Chiang Mai Chatter

Thailand is to China as Spain is to Great Britain. It’s where the richer families go on holiday, it’s where the retirees go to live out their golden years. Due to the low income of many Chinese citizens, especially in the area where we live, if they leave China at all in their lives then it will be to go to South Korea or Thailand. The Qiannan Normal University must have a partnership with a university in Thailand because a couple of students who were lucky enough to study abroad studied there. My impressions of Bangkok were not stellar, it was dusty, polluted and the roads were packed but if I ever got the opportunity to retire abroad, Chiang Mai would be a decent choice of location.

The ex-pat community is bustling there, a couple of our coworkers - a couple - escaped the ice-chill of a Duyun Winter to stay in the Chiang Mai area over Christmas. They rented an apartment, enjoyed chilling by the pool with relaxing music and enjoyed the relative (to Guizhou) luxury of a Thai hospital as they brought a new baby into the world (word up to Sadie Grace). They weren’t the only foreigners there either. Our hostel was co-owned by a Canadian, a Brit and a local Thai partner. The manager who we got to know the best was the Canadian, a nice man who lived what looked like a completely carefree life. He knew everything about the local area, right down to which bar Callum could be kicked out of for asking the wrong person about weed. He lived the life that all Suits pertain to dream of, shorts, sandals, beard, pot belly and all.

For us, perhaps the most incredible thing about being in South East Asia was the ease of life and nowhere was this clearer than in Chiang Mai. The tourism industry is perhaps the biggest source of income for the area. Anyone who can scrub a shoe or drive a red bus is benefiting from the constant stream of travellers. As a holidaymaker you are spoiled for choice with hostels, bars and transportation to your next destination. We were taken aback when we made it into CM in the late afternoon of our second day out of Duyun, walked to the nearest travel agent’s and got three tickets for the hotel, bus and boat trip from Chiang Mai to Luang Prabang in Laos leaving the very next day. The hostel itself was loaded with enough flyers for local attractions to keep even the most picky traveller busy for weeks. And, for the lazy they simply had to ask any receptionist on duty what to do the next day and they would have a day of activities and transportation booked within the next ten minutes plus discount thanks to their encyclopedic knowledge of opportunities and phone numbers. The hostels were allowed to offer discounts to customers as a kind of finders fee, you were rewarded for being lazy. What a country - what a depressingly desperate and exploited people. Hail Britannia.

The temperament of Chiang Mai is far more relaxed and cool than its energetic sister, Bangkok. Being further North, the sandal-melting heat is replaced with a modest breeze and cosy, shorts-friendly warmth. The urban area is nestled neatly behind three sides of a square moat which makes navigation easier for the hapless traveller, just go that way until you reach water and go round until you see something you recognise. There are also religious sites a-plenty for the enthusiastic temple-hopper. One of the best days we had together featured a walk from the hostel in the direction which was vaguely opposite to the moat. Each street corner had some attraction or other, from strange, trinket baring museum to majestic golden Buddhist temples.

One of the most striking things about these temples, besides their extravagant number was the extravagance of their architecture and interior design. After the wonder wore off at the sight of the stone exteriors, wrought into such unbelievable designs one was then taken aback by the munificent Buddha head which stretched for feet upon feet up into the ceiling. The chamber would have been crammed with wandering tourists were said interior not so massive. The other thing that was massive was the lavish donations box which would have comfortably fit a Callum and a Stephen. It shadowed over what, to my foggy memories looked like tiny battered suitcase with a slit in the top, plain and inconspicuous in contrast to its lavish companion. The suitcase was for the money to donate to the poor, the donations box was for money to go to the temple. Victor Hugo could have filled a good thousand pages with my thoughts on that. The other thing about the Chiang Mai temples which rubbed me up the wrong way was the men’s pavilion - no chicks, it demanded, they dirty. I did go in, but on principle I thought it was shit. We had coffee and I wrote postcards to console myself.

Look, a mango tree.

