While in Thailand, I read a short story collection called Sightseeing by Rattawut Lapcharoensap. My favorite quotation from the book came in the first story: “Americans are the fattest, the stingiest of the bunch. They may pretend to like pad Thai or grilled prawns or the occasional curry, but twice a week they need their culinary comforts, their hamburgers and their pizzas.”
Not exactly complimentary, but there’s some truth in there. When I go on vacation for a couple weeks, I always eat the local cuisine, but traveling as I am for months on end, I do need my “culinary comforts.”
The Chiang Mai food scene is the best of all possible worlds, offering both delicious (and deliciously inexpensive) Thai food and, given the large expat population, all the Western comfort food you could want, from Tex Mex to fancy brunch. Before this month, I’d been eating one meal a day at home and one out. In Chiang Mai, I ate out morning, noon, and night; it was just too good.
Even so, I didn’t come close to trying all the fantastic food the city has to offer—I think I could be in Chiang Mai for months before doing so. Of the restaurants I did manage to visit, here are a few favorites:
One of the group favorites and the site of my joint birthday dinner, Tong Tem Toh is best at night, when they have the grill going on the side of the street. It caters to carnivores—the Northern style sausage was the best I had, and the grilled pork shoulder was equally delicious. There’s a wait every night, but take a number and grab a beer from 7-11; it’s worth it.
On the other end of the food spectrum is Anchan, a vegetarian restaurant. The sign outside proclaims you “won’t miss the meat,” and while we were skeptical, they’re absolutely right. They change a few items on the menu weekly, but one constant is their blue pad Thai, colored with the butterfly pea flower, their namesake. Everything I ate there (and I went more than once) was amazing: pumpkin curry, banana fritters, papaya lime smoothie—you can’t go wrong.
For a more upscale experience (the site of another birthday dinner [I had three in total; don’t judge me]), Ginger and Kafe has an adorable atmosphere, with a perfectly decorated patio, as well as delectable food. We all stuck to their Thai specialties—pork belly curry and garlic fried rice for me, yum—they also have a large Western menu. And they have excellent cocktails, which is a rarity; beer is the best option most of the time.
Rustic and Blue is maybe the most expensive restaurant in Chiang Mai (almost certainly the priciest casual spot), but they can take all my money. They have healthy smoothie bowls and sinful almond croissants as big as your head, all-day breakfast with amazing French toast and duck confit, and pages and pages of lunch and dinner options as well. They cater to the expat and digital nomad crowd, and they do it well.
The name says it all; build your own salad or choose from their extensive menu. I can personally vouch for the chicken Caesar wrap and Thai mint dressing on anything. But what really had me coming back was the smoothie menu. I’m addicted to their mango-passion fruit smoothie, and I’m not sure what I’m going to do without my fix.
This is where you get your pizza—wood-fired, natch—which is what we had for our untraditional Thanksgiving dinner. Their spinach tortellini in cheese sauce is also amazing. And everything is served on a large and lovely patio. So Why Not? (If you’re also a fan of The Lizzie McGuire Movie, sorry not sorry for that one.)
Your coffee cup runneth over in Chiang Mai; I’ve never seen so many coffee shops in such a small area. Ristr8to is your place if you like your coffee fancy. They’ve won awards, they make lovely latte art, and they have a sign out front asking you to please not drink iced coffee because it is not their specialty. I had a chilled espresso with butterscotch milk that is their specialty, though, and it was insanely good.
I’m a little biased because Roastniyom was downstairs from my apartment, but it has solid coffee, and moreover, it’s a great place to work. Bustling but not too loud, good wifi, and there was always an empty table. I can also highly recommend their muffins.
Street Food
Go to the Sunday market. Eat everything that looks good (sausage on a stick, freshly cooked pad Thai, pork dumplings, coconut waffles, MORE SMOOTHIES). Be happy.
