Chiang Mai

Friends, Romans, Countrymen:

Well, it does feel like it’s been awhile since last we posted. Have no fear, we have not forgotten you.

We spent three glorious nights in Chiang Mai, the great northern Thai city. We got into town on the overnight bus before sunrise and caught a pickup truck (called Sorngtaaou) into the old city of Chiang Mai: a quiet, laidback place surrounded by a huge moat; you can see remnants of the walls and gates that used to go along the moat. Our pickup truck dropped us off at the East Gate and we crossed into the old city, with guesthouses, restaurants, and used book stores aplenty there.

We roamed the side streets called Sois and eventually found a gem of a guesthouse: the Top North Guesthouse. The price was just over $10, and it had a pool! That’s very rare for the guesthouses here. The desk clerk kept apologizing that the room had no mirror, but we were fine with it. The hotel felt like the kind of place expats, journalists and diplomats would’ve hung out at during the 60s. Our ritual upon arriving at a new spot is to throw down our burdensome bags and get freshened up; so we went for a much needed dip and called our fams via Skype. We were no longer lost (so to speak)!!

Chiang Mai is the cultural capital of Thailand in many ways: in the city, they have cooking, language, massage and drawing classes. There are tons of temples, called ‘wat’s. There’s something called Monk Chat, which I did the last time I was here, where you can sit and shoot the breeze with a monk for a bit; (we happened upon Monk Chat this time, but all the Monks were busy chatting it up with Western lasses). In the city, there are also treks you can take into the mountains, multi-day ones or single days. There, you can ride elephants, ride on a bamboo raft, visit the hill tribes.

I’m very conscious of two things regarding those: the exploitation of both the elephants and the hill tribes by the tour groups that go through. This may be in part due to a unit I taught at CLLC, in Level 3: Listening and Speaking called ‘Travel and Tourism.’ (Shout out to all you CLLCers!) It shows the degradation of the hill tribes (esp. the long-necked women) who are made to sit and have pictures taken of them. Some quotes from the Level 3 Listening CD that I remember: “Before I worked farm all day, now I sit all day and tourists take pictures; this is my life.” Or from an angry, argumentative German tourist: “This tradition died many years ago in Myanmar; these women are just hurting their bodies. It’s degrading.” One of the vocabulary words in the unit was degrading.

The treatment of elephants is another thing that’s degrading (think ‘Like Water for Elephants’): making the elephants do tricks like play basketball and dance. What we were looking for in Chiang Mai was an Elephant Sanctuary where the elephants roam free, and you can bathe them, and ride them in a humane way; except all the elephant sanctuaries here cost an arm and a leg to go to. For a visit to the hill tribes, it’s recommended to go with a non-profit organization where the money goes to the hill tribe or to education; in these situations, the tour guide would also be from that specific hill tribe. Neither of us could find a tour group like this; believe me, there are many tour companies offering treks in this city, but we couldn’t find one that made us feel right. Have no fear, there are more in Laos, which we will definitely be doing.

We signed up for a Thai cooking class instead. Along with 6 other westerners (Holland, France, UK), we were instructed by a young woman named Apple. We had a list of dishes to be instructed in; Megan and I didn’t choose the same ones, so together we could be educated in the most dishes. Highlights: I learned how to make Pad Thai like an expert and Megan learned how to make a spicy cashew nut and rice dish that was divine to eat. One of our teachers was like a female Thai Gordon Ramsey, minus the swearing; she’d shout at us good-humouredly when we weren’t following her instructions. At one point, she jokingly referred to the minced chicken as minced cat; at least, we hoped she was joking.

When we left the cooking class, it was eight o’clock at night, and we stepped out into something absolutely magical. Floating up into the sky, all over the city, were floating lanterns. There were thousands of them all over, being carried up into the sky and moving with the wind. We were in the middle of the Yi Peng or Loi Krathong festival; something we had been hoping to catch. No matter where you walked in the city, you could see these lanterns: their golden glow against the backdrop of the night sky. You could buy them off the street and light them yourself; Meg and I bought one, signed it, lit it and sent it up into the sky. Quite surreal and gratifying to watch your own specific lantern join the throng of the others, until it’s lost in the night sky. I believe ours passed in the front of the full moon. Quite a sight! (Another sight is when the lanterns would burn out and fall back to the earth; some nearly landed on people; no worries, they’re super light)

Along with this sight, there were amateur fireworks and firecrackers being set off every 20 seconds or so. Sounded like a war zone. People would just light them wherever they fancied despite the amount of people in the immediate vicinity. At one point, I saw some kids light a fire cracker and throw it behind a middle-aged man: boy! was he surprised when they went off! We wandered through this dream world and stumbled into the UNDERWORLD. Somehow we had found our way into the red light district. In front of every bar, there was a scantily clad woman welcoming us in; inside, were westerners with newly acquired Thai girlfriends; the beer was flowing; animalistic laughter echoed down the dirty streets; many lady boys dotted the landscape bidding us enter this hedonistic hell. We quickly escaped unscathed. Whew.

The rest of our time here was divided between chilling out at our pool, drinking cold Chang beer, eating cheap Thai street food and wandering the laidback streets; we perused used bookstores (which there are more of here than shopping malls!), and had cold lemon shakes and banana shakes: divine!

Alas, our free 15 day visa was running up, (on Dec. 1), so we had to get bus tickets to Chiang Kong, where we would cross into Laos. Has it really been 15 days in Thailand already? We had worked our way up from the south, and have mentally noted places we would return to and places we didn’t get a chance to see; we will return! We loved Ko Pha Ngan and Chiang Mai the most. In the future, we would love to do a diving course at Ko Tao; visit some more islands in the south; visit Chiang Rai. But that’s all there is from Thailand now: ONWARD to LAOS!