Honestly I had no expectations when arriving in Chaing Rai. I don’t know why but I assumed Chaing Mai was the star of the north of Thailand. Maybe having zero expectations yields the best results because I was in for a real treat! Once I arrived I went looking for a cafe to hijack some wifi. I asked the typical backpacker looking girl with the baggy elephant pants and the meesed up hair tied in a high bun if she know a place close to the bus stop where we were. She got all excited and told me that further up the main street was a cat cafe.  Sounded cute so I went over there. Indeed it was a cafe filled with overweight super cute cats. They’d all keep their distance until my order of apple crumble pie was served then all of a sudden they wanted to be closer to me. And I accepted, you want pie you better let me pet you!

After meeting with the cats I went over to the best hostel so far! mercy hostel. In the city centre but yet very quite. It’s clean and you get a huuuge bed with curtains perfect if you want some alone time on budget! So what is there to do in Chaing Rai? Plenty! You got the beautiful temples in town but the real magical ones are about an hour outside the city. There we have the majestic white, gold and blue temple.

Further more north I went to the view point where you can see the golden triangle. The golden traingle consists of Thailand, Burma and Lao. From where I was standing (Thailand) you can see Burma on your left and Lao to your right, how beautiful is that! This happens to be where the main international opiom trade took place.

Speaking of opiom. I got hints when i was in Chaing Mai about the opiom trade that was a popular market about 100 years ago. In Chaing Rai it was the same. So much they dedicated a musem only to opiom. So i headed over to the opiom musem to learn more about this facinating history (which it really is!). Here I got  to learn all about different pipes, best position to smoke opiom (lying down on your side wiith your feet close to your butt), myths about opiom like this one:

Alrightty this was my last stop in Thailand before heading home from Bangkok. Thailand definatly lived up to it’s reputation, touristy, beautiful and spiritual 🙂