Loy Krathong Festival in Chiang Mai, Thailand: A Week of Culture, Food, and Fun

Chiang Mai is my favorite place I've traveled so far. The food is to die for; Khao Soi is native to Northern Thailand, so it's hard to find outside of Chiang Mai. It is amazing. It's a curry soup with rice and egg noodles. 

I was with my vegetarian family, so we ate at vegetarian restaurants. Morning Glory, Goodsouls, and Blue Diamond are all amazing vegetarian places, that are delicious even if you don't like vegetarian food. 

We took a cooking class with Diana from Morning Glory, which was amazing! We cooked in an outdoor kitchen at the restaurant, and she was so cool and informative, and she gave us a little recipe book of everything we made at the class. 

The Maya mall is super cool, they had yummy vegan donuts in the food court; which had a lot of great food options. 

The Plaza was a good night market, though more expensive than the traditional Sunday Night Market, which I went to many, many times throughout my stay in Chiang Mai. You can buy little bites of food as you walk through the market, and peruse jewelry and little arts and crafts. 

We went to the elephant sanctuary, which was a super fun trip. We got to walk the elephants, feed them, bathe them, and groom them. We chose a place that did not have elephant riding and treated their elephants well. 

My favorite place was called Sticky Waterfall. It's a short tuktuk ride from the center of Chiang Mai, and it's this gorgeous waterfall with some naturally-occuring mineral on the rocks that makes them super grippy. It's one of nature's cool phenomenons and it was really fun to walk up the waterfall! It felt like we were defying gravity. 

We also did this batik class called Batik with Oi, where we made some shirts using traditional Thai Batik. That was very cool!

Chiang Rai is a great weekend trip or even a day trip from Chiang Mai. There isn't too much to do, so going to the white temple during the day and then spending your evening at the Saturday Night Market is a perfect day. The food is amazing and the market is bustling and endless. The temples are absolutely gorgeous.