We normally spend Christmas with family, either in Australia or the US. That wasn’t going to work for us this year, but we knew that as long as we could enjoy a good christmas meal and have good enough internet to call home we’d still have a good day. When it became apparent that it’d be impossible to find either of these anywhere in Myanmar, we decided to flee to Chiang Mai (Thailand) on Christmas eve, where luckily we were able to find both (particularly excellent food).
For our Christmas lunch, we booked a beautiful riverside French restaurant, indulging on some of our French favorites, including a duck salad, steak frites, beef bourguignon and a chocolate fondant. We spent the rest of the afternoon and evening wandering around street markets. This routine of overindulging on delicious, mostly Thai, food and walking it off (by visiting many markets and temples), was the norm for us for most of our time in Chiang Mai.
On our last full day in Thailand’s food capital, we attended an excellent cooking class, which included a market visit to buy supplies, really helpful demonstrations, and 4 courses of surprisingly delicious Thai food chosen and cooked by us. At the end of the day we left with recipes for everything we cooked, so hopefully we are able to recreate them back home.
From Chiang Mai we took a mini bus to the nearby town of Pai. The small laid back town and its surrounding hills are attracting more and more tourists (particularly backpackers), many of whom stay for up to a week. With not much to do there other than ride bikes around town and unwind we, having well and truly unwound over the course of the preceding 9 months, just stayed for two days. This was plenty of time for us to enjoy some of the sights around town (highlights being a small Chinese village and tranquil hill-top waterfall) and to understand Pai’s increasing popularity.
Our next stop, Bangkok, promised a dramatic change of pace. Arriving at our hotel we met Napo, Cindy’s brother, who had flown in to join us for just under three weeks in Thailand and Malaysia. To mark the reunion we planned a big night touring Bangkok’s famous night spots, starting at the Lebua sky bar (of Hangover 2 fame), have plenty of much more affordable drinks at the backpacker hub Khao San Road and finishing at Soi Cowboy (the red light district, which hosted one of the more cringeworthy scenes of Hangover 2).
We woke up the next morning, New Years Eve, knowing that we’d need to back up again for another big night’s drinking (which was never a problem when we were in our early 20s but all three of us have now passed 30). Thankfully, after watching a movie in our dark hotel room and having a couple of cheap Red Bulls (the original, non-carbonated, Thai stuff, not the more famous and much more expensive Austrian copy), we bounced back reasonably quickly.
We’d done plenty of research on the best places to spend NYE in Bangkok. It seemed that foreigners with plenty of cash mostly spend big on glamorous rooftop bars (Lebua, where we’d been a night earlier, was charging $300 to get in and $13 a beer) or get on a stuffy river cruise. All the locals we spoke to said they were going to Central World, the Thai equivalent of New York’s Times Square, for the countdown, so we decided to do the same. Arriving just before 10pm we spotted a massive Heineken oasis in the middle of a crowded alcohol (and, it seemed, bathroom) free zone. After spending our 10 minutes queuing time debating how much we were prepared to pay to get in, we were relieved to hear the admission price was just to buy a $3 beer (much cheaper than we expected and it saved us one of many trips to the bar).
We’d done plenty of research on the best places to spend NYE in Bangkok. It seemed that foreigners with plenty of cash mostly spend big on glamorous rooftop bars (Lebua, where we’d been a night earlier, was charging $300 to get in and $13 a beer) or get on a stuffy river cruise. All the locals we spoke to said they were going to Central World, the Thai equivalent of New York’s Times Square, for the countdown, so we decided to do the same. Arriving just before 10pm we spotted a massive Heineken oasis in the middle of a crowded alcohol (and, it seemed, bathroom) free zone. After spending our 10 minutes queuing time debating how much we were prepared to pay to get in, we were relieved to hear the admission price was just to buy a $3 beer (much cheaper than we expected and it saved us one of many trips to the bar).
The atmosphere in the Heineken bar was fantastic with a really good DJ playing up to the fireworks and more than an hour into the new year. The fireworks themselves were spectacular, making for a really memorable NYE. When the bar closed at around 1:30am we decided we’d had well and truly enough to drink, so after a quick McDonald's stop (not proud of that) we successfully (albeit slowly) managed to navigate our way back to our hotel using Bangkok’s impressive metro system.
After a much needed sleep in, we spent our first day of 2015 touring through the Bangkok Royal Palace and surrounding temples, followed by a busy ferry ride down the river. We went to bed much earlier that night, knowing we had an early flight to catch the following day to Phuket. More on that, and a dozen (give or take) southern Thai beach destinations, in our next post.
After a much needed sleep in, we spent our first day of 2015 touring through the Bangkok Royal Palace and surrounding temples, followed by a busy ferry ride down the river. We went to bed much earlier that night, knowing we had an early flight to catch the following day to Phuket. More on that, and a dozen (give or take) southern Thai beach destinations, in our next post.