The Lantern Festival Begins in Chiang Mai
By Lauren Gerzina & Justin Hayes
Fancy Coffee, Delicious Food, and Lanterns
Today, we learned that you should never book walking tours on the same day that you are transferring hotels within a city.
As mentioned in our previous post, even though Chiang Mai was one of the first things we booked in preparation for this trip, we ended up tacking on an extra day to the start of our visit, but a lot later. By the time we decided to add the extra day, our original Airbnb was booked up, so we found the POR Thapae Gate.
Our check out time at POR and check-in time at our Airbnb was noon. So, naively, we booked a free walking tour that started at 1pm, not thinking about the fact that we would need to eat lunch at some point before our tour.
More on this later . . .
We started the day with a free breakfast at our POR hotel. It was actually really good, much better than we expected. They also had some delicious coconut sticky rice desserts that Justin could eat. But we were still craving some coffee, so we found a highly-recommended coffee shop called Akha Ama that was a short-ish walk from our hotel.
Their coffee was incredible. Justin got a drink that had espresso with honey and an orange peel. It was prepared and served like a coffee cocktail, but without the alcohol. Lauren got a mocha that was also very chocolatey without being too sweet. We ended up staying there for a while. Justin uploaded some pictures to the blog while Lauren researched some spas that offered full-day experiences. We stayed so long that we both ordered another drink – Lauren got a latte and Justin got a hot coffee.
It was time to transfer hotels, so we headed back to POR, grabbed our stuff, checked out and headed to the Airbnb, which was an apartment at Twin Peaks Condominium outside of the old town/city gate area, closer to the Night Bazaar.
We had about 30 minutes to spare, so we figured we would have time to get back to Thapae Gate and eat before our tour started.
We were wrong.
We found a vegetarian Mediterranean place near the gate called Hummus Chiang Mai. The food there was incredible. Justin got a roasted eggplant dish, Lauren got a quinoa salad, and we split roasted Cauliflower that ended up being our favorite thing.
While we waited for our food, we messaged our guide and told him we were going to be late and that we would text him when we were done so we could meet them at the next stop. Well, we finished our meal, texted the guide through the Guru Walk app, and . . . crickets. We walked to the second stop on the tour, a local market, hoping to catch them there. We saw no one that looked like a tour group. Someone else messaged the group and said they were running late, but no response.
Our eventual guess was that everyone was late and/or cancelled so the guide just decided to go home. Or he just decided not to bother messaging the latecomers since this was a “free” tour (although technically you pay the guide at the end based on what you thought of the value of the tour). It was unfortunate that we never linked up with him, but what are you gonna do?
So we decided to just head back to our Airbnb and relax a bit/figure out some plans for the rest of our time in Chiang Mai. The Airbnb was so nice, especially compared to our small hotel room at POR. It was a one bedroom, one and a half bath apartment with a kitchen, washing machine, nice large shower, and a living room with a large couch/TV. It had a balcony overlooking the condo’s pool. It was also tucked away from a main road, so it was very quiet and peaceful (except when lantern festival festivities were in full swing).
After relaxing for a bit, Lauren decided to go get a manicure as she had recently broken a nail. She chose a place that was inside the city gate and had a very adorable Pomeranian dog. When she was done getting her nails done, she texted Justin and he called a Grab motorbike to take him into the city gate.
Once we met back up, we decided to check out the Sunday Market, a huge night market where they close down one of the main streets with hundreds of vendors selling everything from clothing to jewelry to souvenirs to food. A few of the temples had also converted into food markets. We ended up grabbing some Northern Thai sausage from one of the (very popular) stalls in the temple area, and they were amazing (and a little spicy).
We walked around the market for a bit longer, which was getting extremely crowded, and we were both still pretty hungry, so we decided to stop at a restaurant Justin found that was gluten-free-friendly called Its Good Kitchen. There was a bit of a wait, of course, as the restaurant was right on the main drag of the night market, but it was definitely worth it. Lauren got the traditional Chiang Mai/Northern Thailand dish Khao Soi and Justin got GF Pad See Ew, one of his favorite Thai noodle dishes to get at home. Both were quite good. We also got some mango sticky rice, because of course we did.
Now with some food in our bellies, we wanted to check out some of the festivities for the start of the Yi Peng and Loy Krathong Festivals, which we heard were happening near the Three Kings Monument.
We came across a temple where people were putting the Loy Krathong floating lanterns in a small pool that had a beautiful tunnel of colorful lanterns where people were taking pictures. Closer to the Three Kings Monument, there were several large lantern displays as well as some poles with animals on top representing all of the years from the Thai lunar calendar. We got pictures in front of the snake (Justin) and goat (Lauren) for our birth years. We also took some photos in front of the other lantern displays as you can see in the gallery below.
We were both ready to go back to the Airbnb, so we called a Grab to head home. We also wanted to get to sleep relatively early as we had a fun morning ahead of us.
