Chiang Mai to Fang: mostly a travel day

(Another draft post) We had a van and driver scheduled to pick us up at 10:00 so I was free to sleep in. The only trouble was that I woke up around 4:00 and never went back to sleep. I even took a melatonin and could feel it start to make me sleepy, but I never actually fell asleep. I finally decided to just get up and walk up to the old city and revisit the market. I am glad I did. I took a different way to the market and stumbled onto another temple. It was so peaceful, cool and with soft light in the morning. From the temple I made my way to the South-east gate of the old city and explored more of the market. I found sections selling produce as well as the section selling various meats.

It was then back to the hotel for breakfast, followed by a 3 hour drive up to Fang.

The road was pretty curvy and a bit chaotic with slower scooters and trucks resulting in lots of passing and hard acceleration and braking. The scenery got progressively better as we slowly left the sprawl of Chaing Mai behind and made our way to the heavily agricultural Fang district. We passed bananas and papayas growing on the side of the road, which reminded me of both Hawaii and Costa Rica. We also passed by orchards of what looked like mango trees and another fruit tree that wasn’t immediately recognizable to me. There were also some smaller fields of vegetables as well as rice. Some rice was fields were just being plants, while other fields had tall brownish rice that looked ready for harvest.

We made it to our hotel and then had to go get lunch and kill some time because they wouldn’t let us check in until 2:00 pm. After lunch we drove up to Tha ton to do some reconnaissance on the availability of boats to hire for our trip to Chiang Rai. We then returned to Fang and walked through Fang’s Sunday market on our way to and from dinner.