We only spent one night in Mae Sot before continuing onward. The next morning, after a nerve wracking wait for our taxi that showed up late, we made it to the bus stop in time for our ride to Chiang Mai. It was over 7 hours long, and along winding mountain roads that were quite nauseating, but we eventually made it to Chiang Mai and were really able to start relaxing after our time in Myanmar. 

Relaxing and figuring out our plans ended up being our main goals in Chiang Mai. We stayed for 5 nights, and rarely got bored even though it feels like we didn’t do a whole lot. We went to the night market one night and ate some “street food” in a hip little market, where we got to try the khao soi, a northern Thai noodle dish in a curry sauce/soup, before looking at the souvenir stalls. 

We actually ate a lot of good food as there are a number of great restaurants in Chiang Mai.    Our first night we got our western food fix at an American restaurant right across the street from our hotel, the Corner Bistro, where Thom had a burger and I got a BLT with amazing fries. We also had Mexican food, something we sorely miss from home, at the Salsa Kitchen; we got nachos and delicious soft tacos, both with cheese and sour cream! Gosh I miss dairy products haha. 

We did also eat Thai food in Chiang Mai, and hit up a restaurant near our hotel with a name only in Thai for more khao soi and an eggplant dish from their “mix and pound” menu that reminded us of Burmese food, shown in the picture below. The Imm Aim vegetarian cafe was another great choice, where we had a great grilled veggie sandwich and pad Thai.

One evening we took a long walk (probably 15km total) to the train station to buy our tickets for the overnight train back to Bangkok, and we passed by this nice wooden temple with cool reptile sculptures:

We also had a spa day in Chiang Mai! This was the first time either one of us has ever gone to the spa, or had a professional massage, or anything of the sort really, so it was definitely a treat! We had a foot treatment and massage, a Thai yoga massage, and an oil massage. Our ladies were amazing, though we have nothing to compare it to so I think any massage probably would have been amazing to us 🙂 The Thai yoga massage involved a lot of stretching and pressure point work, and my lady was very strong, it was great! We were there for 3 hours and paid like $64 for the whole thing for both of us, a price that would be absolutely unheard of at home; we were glad to have experienced it and had a relaxing day, and left with our bodies feeling like wet noodles.


Thom also finally got a haircut in Chiang Mai, at a hipster barber shop that fixed up his beard too and did a straight razor shave on his neck and the edges of his haircut! While I was waiting for his 2 hour haircut to be over, I hung out at a great coffee shop that was playing one of my favorite internet radio stations, soma.fm, on the Indie Pop Rocks station. I was feeling a little homesick in that moment because I would always listen to either that station or KEXP on my days off while cooking, making pottery, or doing my random diy projects around the apartment back in Seattle. So I started casually looking at jobs for when we get back to the west coast and settle in Portland this summer, and I found a great opportunity that I couldn’t resist applying for, even though we won’t be in Portland until the very end of June. I spent some time in Chiang Mai fixing up my resume and writing a cover letter, and thinking about getting back into the mindset that we will at some point have to be adults again and get back to work. Surprisingly, I heard back from the pharmacy relatively quickly, and set up a phone interview for a few days ahead of time while we would be in Bangkok. 

We also did a ton of trip planning in Chiang Mai. We found an Airbnb for our 5 days in Bangkok, booked a plane ticket from Bangkok to Kunming, China, and started thinking about what sort of route we would take to India in order to make it to our flight back home out of Delhi on June 20.

Before long, our time in Chiang Mai was up so we got on the overnight train to Bangkok and headed off. The day before we left, our Airbnb host in Bangkok told us that she could not honor our reservation as someone else was staying in the apartment, but that she would find somewhere comparable for us to stay. We have seen a number of reviews on Airbnb of hosts that have done this for people in Asia, so we didn’t think too much of it. 

Luckily, I had bought a SIM card for the phone interview I was planning to do in a few days, but unluckily, I got a message from her while we were on the overnight train that she called Airbnb and was unable to find a comparable room and would have to cancel our reservation. I sternly scolded her for stringing us along for several days when we could have been researching another place to stay (which we now couldn’t do with spotty cell service on the train), and a few hours later she wrote back that she now could find us a place to stay and to meet her in the morning. She also had not cancelled our original reservation on Airbnb. I was so confused by the end of the messaging with her that I didn’t know what to do, whether we would have a place to go towards once we got off the train, or how much we should actually trust her. 

So once we got off the overnight train, I called Airbnb myself from the train station to find out where we stood, on a number that I thought was toll free. I got a really helpful guy who read through the messages and agreed that we should probably not continue on with this flaky host, but as soon as we got to the point of figuring out what to do next, the call dropped. I had used up all of my minutes on this call! I was so upset at this point, we were tired from barely sleeping on the train, we had nowhere to go, I needed those minutes for my phone interview and I was already stressed enough about preparing for an interview when I haven’t done one in like 7 years, that I just couldn’t prevent the tears from flowing. In the middle of the busy train station. 

Since I had no more minutes, I collected myself and we went to a breakfast spot near the train station with wifi. The helpful Airbnb guy had emailed me to keep the contact going, and he felt so bad for how poorly this whole experience was going with the host and using up my minutes on the toll free call that he refunded the entire cost of the reservation (like $100) and gave us a $150 coupon code to book another, slightly nicer place. I was so grateful, finally, a bright spot in the day! 

We then spent forever trying to book an Airbnb for that same day, but for those of you that haven’t used Airbnb, it is not really a great venue for same day bookings as many hosts need to approve the booking before it is finalized. The ones we found that can be booked instantly in Bangkok were for hotels using Airbnb as an advertising spot for their rooms, or really tiny studio condos with a microwave, not apartments with kitchens like we originally wanted. We spent several frustrating hours searching for a place and getting denied 3 times by hosts that hadn’t updated their calendars, and we finally found one that we could book for the next day and just decided to stay at a hotel that night. 

Now that the dramatic fiasco was over, we headed to the hotel, napped, ate a delicious sushi dinner, and spent several hours at the bar that night to wash away our worries.

The next day we went to the Airbnb, got some groceries, and I went back to the task of preparing for the phone interview and researching our trip plan. It turned out the interviewer was willing to use Skype because the long distance call would be quite expensive for him, which was great because then I didn’t have to figure out how many more minutes to add to my card or how many minutes I would need to receive a call from the US in Thailand, something that proved impossible to find the answer to online. The interview seemed to go fine, although I was definitely nervous and couldn’t seem to think of much to say about our trip – how could I not think of anything to say about our trip?! I have been living it and writing about it for months!! Silly nerves. They also asked a ton of clinical questions, which surprised me as I wasn’t expecting that until a second interview, but luckily it was a lot of stuff that I was regularly asked at my last job so I think I did ok. Overall, I think it went fairly well, I just have to wait and see; since I won’t be in Portland for awhile they may need to hire someone sooner, but at least it got me back in the practice of interviewing and searching for jobs.

Since this is now our third time in Bangkok, we spent the rest of our days here doing trip research. We finalized some details about how we will go to India – we are going to travel around China until May 30, when we will fly from Chengdu, China to Kolkata, India, and mosey our way towards Delhi for our flight home. We also started getting ourselves really excited for China – we are thinking of going to Dali, Lijiang, and Shangri-la, all pretty towns near the mountains in the Yunnan province, hopefully doing a bit of hiking, then heading to the Sichuan province for some mouth-burning spicy Chinese food 🙂

I kind of doubt that WordPress will work in China, but I will keep writing posts and get them online when I can!