Hello from Chiang Mai, Thailand
Saturday Evening – July 15, 2017 (Sixth post of this travelogue)
Today was our travel day from Phuket to Chiang Mai. Our flight was a bit less than 2 hours. It is amazing how the airlines over here treat you like humans. They even feed you on the plane!
We are staying at the DusitD2 Hotel (link to Google Map hotel location)
{google_map}18.786334 98.999823{/google_map}
This is a very nice hotel, but not quite the same level as our last two. I have included some pictures of our room.
In the last post, I forgot to include a picture of our Thai Cooking Class instructor with her star students {grin}.
Our Thursday excursion was a lot of fun. Our first stop was a cashew processing plant. We really did not get to see all that much, but we did see two workers hand shelling the nuts.
Next we stopped at a very large Buddhist compound that had several magnificent temples
Our guide at the Buddhist compound
Our next stop was an elephant reserve where we got to ride the elephants. We are glad that we had the experience, but the gait of the elephant is such that the ride was quite rough. The trek was perhaps a half mile through some neat scenery. However, at the end of the ride we were ready to get back on the ground.
Selfie on an elephant
Our last stop was a farm. All of the exhibitions were examples of how farming was done many years ago. We got to see them grind and sort rice, observe a rice paddy watch them process latex rubber from the trees and ride in an water buffalo cart.
Monsoon rain
Rice paddy
Having spent most of my life in the rubber industry made latex exhibition part of the tour even more interesting. Latex or “natural” rubber derived from trees has some great properties. However, it does not have good mechanical properties that would make it useful for belts and hoses, so I got to learn quite a bit between the demonstration and my research (link to information).
Collecting the latex rubber
Processing the latex rubber
As soon as we arrived at the farm we experience a monsoon rain as you saw in the previous photos.
Yesterday we were scheduled to take a heritage trip and do some shopping. Part of the trip was a duplicate of Thursday’s trip so we decided to chill out at the resort.
And now for our discussion of the weather here:
Actually up until the last few days the weather has not been all that bad. Yes it is hot and humid, but the grandeur of the trip makes that bearable. Many days had light rain but it stopped fairly quickly. Not the case with the monsoon rains the last few days.
That is all for this trip.