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Published: January 8th 2009
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Karen girl
She was so nice, and made fun of my relatively tiny earring holes. Greetings!
We made it to Vietnam via Cambodia on New Year's Day, after two weeks taking in the culture, temples, and small-town life of northwest Thailand.
Still braised from the southern beaches, we arrived in the north's largest city, Chiang Mai, via train from Bangkok confident that the packs of sweater-clad dogs we encountered en route to our hotel were a good sign that cooler temperatures would prevail. Chiang Mai (pop. 150,000) is a university town and center for Buddhist learning, with over 350 temples crammed into its city center. We strolled around a half-dozen ornate, beautifully preserved 13th and 14th century specimens on our first day in town, including Wat Chiang Man, where we also dropped some Baht buying and releasing a wide assortment of birds (allegedly) purchased from the city food market by locals who then give visitors to the temple a chance to buy and set them free--all in the name of good luck.
As one might expect, orange clad monks dominated the street scene around town. We even took up one temple's offer to talk with an English speaking monk ("Monk Chat," the sign read), thinking we could get some insight into the ascetic
life. Instead, our teenage monk was basically a jackass, who rolled his eyes throughout our chat and who countered our questions with sardonic riddles (e.g., Q: "Do Monks mind being photographed?;" A: "How many megapixels is the human mind?"; Q: "What do you like about life as a monk?" A: "Yeats said it all."). Without exception though, everyone else we encountered in Chiang Mai was incredibly nice, including the inmates at Chiang Mai's Woman's Prison from whom we received surprisingly good foot messages; the Chinese street merchant who let Jub try out his throwing stars and nun chucks even after Anna made it clear they weren't an option for Christmas; and, especially, Ms. Kaidee--whose patience and effervescence throughout our day-long Thai cooking class should have Rachel Ray looking over her shoulder in fear.
From Chiang Mai, we took a pass on the 1,864-curve road heading west (whose infamous reputation we first learned about on popular t-shirts worn around town) in favor of a thirty-minute puddle jumper to the quiet hill-town of Mae Hong Son, which we used as a base to explore the surrounding, emerald green countryside. After a short (and
Eating
Yong the elephant really didn't care what I said or did, so long as she was pointed in the direction of a food source. oft repeated) delay our first morning playing with the puppies who had taken up residence under our hotel, we hired a small boat and motored up-river to the Myanmar border to visit an ethnic Karen refugee village. We then toured around, marveling at the inhabitants' long-neck and ear stretching traditions (Lower East Side eat your heart out), as well as their ability to coax us into buying the colorful, handmade scarves that appeared to form the backbone of the village economy. We also had lots of fun with the village youngsters by giving out pictures from an old-school Polaroid camera Jub has been lugging around. This resulted in a Pied Piper-like trail of kids following us through the village, and in several parents sprinting off to find their kids for family portraits.
The whole experience was cool enough to warrant a repeat, so the following day we rented scooters and "head out on the highways," around town to another, more remote Karen village, then to the Myanmar border (replete with armed, grumpy border guards), the local mud spa, an ethnic Chinese village (where Anna broke out her Mandarin for the first time this trip to procure us some ginger
candy), and a beautiful alpine lake where we joined a group of Japanese tourists performing cheerleader moves in the late-afternoon sunshine. Drama ensued on the way home when Jub's tire blew out; but in a typical display of Thai hospitality, we pointed out the problem to the inhabitants of the first shack we came to, which prompted a teenager (inexplicably wearing a jacket emblazoned with a giant pot leaf) to hop on his scooter and motion for us to follow him a few miles down a small side road, where we came upon a storefront and a cadre of locals who debated the situation amongst themselves before taking off the tire and patching it up as good as new for a whopping $0.90. Back in town, we continued our nightly run on the Mae Hong Son street market, where in one typical twenty minute span we ate (1) fried coconut & corn fritters (2) ginger tea served in bamboo stalks, and (3) black sticky rice covered with coffee syrup; and then watched the flying paper lantern we bought from monks at the lake-side monastery sore 1000 feet into the air.
For Christmas we returned to Chiang Mai, where we
Wat
Chiang Mai tried to fit in with the European scenesters staying at the D2 Hotel. We knew this would be an uphill battle when we walked in to the sounds of a 140 bpm, trance version of "Jingle Bells" and saw the hotel's uber-modern orange Christmas tree. The midnight mass we attended later that night was thankfully more traditional, with lots of Christmas sweaters in the crowd, a live nativity scene, and spirited caroling--although the only words we understood during the hour and a half service were "Bethlehem" and "Galilee." The following day, we celebrated Christmas by laying around the pool and eating a great dinner with all the usual trimmings while preparing to go ride elephants!
That's right, in definitely one of the highlights of our trip, we took a one-day mahout training course at the Thai Elephant Hospital and Conservation Center, where we tried our hands at riding elephants bareback. Our nerves were rattled early on when we noticed a wheelchair, gurney and crutches at the ready, and Jub's did not improve after he was assigned to ride the Center's tallest elephant--at sixteen feet ("same same," one assistant said, pointing back and forth between Jub and the elephant). But
Night market
Mae Hong Son after our instructor grilled fifteen key elephant commands into our heads--thus increasing our Thai vocabulary roughly fifteen-fold--we spent the next several hours practicing all manner of mounts (step on the front leg, pull yourself up by the back of the neck) and dismounts (tell them to kneel down and then jump off over their heads) and trying to stay roughly on course during walks through temptingly yummy fields of grass. The only mild glitch came late in the afternoon when we "bathed" our elephants, which was supposed to consist of us riding them into five feet of water and scrubbing them down. Neither of our elephants were really into the idea, however, and they instead spent most of their bath time in the deep water at the center of the stream, dunking themselves all the way under, leaving us soaked up to the neck. It all seemed like good fun at first, that is until we noticed an entire flotilla of elephant dung all around us in the slow moving water. Suffice to say, once we finished up, the pungent, hour-long taxi ride back to the D2 seemed to take much, much longer.
Stay tuned for stories from the
Mahout Training School
Outside of Lampang, Thailand Mekong Delta and New Year's Eve in Cambodia.
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