Community trails
Listed by the Ministry as “Indie travelling, the community way”
Villages that host visitors themselves — a riverside artists' quarter, a coffee village in the hills, a hot spring.
This is one of the Ministry of Tourism & Sports' own suggested routes for Chiang Mai. The places are theirs; the order and the distances are ours, because the Ministry files a route as a set of places rather than a sequence and driving it in the order given would take you back and forth across the province. We put the stops in the order you would actually drive them and measured the result.
The Ministry's record also lists Doi Luang Chiang Dao Community Based Tourism, Ban Mai Mok Jam homestay. They are too far from the rest to fit the same day, so they have been left off this route.
The route
In the order you would drive it, with the leg between each.
- 1
Wat Ket Karam Community
The old quarter on the east bank of the Ping, and the city's main river port before the railway arrived. Chinese, European and local families settled here together and the architecture still shows it; the temple was the centre of it, and there is a small museum of the neighbourhood's things.
Tourism Directory →Ministry of Tourism & Sports · Ministry of Tourism & Sports, Thailand 7 min · 2 km - 2
San Kamphaeng hot springs
34 kilometres from the city, in gardens under the hills. The water comes up at close to 100°C and one vent throws a jet as high as fifteen metres; there are pools to sit in, and eggs are boiled in the spring at the top.
San Kamphaeng Hot Spring
Tourism Directory →Ministry of Tourism & Sports · Ministry of Tourism & Sports, Thailand 51 min · 35 km - 3
Mae Kampong
A village at about 1,300 metres in a fold of the hills east of the city, with a stream running through the middle of it. Tea and coffee are grown on the slopes, and a number of houses take guests overnight.
Ban Mae Kampong
Tourism Directory →Ministry of Tourism & Sports · Ministry of Tourism & Sports, Thailand 36 min · 22 km - ⌂
Places and facts from the Ministry of Tourism & Sports: thailandtourismdirectory.go.th →
