Being for more than a week in Thailand, here is my first review about my touri-realizings:

– suddenly 50 Baht for a meal is actually pretty expensive (about 1,30€)

– 7-Eleven occurs to be your favorite spot for EVERYTHING! (Breakfast: 25Baht sandwich)

– You already can’t see or smell any noodles (how many weeks to go again?)

– You just (as a matter of principle) don’t pay the price you’re told! (Especially taxi, NEVER do that!)

– Realize that every second store is a „tourist information“ (no: that are travel agencies)

– Streets in Thailand? Just run, don’t ever stop and better don’t look! They will figure out a way to drive around you

So, and now to my day in Krabi, not the district (which is huge!), but the city. We went to Ray Leh Beach, that is known for one of the most beautiful beaches in the world! Our first beach experience, and it was quite exciting, because the weather was a little cloudy and windy and the boat tour to reach the beach (just by boat), was, I have to be honest, a little scary. You go by Long Trail Boats and they had to fight the waves a lot and we were as wet as you can be whenever we could finally leave the boat.

But: it was an incredible day, the first day we spend being lazy (although it took us 1,5 hours to arrive), but still!

 

I still can’t believe my luck being able to see and touch the most fascinating and cutest animals in the whole wide world!

Chiang Mai and the surrounding is known for having huge and many animal parks. One big Tiger one and more than 60 different elephant ones. Sadly close to all of them are cruelty to animals, they are treated so badly. All the tourists wanting to ride elephants or see elephant shows or even to hug a tiger seem to misunderstand that there has to be a reason why these wild animals are defenseless and do all those things (definitely not because they like to do it). It doesn’t matter if it’s drugs, starving or pain, but one of those three is happing. So if you want to see wild animals, but with less harm as possible, inform yourself! In Chiang Mai there are three elephant parks where the elephants are not getting hurt, where is no riding or shows and where the elephants are living far out in the forests. (Just 3 of more than 60!!) That’s what we decided to do, it’s more than three times as expensive as the other parks (we paid 1500Baht, that’s about 40€) and I’m not gonna lie, elephants have to be trained to let people touch themselves. But it’s the first little step for a big change, because if more tourists would pay attention, if more tourists would like to see elephants in their natural habitat and not in shows, than all these other parks would need to change as well!

We were close to the Mae Wang waterfall, our first time being really in Thailand nature.

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Our second day in Chiang Mai…

So hard to decide what to do: going to another city or just staying, because on Sunday our flight was scheduled to the south of Thailand. We decided to really get into Chiang Mai and visited Wat Phra That Doi Suthep. Of course because there was still so much to see, but to be very honest we just couldn’t sit that long again after our crazy beginning and needed to stay at one place for longer than one night.

Doi Suthep is a temple placed on a mountain not too far from the city, but you do have to haggle a lot with the taxi drivers to make this trip worth the costs. They will always start very high, on trips they know you have no other choice, that you need the taxi. (Places far out or to the airport)
For us it definitely was worth everything!

Afterwards we went to three different night markets in Chiang Mai. I have to say: there are prettier ones in Thailand (my personal opinion). But still, they are huge, easy to reach and diverse!

Warorot Market, Night Market and Night Bazaar. The first one is the less touristy one, the last one the most touristy one, but still the best one I think!

Our first day in Thailand.. and Chiang Mai made it easy to fall in love with these new world for us. Not with the dirt and stinky emissions, the food we’re not used to smell yet or crowded, confusing streets. It’s the cultural spirit that catches up with you whenever you walk through the streets. Temples around every corner, people sitting behind their sales booth selling interesting food and things. Everyone friendly and trying to be talkative, no matter if with hands and feeds or in broken English. Therefore we didn’t mind walking one day through the city, surprisingly we made it to more than 12 different temples, still being beyond fascinated afterwords. In the following I won’t show you the most „worth seeing ones“, because every single ones has their own aura. I will just show you my favourite pictures and have to admit that my absolute favorite temples are Wat Chiang Man, Wat Chedi Luang and Wat Suan Dok, those you have to see for sure if you ever happen to be here!

 

And a night food market:

An one day city trip is crazy? Especially in a huge city like Dubai? – It definitely is, but it’s still so worth it!

We arrived at 5am in the morning and left the next morning at 3:30am to fly straight to Thailand, our final destination. Dubai is very hot at this time of the year, with more than 40 Celsius in the shadow you feel unable to go out between 11am and 6pm, at that time try to do inside activities. Public Service is crazy cheap, we paid for each day-ticket (all zones) 5 Euro! I can only recommend it, even though taxi is probably the more chill way, the busses and the metro have air conditions as well as the bus stops. It’s clean, very new and not hard to understand, that way you save money for other things. Furthermore the metro goes straight from the airport to everywhere you wonna go (red line).

Now, I have to shorten myself: In the following are my personal 5 highlights:

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