We found a lot of good spots to relax in Chiang Mai, it came at the midpoint of our holiday and after many days of flights, cruises and bumpy bus rides in ovens it was nice to put a few days aside for nothing. There is a large cluster of hostels and restaurants near to the moat and we found it easy to locate numerous spots to enjoy drinks and Pad Thai. One of the nicest places we found was a garden cafe sheltered by overhanging trees. It also had a comfortable hammock perfect for reading the Kindle and overhearing every word of your friends’ intense conversation. The coffee in Thailand is great, especially after living in China. Of course South East Asia is a hot-spot for coffee production, Cambodian blends are delicious. There was even, and I was amazed to see this, a Starbucks 3 stories high in the square. I visited for the sake of novelty (I hadn’t seen one in four months) and was happily reminded what it felt like to spend three pounds on a cup of muggy brown water. I didn’t go back. Well, I did enter the Bangkok Starbucks but I really needed to use the facilities.

Thailand is also a great location to receive a Thai massage. I went along one day to get my feet done which was extremely pleasant, like walking on marshmallows. I think I made the right decision too as Callum and Aimee emerged from their beds with the look of shell-shocked bombing survivors. My rule is, don’t touch me above the kneecaps and we’ll get on fine. If more people in the world followed my rules it would be a far more boring, introverted and safer place. The following day I went back to our friendly masseuse for a foot scrub. I needed it, Trump had just moved into the White House and was waging his one-man war on intelligence and common sense.

A major part of the hosteling experience is getting to meet new people, whether you want to or not. Even I, who could quite happily remain silent for a good month and a half, got to speak to a few new people. During each stage of our journey we met an interesting person travelling which who conveniently fit into three separate posts. As we were travelling in a group of three we would often end up sharing a room with one outsider. In Chiang Mai we met, lets call him, Harriet. Harriet had left university in the States and was going to take up a position in a financial firm in New York but he was taking six months out to see the world before sticking his nose to the grindstone. He was nice, an ex-American Football player, casual weed smoker and bore a resemblance to Tom Hardy. A less grizzled Tom Hardy, perhaps. He was placed in our room and on his first night was regaled by Callum about the merits of recreational marijuana imbibement. He invited himself along on our adventures for a couple of days and no-one minded too much, Aimee who is a fan of the American University lifestyle was positively thrilled to have an insider to talk to about it with.

The Chiang Mai area has a number of beautiful, natural sites turned into fiendishly chargeable tourist hot-spots. We visited a deep lake surrounded on all sides by heavily excavated cliff faces. The place had deck chairs, an expensive cafe and a cliff for jumping off. It had also, amusingly, been named The Grand Canyon, though I’ve seen grander, even if it was only pictures on a Google search. It amounted to little more than an outdoor swimming pool but Callum, Aimee and Harriet did get to jump off the cliff. I got to eat watermelon and struggle with Terry Pratchett’s convoluted prose style.

Chiang Mai is the home of the Doi Suthep, a vast hill which would take the best part of a day to climb. It is topped with a spiritual temple/ visitor centre and Harriet recommended we go there to watch the sunset. We took one of the red busses, like taxis but with fewer seat-belts and available to any number of strangers travelling in a similar direction. As with any of the services in this part of the world, the price was open to negotiation so we were lucky that Harriet was not the sort of man to take shit from a red bus driver. Our journey to the temple was winding, fast and uncomfortable but it was preferable to the journey back. Our driver, who had made us wait for about twenty minutes until his cab was full (it was the end of the day after all) stopped half way down the hill on the side of what amounted to a pavement-less dual-carriageway. “This is where the real view is!” He told us. “Get out, come and see!” Something smelled fishy so we just stayed in the bus until he gave up trying to wheedle more money out of us and we went back into the city.

