Exploring Paradise: Chiang Dao

A picture from our daily commute.

Sometimes when you live in a place, and the daily grind keeps you busy day in and day out, waking up early, getting the kids off to school, commuting to and from work, grocery shopping, meetings, and more, it is easy to forget you live in paradise. Sometimes, in fact, paradise can seem dirty and hot and crowded and hectic.  That's when it's time for an adventure--it just takes a day of exploring outside of the city for all of the dust and monotony to fall away.

Driving to Chiang Dao, I had to keep interrupting my read-aloud of Harry Potter, book 7 (much to our kids' dismay--I always seemed to manage to get distracted at crucial points) to gawk and exclaim about the incredible jungle or rice fields or mountains or temples or water buffalo or bird-sized butterfly flitting past the window.

The hillside in northern Thailand is just so beautiful these days, freshly out of the rainy season as we are.

When we arrived to our first destination, the Chiang Dao caves, My Man and the kids were convinced we'd somehow ended up at one of our earlier destinations--it looked so much like the strange temple we visited in the country near Chiang Rai earlier this year. But it was not.

There was a beautiful spring-fed koi pond with gigantic fish and crystal clear water.

There were women weaving grass baskets. There were dogs, including a rowdy group of new puppies (oh so tempting . . . ). 

There was a beautiful old stupa, where we were amazed to see a sign claiming an origin of 191AD (turns out it was a mistranslation, My Man, our resident Thai-reading expert, found out it was actually build in 1910--still old, but much more believable!).

Finally we made our way to the cave where we paid a small admission fee to go in. We opted for the lit path way (once inside the cave you can pay for a guide with a lantern to take you deeper into the cave. We have heard it takes 1-2 hours for that trip and gets dirty with some crawling and tight spaces).

The cave was wonderful and cool, though it is not as well preserved as we'd have liked, there were still some active stalactite formations.

After the cave, we went on a jungle hike. It was awesome until we started being attacked mercilessly by giant mosquitoes. Somehow I'd forgot our repellent in the car, so we hurried back, slapping ourselves silly along the way.

The temple structures were also interesting. We especially liked the three-headed snake.

Finally, hot and dusty, we returned to the sanctuary of our car and cool, sweet air conditioning. We snacked on cucumbers and granola bars as we wound our way further up the mountain and through the national forest. It was beautiful and as we climbed the views just got more and more breath taking.  The best part about trips like this though?  Check out My Man and Young Man in the pics below (I can't even remember the joke, but this is what it is all about, making memories and laughing together):

We didn't have a specific destination in mind--we were just driving and drinking it all in (and reading whenever I could tear my eyes from the verdant vistas and wasn't too carsick from all the switchbacks). 

After a few hours of driving, we consulted our dear friend Google to see if we could loop our way home or would have to turn around. It looked iffy, but we decided to go for it. Unfortunately, our one-way trail eventually dead-ended in a construction site and we had to turn around. It had started to rain so there were some interesting sections of mud and creeks running over the "road" that we had to ford. We definitely put the 4-wheel drive to the test and got out of there covered in glorious war paint mud splatters, proof of our incredible adventure outside the city.

To top it all off, as we headed home, starving after that adrenaline-filled episode, we spied a roadside vendor grilling what looked like ribs. I hopped out and bought a couple for our meat-loving boys. Turns out they weren't ribs. Or rather they were, but not beef or pork. Each skewer comprised three or four sets of little ribs. We decided they must be some version of rodent, squirrel maybe? Or ROUS (rodents of unusual size)?  Either way, the boys all agreed, they were delicious. Turns out they were field rats. Yum. 

Young Man wouldn't let us eat this little guy though.

And that, my friends, is what a northern Thai adventure looks like, local-style.