Not exactly a restaurant, but one of the biggest and best meals I had in Thailand. In just four hours, we took a tour of the market and made noodle, salad, and curry dishes, plus a spring roll. I opted for the pad thai, chicken larb, and panang curry. Our instructor made it seem easy, and the food was worth slaving over a hot wok outside. We received cookbooks as souvenirs; I’ll definitely haul my butt to an Asian grocery so I can stock the pantry and make this food at home.
Chiang Mai may well be my favorite food city so far; honestly, it was hard to narrow this restaurant list down. I couldn’t eat all the food in Chiang Mai, but I certainly tried my best.
Earlier this year, I wrote a post about how I’m not bored when I take beach vacations alone. And I’m not…but sometimes I am lonely. Beach vacas are prime spots for couples, after all. More than that, though, sometimes resorts make it way more awkward than it needs to be.
I took off by myself for, after a stopover in Bangkok, five nights divided between two islands: Koh Kood and Koh Chang. They’re two of the three Trat islands—located to the east, close to Cambodia in the Gulf of Thailand, they can only be reached by taking a ferry from Trat, a tiny, one runway, propellor-plane airport about a forty-five minute flight from Bangkok. The remoteness of the islands is part of the allure; they’re less populated and touristy than the more famous stops like Phi Phi.
Koh Kood in particular feels like another world. There’s one main road that winds around the island, with only a few shops and restaurants, by which I mean huts on the side of the road—no chains here, not even 7-11 (a staple in much of Asia).
The awkwardness started when the driver from the resort met me at the Trat airport. Apparently the resort told him he was picking up two people, so I had to communicate across a language barrier that it was, in fact, just me. It continued as I went through the various transit stages: He drove me in a van to a checkpoint, where I got a ferry ticket and transferred to a golf cart. The golf cart drove me to a ferry, and that driver carried my bag onto the boat and made sure I got a seat. Another driver met me when the ferry dropped me off on the island, and he drove me to the resort in the typical open-air pickup truck retrofitted with bench seats, while a hotel employee sat in the back with me and told me a bit about the island as we drove.
The most awkward moment came when we arrived at the hotel. A line of about six employees stood out front to greet me with a chorused Thai hello. They presented me with an orchid garland and then insisted on taking my photo before I checked in—they never delivered the print as promised, though; perhaps they also recognized that it was a bit sad.
I blame forced luxury for all of this nearly as much as traveling alone. I love a nice room, a high thread count, and plenty of amenities, but beyond that, I generally want to be left to myself. The hotel, High Season, was very nice, but as one of only two five-star resorts on the island, it seemed like they felt pressure to provide services that felt a little performative. But the fact remains that it would have been far less uncomfortable if I were traveling with another person.
I spent a quiet day and a half on the island. It poured for much of my only full day, a huge tropical thunderstorm that woke me up when it started at 5 am, and I spent the morning hiding behind my mosquito-netted bed with a cup of coffee. I appreciated how isolated the resort felt, though—I only saw a handful of other people; after the welcome greetings, it was quite peaceful. And, when it wasn’t raining, it was lovely:
I then took a ferry, by which I mean a mid-sized speedboat, to Koh Chang, a larger and more populated island. My resort was a little less fancy but a lot more of a bargain, so there was mercifully less fanfare. Though when I checked in, I of course got the, “Are you alone? Really, just one? No one is joining you later?”
Just. Me.
The resort, The Dewa, was much busier, though, so I was surrounded by more couples and several families as well. It always feels strange to me to see couples my age with a baby, even though it’s more than normal now that I’m in my mid-thirties.
The most awkward moment came when I was in the shower one afternoon and housekeeping started knocking at my door. I was in the middle of rinsing out my hair, so I couldn’t do much. I exited the bathroom in a towel just as a man from housekeeping was coming in. He apologized and left quickly, yet not a minute passed before he knocked on the door again. In fairness, it was to give me delicious cake, but give a girl a second to put on a robe. Or give a girl a second person to answer the door.