On our final night, once Harriet had departed, we decided to go to the safari. The location had come highly recommend and even though we weren’t quite sure what the place offered we hired a minivan and it drove us far out of the city to the safari. Much like Disneyland or any other family day-out centre it was packed with statues, entertainers and that eerie sense of falseness. There were shows all around including a rodeo-style event in the main courtyard. The Thai performers threw historical accuracy to the wind combining traditional Eastern dancing women with lasso-wielding, stetson-wearing blokes. One of them even got to ride a horse, I think he was in charge. The fire displays and cracking whips were almost too terrifying to bare. The performers were not separated from the audience by anything other than a few feet so one was made hopelessly aware of the potential for any small child to wrestle themselves free of their parent’s arms and find their way in front of a disfiguring danger.

As with any attraction featuring performing animals the Safari seemed quite appealing on paper. I had my phone out and was excitedly recording the fact that Aimee, Callum and I still had faces, that we were sitting in an audience and that we were about to watch a lion show. When said lions were brought out, however looking emaciated, threadbare and forced to do humiliating tricks for scraps of meat I put the camera away, thinking that I’d really rather no one knew that I had financially supported the creatures’ evidently unpleasant lifestyle. The best part of the experience was the actual safari. We were packed into plastic chairs on charming busses and we got to squint out through the dark night at zebras, giraffes and all manner of furry beasties. We bought vegetable to feed them but I got a bit overexcited throwing them unsuccessfully to some far-off bears and didn’t have any left when we came up close and personal to some deer and a zebra who was eating out of people’s hands. It’s like the old Aesop’s Fable of the boy who threw away his carrots and didn’t have any left to feed a zebra which he wanted to do. It’s uncanny, actually.

Chiang Mai also offers tourists the opportunity to watch people beat the ever-living shit out of each other in a local form of boxing. Every day matches were advertised with faces of people you’ve never heard of plastered on flyers around the city. We went along one night because we were in Chiang Mai and it’s a thing that you do when you’re in Chiang Mai. The whole event was quite impressive with live music playing during each fight and crowds of loud people getting steadily drunker match after match. The music was played with a type of reed-instrument that sounds a bit like the thing you’d expect a snake-charmer to play so it all felt very cultural. I enjoyed the not-so-open bar and laughed about how seriously everyone was taking the over-glorified punch ups much to the chagrin of my neighbour, a sweaty American who was appreciating the artistry on display. In the end the night was cut short because a fighter was knocked unconscious. I had a headache in the morning and it served me right.

 One of my favourite memories from Chiang Mai involved a group of noisy, inconsiderate youths and Aimee and Stephen not enjoying conversation about sex and drugs taking place loudly outside of their thin bedroom walls. We had come back from a day of something and aforementioned crowd had set up camp in the restaurant area right next to our bedroom window. Aimee and I had tried to relax in our beds but the noise was unbearable so we decided to sit on the patio outside the main entrance. I left my sandals in the room because I didn’t intend to be walking very far. Aimee called her mother and I relaxed with a book or some YouTube videos (that detail has unfortunately been lost to history.) A good hour passed and there was no change in the volume of the party so we stayed. It was irritating but we dealt with the inconvenience stoically. The hours kept passing, however and the bawdy conversation got, if anything, even louder. Eventually I vented some frustration by emphatically lying that if it didn’t stop I would be complaining tomorrow, moving hostels and asking for my deposit back. Immediately our Canadian host shot out of the front doors and told the group off loudly and without room for question. (He was clearly well practised in the art.) Aimee and I realised that the party would soon be leaving the comfort of the restaurant and would see us sitting there, the only people who could have complained. We ran out the gate, down the street and went for a nice, brisk walk through the city at night. We were like little kids running away from bullies because they had got them into trouble with the teacher. And I still wasn’t wearing any shoes.

Chiang Mai is truly worth your time. The hosteling experience wouldn’t be complete without friendly cities like Chiang Mai to soak up your time. There’s plenty of bars and clubs for late night revellers and plenty of hotels, museums and temples for the more distinguished travellers. It served us well for a good six days but we could have been contented staying there for even more time. Next up… (hopefully not in three months…) Laos.