Day 127 – Chiang Rai Scooter!

Another hostel, another free breakfast. This one comes with tea, toast, cereal and bananas. When I googled somewhere to stay the other day I discovered there had been an earthquake in the Chiang Rai province of 6.3 magnitude only on Tuesday, so 4 days ago! Crazy to think we could have been here when it happened. The main reason for coming here was to see the white temple and I read in an article that had been partly damaged and was closed, so I was very happy to find out it had only closed for the day and was reopen for us!

We debated about hiring bikes to ride around the town but decided to go all out and hire a scooter for the day and ride to the temple ourselves. It only cost 250B, which is about £5 for 24 hours! Absolute bargain! The temple was about 12km from the hostel and it was one straight road to get there, so we couldn’t really get lost. I have driven a scooter once before in Malaysia and got used to this one really quickly and loved every minute.

The white temples official name is Wat Rong Khun. This contemporary temple began being built in 1997 and apparently wont be finished until 2070! He has since added it will take 2 years to fix the damage the earthquake has caused. This is the most impressive temple I have ever seen. I think because it’s not traditional and has been created by an artist you can really see the story behind it. He’s a crazy man but still, it was amazing to look at. I think you might have been able to walk through the temple and get closer than what we got but just seeing it was better than not seeing it at all.

We left the temple grounds and made our way about 17km down the road to see the Khun Korn waterfall. We went down some crazy potholed roads and I managed to miss a lot of them! We then had to go on a 1600metre trek through the forest to find the fall. It was totally worth it, out of all the waterfalls I’ve seen on this trip this could potentially be top spot, you could feel the force from the fall as soon as you got to the top of the trail.

When we left the waterfall we took the same journey back to the temple and onto the highway to take us back to our hostel. On the way back we stopped in the Central Plaza shopping centre to take a look around. We bought a few goodies, grabbed some lunch at 5pm as we hadn’t eaten since breakfast and then went back to the hostel.

Seeing as we had the bike we decided to take it out for a spin in the evening and find the Sunday market, which was slightly too far to walk too and good job we did! Within about 5 minutes of arriving at the market a storm appeared and did the rain come down! We took shelter in a pub for about 40minutes waiting for it to stop and when it did… well, we went outside to walk back to the bike to get back before it started to rain again and the road was completely flooded. It was about 3inches deep so we waded through it and somehow the road from where we parked the whole way back was fine. We were gutted as we really wanted a bit of street food and the market looked really good before everyone grabbed it all and legged it under cover!

Day 90 – Hired scooters and explored Langkawi.

We got up about 9am and went for breakfast at ‘The English Tea Rooms’ we should have known it was going to be terrible when Steph asked if they had marmite and he said no but they had marmalade… as if that’s the same thing! Anyway, I went for beans on toast and it was pretty good but our food didn’t come out at the same time so they had all finished when I started mine and it was just a bit overpriced for the quality and service.

We decided to hire 2 scooters for the day so we could really explore the island. I was on the back of Steph’s and Lucy was on the back of Tim’s. We made our way up past the airport to the Crocodile farm. For an Australian, Tim was just a bit too excited to see them. They were playing various Aqua songs but with more of a techno beat as background music, which was quite weird. It started to rain as we arrived and were given umbrellas to walk around with, we saw some being fed and in this one pond there were probably a good 50 crocs!

When we left here the rain had mostly stopped and so we hopped back on the bikes and started to head for the black sand beach. We got a few minutes down the road before it started to rain again and as soon as we found somewhere to pull in we did. We were stranded here for about 15minutes along with other tourists who were doing the same thing. Eventually we got back on the road and couldn’t find the black sand beach, we either never made it or it wasn’t very black. We got right up to the north east of the island and had lunch at Tanjung Rhu Beach. Once again it was so cheap and so good. We then chilled out on the beach up there for the rest of the afternoon and around 6pm made our way back to our apartment. 

On the way back I drove the scooter instead of Steph and I actually did alright! I still prefer driving a car though. We showered, changed and went out for dinner and then to a beach bar after. It started to rain (again) so we didn’t stay out that for that long.