Today we left the temples of Chiang Mai heading to Pai. Our hotel helped arranged a Songthaew pickup to Chiang Mai bus station. It seemed that local Songthaew is a FIFO queue with capacity of 8 people, when someone arrived at his destination, the driver headed out for the destination of the next person. Without complicated algorithms like Uber, but it worked still fine.
Songthaew ride in outer Chiang MaiToday it’s mainly the various temples in downtown Chiang Mai. So after breakfast we rented two bicycles and cycled randomly in town. In fact, given the density of temples in Chiang Mai, it’s totally fine to walk.
Also in fact, the temples in Chiang Mai followed the same construction pattern.
Dawn, Chiang Mai streetsMaybe because there’s too many temples in Chiang Mai, with fierce competition for tourists, so none of them charged any admission fee. More than that, it felt like they truly welcome people in, to spread their faith to the devoted and their culture to the alien, while I have experienced so many temples in China that preyed on the admission fees with little to offer.
I woke up to a quite pleasant morning that’s unique to little towns like Chiang Mai, which the occasional horns of motorbikes and constant peddling of vendors striking a delicate balance between scary silence and annoying noise. It’s like, the whole town has been born again.
Morning, outside hotel