Travel day! To Chiang Mai!
So, we woke up and got packed. It’s a little surprising how dirty clothes take up more room than clean ones. And with the heat and humidity, there are some dirty clothes. Also, the bits of our clothes that got the river splashed on them are just singed holes. Okay, that’s not true.
We left our bags in our room and headed out to find an internet café that wasn’t charging the 250 baht per hour that our hotel was. Right across the street was a lovely and teeny little shop that also rented videos. We sat down, ordered a couple coffees (the best we’d had so far in Thailand, it’s a major coffee drinking culture here, all coffee is good, but these were great) for like 80 baht and got free internet. So much better. We spent an hour and a half uploading our first blog, upload times are slow here so posting the video and pictures takes forever. We sat and watched the street come to life. All the food vendors wheeled their carts piled high with chairs and buckets and bags. Taxis and scooters plied to and fro. Stray dogs (of which there are millions) snoozing in the sun. The fellow across the alley from us had set up a cart with a huge wok, sizzling oil and a huge wire ladle. He had flour up to his elbows and quite a few customers so we decided maybe we’d stop and get our first street food from him, not even knowing what he was selling. We asked the coffee shop guy and he said what they were in Thai and when we just dumbly nodded and smiled he said, “They good, get them”. On our way back to the hotel we stopped and asked for a bag. He filled it up with puffy little golden balls hot from the wok. We paid all 10 baht and took our treats with us back to the hotel, snacking as we went. Oh heaven! They were like a cross between a begnet and a pancake, fried in a ball, with I am sure some icing sugar in the batter. Delicious, hot, crispy on the outside, doughy and light on the inside. Yum!
We checked out and grabbed a taxi, meter taxi, to the airport for our first domestic Thai flight. The meter taxi was super fast, driving up big freeway interchanges with people fishing off the side, it took only 25 minutes to get to the airport and cost us just over 8 bucks. We checked in no problem and headed for our gate with a few hours to spare. Little did we know there was a Bangkok Airways (50 bucks to anywhere in Thailand, our domestic carrier choice) lounge for all ticket holders. Free internet, coffee’s, sticky rice in banana leaves (the Thai favorite), juices, fruit, popcorn, little finger sammies. Beautiful! We loaded up and caught up on our journal while waiting. We got on our flight and despite it only being a forty five minute hop we were given croissant sandwiches and coffee or juice. They played Just For Laughs Gags (which is Canada’s highest rated international export, no speaking so no translating) and seconds later we were landing in Chiang Mai, which is up in Northern Thailand. More jungly and rainy and mountainous.
We were staying at the #1 rated hotel on TripAdvisor, The Secret Garden. A little bed and breakfast about 20 km outside of Chiang Mai. The wife of the couple who own it, Pai, was waiting for us with Celina’s name on a piece of paper, we hopped in her BMW and chatted our way through smaller and smaller towns, past less and less English signs, onto ever diminishing streets, roads, dirt roads, and finally turned through a lovely little gate and down a long driveway completely engulfed in lush greenery, to our home for the next three nights. 
It is an acre and a half of lovely, rustic, lush garden, ponds, fountains, lanterns, fruit and palm trees, flowers everywhere. It is owned by Peter and Pai. Peter, a German ex-pat who has been here 27 years building this place, is like a less mischevious Funske. There are about nine individual buildings, a sala (lounge meeting dining area, completely open and covered in a grass roof), a wide open kitchen, a pool table and foosball area, a lovely pool with its own bar and waterfall.
(a brief tour)
Our room/house, the Mandalay, has a gorgeous deck and living room, separate from the bedroom and bathroom. All the doors and windows are open all the time, there are fans built in to everything. It is a rustic and unpolished little place, but so gorgeous. It feels like a cross between White Bear lake and Emma lake. In fact our room smells exactly like Granny and Grampa George’s cabin.
(Celina here, butting in: Peter and Pai, the proprietors of the Secret Garden lived in Mandalay house for their first fourteen years on the land. The have a 16 year old, Isabelle, who would play on the front porch of the room that we were staying when she was just a teeny thing while Pai would cook and clean and tend to the house. Peter is from Germany originally and met Pai while she was 16 and working in his factory. He used to own a company that did wood cuts- he’d design them and then the factory would mass-produce them. Unfortunately, patents take three years to be granted once you’ve applied for them and Peter’s work was being stolen all the while, mass produced and sold for far cheaper than he could afford to sell, so he quit his lifelong business, the one that brought him to Thailand in the first place, and opened up the Secret Garden with Pai. And more about them later…) The sound of birds and insects and further off the roosters and cows is deafening in the most relaxing way. There are geckos all over the walls, running to and fro. In the center of the property there is a little lake with flowering lilly pads and fish swimming around. Beside it is a cage with three Mynah birds in it. They were found on the property and put in the cage where they have lived for the last three years, not quite old enough to mimic the human voice yet, but with a huge array of songs. When we arrived we sat with Pai in the sala, she got us a couple beers from the kitchen and we chatted, feeling the stress of the big city melt off of us. She showed us a trick with the Mynah’s. Apparently they like their home. If the doors open they might leave but they’ll come right back, and if you just unlock the door they freak out. Fluttering all over the inside of the cage, taking turns reaching through the wire to push the latch shut again. When they hear it click they immediately calm down and start pecking around like nothing happened.
We checked out our room which has wi-fi and a mosquito net over the bed. A little tv and dvd player. There is a big library in the sala and a bunch of dvd’s and cd’s you can take into your room if you like. They also have an honor system for the liquor, you help yourself to beers and wine from the fridge, the hard stuff next to it, and just mark it down next to your name to be tabulated at the end of the trip. Many beers fell pray to us in the coming hours.
We sat on our veranda and the skies burst open, a true tropical rainstorm, and we sat under our cover, the fans cooling us, the geckos skittering along the walls, sipping our Chiang beers and watching the rain pour down in buckets past us. Paradise!
Pai used to offer cooking lessons, you can eat here for 170 baht a day (3 bucks or so), but it got to be too much and she had to be in the kitchen all day, so now she just lets whoever wants to come in and help her cook. Of course we were all over that, so once she returned from the market we stepped into her vast kitchen and had the best time learning some real thai cooking. Ingredients we’ve never used (some we’d never seen). Galanga root, Kaffir lime leaves, plantana leaf, fresh tamarind (you soak it, it looks like brains). We took video of every step and will edit it into a cooking Thai with Pai video soon enough. We made red curry chicken, thom ka gai soup and pad thai! Real pad thai! Yeeeeeee! I’ll skip the wonders of the kitchen, the laissez faire attitude towards bugs (a wide open kitchen with no windows leaves a fair bit of room for bugs and not much room for sterile cleanliness), Pai’s aunt and mother helping. That’s all on the videos. I will say when we finally got to sit down and eat, holy moly. Yum and yowza! Dat ‘picy! But so amazingly good. All fresh ingredients, made in the traditional way, Thai food is ruined for me now.
Cooking Thai with Pai will be uploaded once we've had a chance to edit it together.
We sat in the sala and ate, saw the other few guests, made a connection with Pai over how loco one American/Australian solo tourista was, ate and ate and ate, and collapsed into our bed, the air conditioner humming, the fans blowing the cool air all over the room, and fell pretty much instantly asleep.
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