Scooting Around Chiang Rai

Chiang Rai is the most Northern Province in Thailand and has easy access to the border town of Chiang Khong to take a river boat into Laos. Our plan was to stay four nights, but we fell in love with the small, safe, laidback city and stayed for an extra night making this the longest stint in a single hotel in our trip so far! Being in Chiang Rai over the weekend, we were able to visit the Saturday and Sunday street evening markets that were full of entertainment, food, and stalls selling local crafts. We scouted out the most powerful manual scooter we could find and headed into the country roads along the river, stopped at a few rice fields and then headed up a Buddhist temple lookout for the sunset.

We heard people talking about how an independent artist built a white Buddhist temple called Wat Rong Khun with ‘crazy murals’ and ‘totally different than any other temple you’ll see’. Well that sounds like our kinda temple! So the next morning we scooted off to see what all the fuss was about.

The temple was more than peculiar and unconventional; it was big, bad and furious. The pathway takes you through sculls and arms reaching out at you from hell, and inside the temple there is a mural that incorporates modern movie heroes and 9/11… it’s a story about how all these heroes and role models are created, but how they have been unable to save us from ourselves. It was definitely well done and worth the visit. One our way home we stopped for a 5k hike to the Khunkorn waterfall where it was just us and another couple before the tour bus showed up.

We didn’t carry our whole family, or any huge bales of hay with live chickens piled on top of our scooter, but we did order a coffee (with straw!) to go in a small plastic bag to dangle off the handle bars :-)