Muang Mai Market: Best Fruit Stop In The World?

I usually ride my bike over to Muang Mai Market every morning to stock up on fruit, and I usually find the experience enjoyable.

Its bustling streets and alleys are crammed with motorbikes, bicycles, trucks, human-powered hand carts, and an endless supply of shoppers going about their daily tasks.

The market is big enough that it took me more than a week just to visit every part of it, and much longer to find the best vendors.

Although I speak very little Thai, many of the vendors speak some English and I've become friendly with a number of them. After visiting regularly for several months they've come to think of me as a friendly but oddly fruit-obsessed farang (they seem to have no concept of a raw food diet), and always assume I'm a fruit seller because I buy so much.

I enjoy browsing around the stalls and looking at the fruit. If you look around you can spot when some of the rarer fruits appear in small numbers, often inhabiting some bin at the back of a stall. Sometimes the vendors tell me if they get something unusual because they know I'm on the look out for unique fruits.

One downside is the smell in some areas. Muang Mai has several "streets of flesh," as I like to call them, bloody fish and meat sale areas filled with the stench of rotting animals. Do you best to avoid these streets because the smell is almost overwhelming at certain times of the day. My sense of smell has improved considerably on a raw food diet, but this is one downside I can't ignore.

One thing Muang Mai market lacks is organic greens. Although several vendors claim they don't use pesticides and fertilizers, I'm not sure if I trust them. I try to avoid conventional greens for quite a few reasons, but especially in Asia where many pesticides and fertilizers banned in the US are legal. Luckily, there are a number of health food stores and super markets that sell organic greens in Chiang Mai, so it's not a problem.