I’ve been back from Chiang Mai for a few days now, and been trying to catch up on my work and construction backlog. But I wanted to post some photos from the second resort we stayed at about an hour’s drive from Chiang Mai city for 3 nights.

It was a beautiful resort called Mountain Float.

The entire resort is floating on a reservoir and is not docked in any way. Instead, they had ropes running about 100m to a nearby hillside. So basically, when you are at this resort, you can walk along the floating walkways between the bungalows and the main restaurant. Other than that, you need to take a boat.

Here is what my phones GPS said my location was when we were there:

You won’t see the resort on the satellite photo because the water level was unusually low in the reservoir, so they moved the entire resort to this (deeper water) spot from its normal location further inside the reservoir (to the right in the map above). In this location, though, it was about 5-10 minutes boat ride from the entrance to the national park and if your eyes are good, you can even see it from the resort. (Just off of the left edge of the map toward the top.)

Another interesting thing worth noting is that of the 3 nights we stayed there, they were basically fully booked each night. But of the 5-10 other guest parties that came by, not a single one (other than ourselves) stayed for more than one night. When asked about it, the staff seemed to suggest that it was unusual for them to have guests that stayed more than one night. And given that this weekend was the first 3 night period we could find where this bungalow was available back when we booked the resort in September or October, they must be doing quite a good business to be keeping themselves this booked with basically only one night stays. (Many of the other guests were Asian tourists from China, Malaysia, etc., so I am guessing they are on the foreign tourist map.)

We hired a driver to take us on the hour trip from Chiang Mai city. (Price was 1200 THB each way.) He dropped us off at a parking lot next to the national park entrance where a staff from the resort was waiting to transfer our bags to the boat and drive us to the resort. The boat ride was pleasant and the water was very smooth since this is a reservoir and isn’t big enough to get any real waves:

Leaving the shore

Arriving at the resort. Our bungalow was second from the right.

The resort is made up of 4 bungalows and a main restaurant area all lined up in a row with the restaurant in the center. You walk from bungalow to bungalow on floating bridges held up by thick foam pieces:

The bridges do move a little when you walk on them, but not enough to feel unstable in any way. As for the houses themselves, it was very interesting to feel how little they swayed when the occasional boat drives by. The waves that the boats would generate could get up to about 20cm amplitude or more, but the houses rocked in a very slow motion (the things probably weigh at least 3 or 4 tonnes, so this is no surprise) and I would guess that the amplitude of rocking was probably less than 1 or 2 degrees. Big enough to feel, but just at the edge of what you notice. I would guess that unless you are sensitive to motion sickness, you wouldn’t call this kind of rocking more than barely noticeable. I found it rather pleasant. But the balconies are actually floating separately and are attached to the main houses, so they rock with the waves a little more than the houses do.

We booked the smallest bungalow which had two bedrooms that would normally bed two people each, but they have additional beds upon request. The other bungalows had 3-4 bedrooms. They told me that the total occupancy of the resort was 24 people if you don’t add extra beds (i.e. for kids sharing a room with their parents), making booking this whole resort an interesting option for a “management strategic planning retreat” for our company. I think that the pricing comes out to about 2000 THB per person per night, which seems reasonable. (Praew mentioned this is roughly the usual government allowance per head when the university does these kinds of department management retreats.) Anyone from work interested in this idea?

I really liked the view from the room when the doors are open, particularly when you wake up in the morning:

(This photo barely does it justice.)

Warning! There are karaoke machines in each room. The volume wasn’t so bad that I couldn’t sleep when they were using it in the neighboring bungalow, but the resort rules are only that they have to stop using it at midnight. So people (like me) who get pretty annoyed by karaoke when they are trying to sleep, please be advised.

They had all kinds of water sport “toys” including small sail boats, paddle boats, kayaks, water bicycles.

Here I am out on the reservoir with water bicycle:

(I enjoyed the kayak better, though.)

And they also had some weirder things like this cross between a water bicycle/pogo stick thing called a “water kangaroo” in Thai (not sure what the English name is). Here is a YouTube video of it from a Thai TV program taken at this resort:

It looked like it could take 20 or 30 times being dumped into the water before you get the hang of it, so I didn’t even bother trying it.

If you want to bring your kids here for a night or two, there are plenty of water activities for them to try out. (The resort is quite strict about people wearing life vests for any activity on the water. Watching some of the younger kids running down the bridges, I kinda thought some of them should be wearing life vests all of the time.)

We tried ordering lunch from the restaurant on one of the days and ate it out on the reservoir in this thing:

It floated in the wind while we were eating, feet dangling in the water underneath the table, making for a very enjoyable and relaxing lunch. Rowing it back to the restaurant didn’t work so well, so the staff saved us the trouble and towed us back using one of their boats. Here is a picture of that lunch:

It is worth noting that almost every dish they had was based on locally caught fish. And it was all really really good. We ate the Chinese style steamed fish in soy sauce, fried fish in tamarind sauce, spring rolls with fish wrapped inside, Thai omelette containing fish, fish tom yum, guay tiew kua bla (fried noodle with fish), bla pad met mamuang (fish fried with cashew nuts) among others. The restaurant wasn’t the usual resort “basic food” restaurant one finds at most resorts. They put some effort into it and it showed.

The staff also mentioned that many people bring meat with them in an ice cooler and they will grill it up on the barbecue on the balcony outside your room. If you are a vegetarian, I recommend you go this route, since I don’t recall seeing a single vegetarian dish on the menu.

Here are a few more pictures to share:

And finally, we took the boat back to land on the fourth day. Here is a picture I took looking back from the land (you can see the boat that dropped us off heading back to the resort in the distance):

Besides the vacation, this resort also gave us a chance to try living on a floating house for a few days, since this is something we are planning to build on our land. I loved the feeling of being away from land. It provides a psychological stress relief, as if all of the issues I deal with at work all day somehow are “somewhere else” and don’t need to be dealt with yet. Some of that may be that we were on vacation, but some of it was definitely the feeling of being on the water. Our own pond is much smaller, of course, so the effect may be smaller, but I’m looking forward to trying out this lifestyle.

On the other hand, after 4 days and 3 nights on the floating house, it took several days to get accustomed to land again. There was a mild swaying feeling during lunch, and meetings, etc. This may (hopefully) be less of an issue if we going back and forth throughout the day.

Coincidentally, the bungalow we stayed in was almost exactly the same dimensions as the floating house we are planning on building, not just in length and width, but in height and the width of the balconies too. I got quite a bit of inspiration from this. I think it is time for us to put some real effort into designing the floating house in the upcoming weeks and try to finalize this so that we can begin construction soon. Coming back from this trip, I’m excited to move this forward.