The first leg of my #ThaiMeUp trip is in Chiang Mai! Chiang Mai is located in the north of Thailand, which is an hour plane ride away or about 12-14 hours by train.
I arrived in Bangkok at 8:30 in the morning in Suvarnabhumi airport. My flight is still at 4:00 in DMK so we decided to get some lunch first in MBK Center. We got to DMK by 2:30. It’s my first time there and I’m really pleased with how organized and clean the airport is! We booked our flights through Nok Air, a Thai low cost airline. I booked my flight back in December when they were having a promo. My roundtrip flight costs THB 2,300 (around PHP 2,500 at most) with free 15kg check-in luggage. Cheap!
It was a quick one hour flight. I don’t remember much of it because I was asleep. Chiang Mai is very pretty from above. Lots of greenery and it looked cold (although there was a bit of rain when we arrived).
It was close to dinner time when we landed so we ate in one of the restaurants in the airport. I got some Khao Soi, which is a specialty in Chiang Mai. It was really delicious but too spicy for me! It made my ears hurt and I had to eat so slowly. I would have finished my food if it wasn’t that spicy. I loved it though.
The Chiang Mai airport has taxi counters, which is how you can hail a ride out if you’re not familiar with the place. You tell the person where you’re going (best to give them the address of the place in Thai). They have a fixed price, hand you a piece of paper, and give it to the person outside. We paid THB 250 which I think is a fair price. Our place was near Chiang Mai University and was around 30-40 minutes away from the airport.
Chiang Mai is a province so the scenery is different from Bangkok. Small local stores after another, plenty of songthaews (their major form of transportation), and people just doing their day to day things. There’s no trains above you or buses. It feels very relaxed. I was looking out the window the whole time, fascinated with everything going around me.
We booked an AirBnB for our stay. Our place is outside of the city which was perfect to me because it gives me a better perspective on what living there is like on a day-to-day basis. The place we stayed at was D Condo Resort which was near Chiang Mai university. It seems to be a condo complex. I think most of the tenants are students. The condo seems to be popular as we never had trouble with ubers or taxis whenever we needed to go back home.
Here’s all we did in our three full days:
Hedda Damasco 