A composite of several encounters in our first 6 months of this yearlong adventure.
I had bought a birthday card for him that I actually knew where it was and had it for the trip, but it was about camping and it was supposed to be when were in New Zealand or Australia. I bought it a good year before the trip. At least I had a card for him.
Today we are taking a Thai cooking class at a farm where they grow some of the produce. We are going to a market before to learn what the local products are. Don loves taking pictures at markets so this will be a good start to his day.
After our now standard noodle breakfast, we engaged a local taxi driver to take us outside the ancient city walls with their protective moat to both Wat Umong, the Tunnel Temple, and Wat Sri Suphan, the Silver Temple. After breakfast there were two other Wats I wanted to see. One was the silver wat and the other was outside the old city in caves on the outskirts of Chiang Mai. We got a cab to take us to the cave one and had him wait so he could take us to the one in town.
We cleaned up after playing with the elephants in the river and went to check out several local Buddhist Temples of interest.
On the way back to the hotel yesterday, July 20th, we had discovered Wat Inthakhin Sadue Muang almost in the middle of the street, but Don had been too tired to appreciate it and he did not take any pictures, then.
I had been looking forward to this day for at least a year, when we started looking at experiences along our chosen route! We had an early morning pick-up for the tuk-tuk trip to the elephant sanctuary. We seemed to be the only guests for this morning visit since no others were picked up from nearby hotels. An hour and a half drive into the jungle-covered mountains and through hamlets of a few huts brought us to the sanctuary camp. We crossed the small stream on a rickety bamboo and cable footbridge, took a right turn at a small, local wat, and walked about a half a kilometer to the small discovery and rehabilitation center. We were given tunics to wear over our clothes, as protection for both us and the elephants, before we met our first pachyderm BFF’s (Best Friends Forever.)
