35 degrees, but the trees kept us in the shade.
Chiang Mai is the perfect city to ride a scooter. The roads are almost exclusively one way and the city lay out is very straight forward. The yamaha mio is a light but powerful scooter. To bad for the fluorescent color scheme...
We went to the highest mountain top in Thailand and saw a tribal village on the way. As everywhere here in the North of Thailand there were little markets with local produce. This country is really obsessed with food (luckily for us). The food in markets is carefully displayed, always super fresh and they have a broad assortment. I am very happy that they sell Coca Cola Light and Coke Zero almost everywhere (something that is non existing in Italy or Greece e.g.)
In a monument for the King we saw that he really likes Volkswagen cars.
You can eat fine thai food everywhere for almost nothing. In the national park we had lunch for 1 euro per person...
Deep in the jungle on the river we did some rafting. Very quiet, very easy, very safe. We went of in time :-)
We spent this morning riding Elephants. Thailand used to have ten thousands of Elephants working in the forests (timber industry). Now that is over a few are left and you can visit them and ride them in Elephant Parks. They were very friendly animals and as far as we could see, treated well. We gave them lots of sugar cane and bananas and they did not complain. On our way back we used an ox car which was fine for the open road, but wouldn't helped us deep in the jungle.
At the Orchid Farm it was very interesting to see how orchids are grown. We saw all different kinds in all different colors. We bought some samples to try to grow them back home - let's see whether they survive.
We went up north to the golden triangle. It used to be the place where opium was smuggled across the borders of Laos, Burma and Thailand. After that it was heroin and now it seems it is pills. This border is also not far away from China so a lot of things happen here.
