botany

The plan is to visit the botanical garden and we don't suspect anything complicated there at the first glance. The hotel offers a car that would wait for us and bring us back. The price is rather high. The young lady suggests us to ask if we get a better price from the street. The survey among three taxi drivers shows that no-one has ever heard of the botanical garden. Back to the hotel. We're about to take the car when the lady reveals that waiting would be maximum 1,5 hours. We are not happy with that. Longer waiting time doubles the price. So we let her call uber for us and then we'll see how we can get back.
A young women with a giant car takes us to the park and up where a café and canopy walk are situated. A walking way high up between the trees. Park maps are not sold. The canopy walk is nice only that local portrait photographers block the way. 'Nyeng, song, saam' sounds from all directions. One, two, three. This warning precedes every picture. When they are not currently taking pictures then they look at their phones. Nobody looks at the trees.
The canopy walk done we walk uphill where there are some glass houses. In the houses are orchids, cactuses, rainforest, carnivorous plants, water lilies and other things. Screaming school children and photographers of course too. The exhibition looks kind of unfinished, not many species there and some greenhouses are closed. Besides, the locals turn all places into disneylands. In the middle of the plants has to be a goat made of wire.
A short walk between trees, then is asphalted road. Everybody else drives from café to the greenhouse. No sidewalk. Luckily soon a nature trail goes to the left. Nature trail is a narrower strip of asphalt. The map promised various gardens. The gardens are also not finished. We find people with machetes. From the half-finished garden narrow paths fork into the jungle and there grow all the plants we just saw in the greenhouses, except for water lilies, cactuses and orchids. Sound of birds, water and irrigation and no selfie-makers in sight. This part of the entertainment is very nice.
From the parking lot we find an empty red car that takes us back to the city with almost the same price as we came.
A lazy walk to Wat Sri Suphan, the silver temple that impresses with chauvinism. So no donation. Religions are man-made. Could be woman-made for a change. But lunges get nicely filled with exhaust fumes when walking in Chiang Mai.
Back to the hotel we find out that our driver from this morning called the hotel in panic and asked them to call us and tell us to take a bus in the park because it is not possible to walk. Well...