One of the main benefits of living in Chiang Mai if you love the outdoors is that there is so much of it here. When I first considered moving here I didn't think that it would be possible that there is so much nature around a city of more than a million people but that is exactly what this place is. We have all the access to modern things such as massive shopping malls, plenty of jobs, movie theaters, just anything you would imagine including probably 5000 shops for mobile phones, but just a few kilometers out of the city we have untouched and protected nature.
If you look to the left and right of this picture you can see that there are points of civilization and this is what a lot of Chiang Mai is like. You'll have a big street somewhere that has things like Tesco and BigC on it, then a few clicks away there are some minor roads, some farms, and then the road just ends at undeveloped land. I am not sure if this is a national park or not, but when we were up there there was only a few trails that might be for motorbikes... they certainly were not well maintained park trails. This is EXACTLY what we are looking for in our runs.
if these areas are actually maintained by anyone, we certainly didn't see any of them and where we parked the cars initially, was just the side of a street. This was just a side of the road of a farm that we actually, for once, had permission to pass through. We are not sure of the legality of entering a national park, but since there were no signs or fences and because we pick up garbage that we find while we are doing the trail, we almost never have problems if people end up getting all huffy because a bunch of brightly colored shirt-wearing people are passing through.
While this irritates some of our older members, we also had more than 100 meters in incline over the course of several kilometers and for me, that makes it more interesting because the FRB (front running bastards) don't run in these situations. The downside is literally the downside. We have, in the past, had several people rather greatly injure themselves when traveling down a hill too fast and then slipping on a wet stone or some mud. This is always something you need to be extra careful about during the rainy season.
Fortunately for us it didn't rain in the past day and didn't rain on the day of the event either.
We ran into some domesticated jungle friends while we were out there too. These guys don't even notice when you get near them and I guess that is a good thing seeing as how it looks like it could tear you to pieces if it wanted to.
The next run is today and as always there are Thursday and Saturday mixed (men and women) runs later this week just like every week. You can join us if you want to! full details are available at our poorly made website that looks like it is straight out of the 1990's.
On On!
