Activity level: 🌶️🌶️🌶️
Modes of transportation: 👟🚐🚡
Eric woke up early to a lack of visa, and got on the phone to rebook the flight (the official government eVisa site was down for maintenance for a week…….). We ended up cancelling and just planning on booking when we’d gotten the visa. All in all, kind of a disaster. Sarah meanwhile, was suffering after not having a real meal for 24 hours (she mostly couldn’t touch the soup from the elephant day unfortunately).
For breakfast, we went to this awesome cafe next door to our hotel where the food was incredible. Sarah got French toast since she figured it would be simple and easy, but she still couldn’t quite finish it and Eric had to eat extra.
We decided not to waste another day trying to figure out if we were going to stay in Thailand, so Eric booked a zipline excursion that people from the cooking class had recommended. We also planned to expedite a visa on arrival to be ready that night. So apparently, there is very mixed information online about visas on arrival. They’re only available through private companies, but those companies usually offer rush services. So we planned to use one and just get to Vietnam.
The zip line tour picked us up from our hotel (but first, a random tiger tour guy tried to get us to go on his tour). The ride ended up being through fairly thick jungle, northeast to the mountains.
Our driver sped up the mountain, honking at every blind turn to alert any on comers of our presence.
As soon as we got to the tour, it started raining, so we bought some rain ponchos and got ready for our excursion. They gave us a harness and a stick they called a “monkey stick,” so we assumed it was to fend ourselves from monkeys (it turned out to be a brake for the zip line). We could have definitely fought some monkeys with them though.
We assumed it would be a single big zip line since they advertise the longest and highest zipline in Thailand. It turned out to be a lot more: 29 zip lines, many rope bridges, a “roller coaster,” and even a rappelling section.
It was sublime seeing the views of the jungle through the fog. There was no way to control where we pointed since they didn’t want us to hold the line, but every direction had a beautiful view (except down).
Some of the platforms were more than a hundred feet above the jungle floor, and we had to navigate up steep stairs and across wobbly bridges. The guides were hilarious and handled all of the attaching and disattaching our harnesses, so it felt fairly safe (though the trees swayed a little much for our liking).
The roller coaster was the highlight of the course. Some points felt wayyy too fast, and on some turns, our legs went almost above the line as we whipped around. Sarah kept screaming and making all the guides and our tour mates laugh, but she enjoyed it thoroughly.
Despite Eric’s fear of heights, they made it through the course in one piece (though we would have liked to have a heart rate monitor graph to see how we really fared).
The rest of the tour was a piece of cake after the coaster, or so we thought until the last platform. It was there that Eric asked Sarah to find the last zip line. To Sarah’s horror, she realized there were no more zip lines, only a rope 130 feet above the ground.
After the tour, our guides brought us down the street for food. It seemed like it had been sitting out for a while, so we didn’t eat much. Our tour mates were extremely interesting. One of them was a younger guy from San Francisco who just up and moved to Bangkok to pursue fighting. He seemed extremely sweet, but we worried a little for him since he told us he did a lot of hard sparring to train (“they don’t believe in brain damage here” he told us). At least he switched to MMA, so hopefully he’ll keep his brain intact a little more in the future.
From there, they drove us back and dropped us off at our hotel. Sarah was craving pizza, so we went to this restaurant called “Pizza My Heart”. It turned out pretty decent, but Eric needed to get a second dinner. So we went for some sushi, which was excellent.
We realized we never enjoyed our hotel’s roof top bar (which everyone recommended), so we went up to the roof for some after dinner drinks. Sarah got a mojito, and Eric asked them to put butterfly pea juice into it to turn it blue. They had no idea what he was asking, but eventually we got the message across.
We checked our email, and the visa on arrival pre-approval had come through! We booked a flight for the next day around noon and sat back to enjoy our drinks.
The rooftop was serene, and it was a great way to end our time in Chiang Mai.
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