A9 is out of town - just beyond the "Super Highway" a couple of miles north of Chiang Mai centre. We were a bit hesitant about staying so far out of the city, but the reviews won us over and we like a bit of peace and quiet.
It's surrounded by real Thai neighbourhoods and houses, a very un-touristy and genuine part of town. This means not a lot of English is spoken in the local businesses, but you can get a long way with pointing and gesturing.
There are several good places to eat along the road - another reviewer mentioned the garden restaurant a few hundred metres down and we can second that recommendation (We don't know its name as it was only written in Thai) - the staff were friendly, spoke a little bit of English and tried to teach us some more Thai words. We were the only non-Thais in the restaurant every time we visited. The food was great, but be warned, some of the curries are very very hot. We like our spice and usually in the UK we can't get restaurants to make our food hot enough - not a problem here! You might want to learn the words for "not too spicy please" ;-)
We went into Green Mill restaurant a couple of times - the crab pasta was nice, but can't say the same for their Thai dishes, and the prices are high too.
Very highly recommended is the place opposite Green Mill - again, I don't know its name as it's all in Thai. It's the first street restaurant on the right as you walk down from A9, it has painted tables and a banner hanging over the top with pictures of dishes. Wonderful food for 25-30baht per dish and you can have a drink from the chiller for about 10 baht. Favourites include fried rice (kaewpad), crispy pork rice (kanamoograb) but there's a huge selection if you can decipher the menu. We kept going back time after time and we genuinely miss the place! Maybe some of the other street food places are good too but we never got around to trying them after we found this one!
It's easy to get a tuk-tuk or songthaew into the city, takes about 10 minutes and we found it cost about 100 baht each way. You can walk into the city but it takes a couple of hours and it's not fun trying to cross the superhighway.
The hotel itself was great, not outstanding but friendly staff and clean comfortable room. We enjoyed having waffles for breakfast in the cafe next door. Nice to have free wifi, but it was quite slow at times. A few things that could be improved - the bathroom could use some updating, and the shower wasn't really hot enough. Would be nice to have a table & chair on the balcony. It'd also be good to have shutters or thick curtains on the inside window as light comes in from the hallway at night.
