It's only been about a year and a half since we were in Chiang Mai, but it's clear how many southeast Asian temples we have now visited as we spoke this question to each other far too often while walking around the Old Town for a couple of days. We usually imagine the "Old Town" of a city as small and compact, but were reminded that Chiang Mai's Old Town is quite large and simply chock full of fantastic sights that can be hard to keep track of. Not that you can't visit a wat more than once, but…we like to be efficient.

We didn't stray too far from the Old Town except for one trek out to Wat Pha Lat, a temple out in the forest that we reached after a 25 minute trek on the "Monk's Trail". As we arrived at about 8:00 am, we got to experience that quiet, serene atmosphere that you always hope to find at a temple. Later in the day, Clare got a massage treatment that would neither be described as quiet, nor serene, but deserves to be expanded upon anyways. When we are travelling, Troy aims to seek out the star architectural and historical sites, while Clare is interested in finding the cultural activities that might be unique to the region. Cue the Tok Sen massage, a traditional northern Thai therapy that involves the striking of a piece of wood by wooden mallet, along the energy lines of the body - back, neck, legs, arms. This is not a massage for the faint of heart! It is intense, and you really just need to surrender to it. No pain, no gain, right?! The gain here is that after an hour, Clare felt incredibly alert and energised, and went back to the hostel to write three blog posts. And there doesn't seem to be any residual pain, but perhaps one is supposed to get into an ice bath immediately afterwards?? Anyways, it is something to try once for sure - "When in Chiang Mai…"