Thailand: Chiang Rai and Chiang Mai

After Pai we plan out our next destination: Chiang Rai, and after reading a few guides and blogs we feel prepared and decide to spend no more than 1 night in Chiang Rai, because lots of places state that there isn't that much to do besides the White temple and the black house.

But before heading to Chiang Rai we have a one night stop at Chiang Mai, otherwise we would arrive way to late in Chiang Rai to see anything. On top of that, it's Sunday! and in Chiang Mai there seems to be a very nice Sunday night market, so we plan towards that.

But just a few hours before reaching Chiang Mai it starts to rain slightly, we don't give it to much attention and check in in our hostel. We drop of the bags and want to head out to have a little drink but then we notice. The rain that we didn't pay attention to before had escalated into a greater storm and made it close to impossible to head out. To kill some time we decide to play a few games of pool and wait for the storm to blow over. Eventually the rain stops and we manage to catch a glimpse of the amazing Sunday night market.



The next morning catch the Green bus to Chiang Rai. It's cold so we are really dressed appropriately, I even had to get my wollen pull over. Once in Chiang Rai we check in in our hostels and don't really do to much more because of the bad weather. We end up hanging around a bit in my hostel meeting some more people and playing a bit of pool.
The sun sets and we head towards the Chiang Rai night market, a big disappointed if you compare it to the one on Sunday in Chiang Mai, but the cold might have added to this experience.

As soon as we woke up the next morning we had a look at the local transport to head to the White temple. The weather had become worse over the days and it was very, very cold today. With 2 pullovers we get on the bus and we still manage to feel cold. I have to say that the white temple is amazing though, and if the weather is nice it is probably something very impressive to see. But with the cold we didn't really appreciate to much of it, we rushed the visit a bit, and the main thing that we wanted to do: Entering the white temple, was something that we couldn't do, the inside of the temple was closed for an unknown reason. A big shame, because it seems that the inside of the temple is decorated with various western movie/comic characters.

The black house is something we ended up not visiting, because it was the other part of town, which ment more than an hour drive from where we were, and we really found it too cold. But it seems to be a museum of a local (rich) artist, that decided to expose his work in his own gallery due to the vandalisation of his pieces in public galleries. This is said to occur because of the style that the artist has, he seems to make art that is very death related, and it seems that the Buddhism community doesn't appreciate this to much.

On our way back to Chiang Mai we decided what our next destination would be: Ayutthaya.