Today was our free day in Chiangmai. Most of our group wanted to go to the tiger sanctuary. Lin arranged to have our bus take us there. They have about 45 tigers of a variety of breeds and ages. We walked around and checked them all out. Ann, Rick and I had purchased tickets to go into the cages with the baby, 6 week old, tigers. We had to wear a smock over our clothes and slippers. We spent about 15 minutes with the babies. They were very cute and playful. We all loved it.
Sometime later someone told us that they may have drugged the tigers. They didn’t seem drugged but I’m certainly no expert. All I can say is I hope they don’t drug them.
Then we took the bus back to the hotel. A smaller group of us went to a pizza restaurant just down the block from our hotel. It was very good and another nice break from Thai food.
Then we ventured into the city. We stopped at a couple of temples and spoke with one of the nuns we met. Then we headed off to the market. Some of our group bought some items but we just looked around. We were trying to find a tablecloth like the one we had seen at the home hosted dinner, but no luck. It was really hot so we went back to the hotel. After it cooled down a little, I walked into the old city which is only about 1 square mile. It was surrounded by a moat and wall with beautiful flowers near the entrance. Honestly it didn’t look much different from the rest of the city, but at least can say I explored it.
According to TripAdvisor the 10th best restaurant in the world, called David’s Kitchen, is in Chiangmai. We had made reservations about a month earlier. Lin had arranged a taxi to take us there. We didn’t quite make it on time because there were 4 colleges all getting out at the same time. The traffic was terrible. We were immediately greeted by David himself. It was a really lovely restaurant with very, very attentive staff. Rick and Ann shared two appetizers, gnocchi stuffed with lamb shank and grapefruit wrapped in cucumbers with fried fish on top. For dinner Ann had salmon, Rick had snow fish and I had boeuf bourgeois. It was excellent!
They called us a taxi and we headed back to the hotel.