Travel-Trotter

The next day we rented a car for the day to see some of the more far flung spots around Chiang Mai.  We rented the car from a Chiang Mai Facebook group, which they delivered to our condo and we were off!  We first visited the Bua Tong Falls or Sticky Falls as it is known, located about an hour away from Chiang Mai.  The falls originate from a spring at the top of a hill which flows down hill over a clay slope.  The water from the spring is rich with dissolved calcium carbonate and wherever it flows down the hill it leaves a coating of calcium carbonate.  There were branches, roots and rocks that were covered with the biege coating leaving the otherwise slippery clay hill with a tacky coating that makes it very easy to climb thus the apply named Sticky Falls.

The kids loved the falls, they climbed it three times and of course I was the only one to face-plant.  I captured it all on film too, gotta watch to the very end.  Check it out here:

After running up the hill three times the kids and I were completely soaked, we should have been wearing our swimming suits but it wasn’t that warm out.  We were pretty cold the rest of the day but a huge bowl of dumpling soup and fried rice helped keep us warm.

Our second stop was to Chiang Dao Temple a Buddhist sanctuary that was set in a natural limestone cave.  We wandered through the temple and hired a guide with a lantern.  We were doing great until Julie saw a large spider, three inches wide with spindly legs and totally freaked out.  We backed out of the cave quickly.  After playing with two kids from London we headed back to Chiang Mai.

For dinner we met two other world schooling families at the Saturday night market and had a fun dinner and swapped strategies and experiences.  The next day we returned our rental car and hopped on a bus to Chiang Rai…