Other than that, it was standard—every night, for instance, the hotel restaurant set up candlelit tables on the beach. It was very romantic, but I put my game face on and ate there anyway. I watched the sunset alone:
And the fire show alone:
And I enjoyed myself, as I nearly always do. Traveling alone, particularly to places seemingly designed for couples, is sometimes sad and uncomfortable, but it beats the hell out of not going.
It’s hard to avoid having expectations when you travel. You know rationally that if you set the bar low and go in expecting nothing, you’re less likely to be disappointed. (Some people on We Roam think that’s part of why we all loved Belgrade so much.) But when you start reading about a place and researching all there is to do, it’s tough not to get excited. And it’s good to look forward to things—but sometimes the actual experience is nothing like you imagined.
Our first weekend in Chiang Mai fortuitously fell on Loy Krathong and Yi Peng, two festivals that combine to create three days of excitement. The most well-known images are of people releasing lanterns into the sky, but it also involves releasing krathongs (small floating sculptures decorated with banana leaves and flowers) into the river. There are parades and dance exhibitions and special ceremonies at temples. I couldn’t wait.
The day of Loy Krathong started well. Our workspace hosted a workshop to make our own krathongs, graciously providing all of the materials. The final products were so lovely that people stopped us on the street to ask where we’d purchased them.
Then we headed to the river for the evening release. Everyone describes it as being magical—you place your krathong in the water, candle and incense lit, or light your lantern and lift it to the sky, and you let go of your worries from the previous year and make a wish for the year to come. It sounded beautiful, magical, serene.
But the reality was chaotic at best and dangerous at worst. We had to fight our way down to the river to release our krathongs, the final push occurring on a dubiously constructed wooden dock with flaming lanterns flying at our heads from the bridge above. Then instead of carefully placing our vessels in the water and watching them float away, we passed them off as quickly as possible to a man standing in the river below; the people behind us shoved through before we could see our krathong’s fate.
The attempt to release a lantern was even worse. Just buying one was a struggle in itself, then the flimsy paper was ripped by the crowds pushing past. We opted not to try to launch ours, as we watched lanterns burning in trees, getting caught on power lines, and even singeing people after failing to take flight as intended.
Lantern in a tree–fortunately, the trees are very green in Chiang Mai.
Chiang Mai, for reasons none of us can fathom, opted not to close the bridge where they specifically told tourists to release their lanterns, so in addition to thousands of people with burning objects, there were cars trying to make their way through the crowds. I couldn’t help but feel anxious, seemingly surrounded by potential threats.
Taking photos in this melee was difficult, and my iPhone was actually better at distinguishing the proper lighting than my fancy DSLR. Just know that below these lovely lanterns is a battle.
I was happy I saw it but even happier to make it home unscathed. Perhaps the festival of my dreams exists in a smaller Thai town, but in Chiang Mai, it’s too overrun for me to feel the spirit the holidays represent.
But travel giveth as well as taketh away, and my experience at the Chiang Mai Cabaret a few days later was so much more than I could have hoped.
Informally known as the ladyboy cabaret (a term widely used in Thailand though obviously problematic), the show is located in the night market, and a few of the performers stand out front in sparkly costumes and feathered headdresses to entice tourists inside.
When I see a Broadway musical, my general test is whether I find myself smiling throughout the show, and by that measure, the cabaret was a huge success. The lip syncing is generally terrible, but it just adds to the fun. The dancing is energetic, with everything from Vegas-style showgirl numbers to a Rhianna S&M impersonation that was eerily spot on, and the guys in the first couple rows of the audience get way more of a show than they pay for.
I went with a few friends the night before my birthday, but despite the occasion, my expectations were low. The online booking function on the website didn’t work, I’d heard almost nothing about it, and the venue itself is a little shabby. But it turned out to be a hell of a lot of fun and a far less stressful night than Loy Krathong.
Travel is always surprising, and fortunately, sometimes the surprises are good.
