Thailand - Day 13 - Thursday

Today we said goodbye to our guide Waza and driver from REI.

We had a free day now in Chiang Mai - we opted to sleep in, lounge at the pool until late afternoon.

When we started to get hungry we walked to the various night markets. We couldn’t decide which place to eat at, and I was getting hangry, so we got some bacon on a stick from a food stall. Eventually we ended up at a local-ish restauant that had an English singing cover band playing. We all got some sort of noodles and chowed down.

After this we walked the several night markets several times looking for good souvenirs to bring home! We also had to buy another suit case to tote home the new things we had bought along the way during the trip. Chrissy found a neat elephant bag that she liked so we haggled with the vendor to a price we thought was OK. I wanted to just walk off but they were persistent on making a sale! Eventually she said to Chrissy, you have a cute boy there, so 400 Baht (down from like 600 sticker price). Later the same night in a different stall in a different market area we saw the same bag for sticker price of only 300 BHT, and damn, lesson learned… it was only a couple bucks difference.

We kept walking around for a while longer, found some ice cream and then declared we were too tired to walk back, so we hopped in a TukTuk after arriving on a price with the driver who spoke no English. I had to show him on Google Maps where we wanted to go, and I think I paid 200 BHT to have him drive us 1.5 miles, which most people would likely say we paid way too much as I’ve learned.

We went to sleep knowing we had to wake up very early to get to the airport. I had arranged a car to pick us up at 530am to take us on the 15 minute drive to the airport.