Today we have the last of our tours from Chiang Mai. After breakfast, we waited over an hour for our tour pick-up. The van arrived rather late around 0900 due to heavy rain, flooding, detours and traffic jam.
Some areas were still flooded as we headed out on our tour.
Some areas were still flooded as we headed out on our tour.
The tour for the day is called Elephants at Work. When we got to the site north of the city, we caught only ten minutes of the elephant show.
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- Elephants At Work show, in the rain.
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- Elephants At Work show, in the rain.
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- Elephants At Work show, in the rain.
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- Elephants At Work show, in the rain.
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- Elephants At Work show, in the rain.
Our next stop was the orchid and butterfly garden. The orchids were beautiful but I loved the cats, including Korat and Siamese. These cats are closer to the original varieties and hadn’t been bred to fit into the western pedigree characteristics which are often too skinny for my liking, in the case of the Siamese. We didn’t see any live butterflies here. There were some preserved specimens and a collage made from the wings of dead animals, which may not have been in the best taste.
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- Beautiful orchirds.
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- Cats huddling for warmth.
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- Cats huddling for warmth.
Kim was getting grumpy from getting wet from the horrible weather. The last stop on the tour was a snake farm and show. We had lost interest by then, partly due to the weather.
The driver discounted the tour by 25% (THB100) for the lateness which resulted in us missing part of the show. The day had been a wash-out, really.
We had a relaxing afternoon indoors sorting photos and then ventured out to have some of them printed. Having sometimes been disappointed by the quality of printed photos, we asked if they could adjust the colours manually for us, rather than just put the machine on auto mode. The request paid off.
I had a pre-dinner massage while Kim had a reflexology. I loved the full back-bend while Kim fell asleep during his treatment.
Our final meal in Thailand was a late dinner. I loved the Northern Pork Curry which had a taucheo (fermented soya bean similar to miso) flavour while being sweetish and hot. [Edit: looking up various recipes later, it doesn’t actually have taucheo.] We also had a green chicken curry. As usual, we shared our meals and it was a very pleasant way to end our adventure in Tibet, Yunnan and Northern Thailand.