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Published: March 11th 2007
When last you heard for us we were in Lampang.
From there we caught a bus to Chiang Mai. It was a pretty smooth transfer. We wanted to go to this Elephant Conservation Center which was on the way to Chaing Mai 27 km out of Lampang. We hailed a Songtow to take us there. A songtow is a little pickup truck with benches in the back. It turned out to be not such a good idea. The poor little old beater could only go 30 mph on the flats with a tailwind. So we're going up the highway at 25 and every other vehicle is whipping past us at 50 or 60. I kept expecting to get squashed like a bug on the grill of one of the big trucks rolling up the highway. Anyway, we got there OK and just in time for the 10:00 elephant show, which was really silly. First they demonstrated how they train the beasts and used them in the logging (now banned), which was interesting. Then it got silly when they got an elephant rhythm section going and the MC sung along. The best part was the elephant artists. They did paintings under
close of their mahouts (handlers). One did abstracts (not much supervision) and one did flowers (lots of supervision). It was too funny. They sell the paintings for 400 baht ($13). We were going to buy one but they were too big to haul around for the next few months.
Next we took the obligatory elephant ride, 30 minutes for 400 baht. It was a slow motion affair, I don't think you can rush an elephant. Our mount was kind of lazy, it would just stop and stand there until the mahout urged it to continue on by jiggling it's ears with his feet.
We had lunch there, collected our backpacks from the ticket booth and hiked out to the road to catch a bus. We got really lucky. As we walked up to the road a bus was just pulling away from dropping someone off and it stopped again for us. It was a non-ac bus but it was only about an hour to Chaing Mai so it was alright.
We got here and got off the bus and realized that we did not have the address of the hotel. We had the phone number but were
out of minutes on our cell phone. Duh? Just a little hiccup in what was otherwise a pretty smooth trip. We worked it out and found our hotel without too much trouble.
We spent 4 nights in Chiang Rai (CR). The first day was a bit of a roller coaster. Our plan was to visit some Wats in the old city and then do some planning. In the morning when we were getting ready we could not find the camera. We looked everywhere, and then looked again. No camera. Needless to say we were really depressed. By lunch we had reconciled ourselves to no more pics. By mid-afternoon we had concluded it was better that way. Our friends will appreciate not having to act interested during our boring slide shows. It's better this way. We were getting ready to go out for a nice dinner, it was Valentines Day, when Karen found the camera hidden in her pack. "I can't believe we found the camera!" replaced the earlier mantra "I can't believe we lost the camera - AGAIN!"
We got over finding the camera faster than we got over losing it. We had a really nice dinner, I
Chinese New Year Lion
It is now the year of the pig.had my first good martini since we've been here, at this really swell hotel along the Ping river (The Cheddi). After dinner the staff was helping diners launch Thai hot air balloons. These balloons are 4 foot tall cylinders ( 18" in diameter) and they have a kerosene wick or torch attached to the bottom. You light the torch, the hot air from the torch fills the balloon, and when full you let it go and make a wish. The balloons shoot up into the night sky and after about 10 minutes drift out of sight. The sky was full of them from all over town, it was really cool.
The next day we took a Thai cooking class. The menu consisted of fish cakes, pomelo salad, roasted duck with red curry and black sticky rice for desert. Everything was really awesome, and now we know how to make it. How cool is that. The cooking school was about 15 k from the old town in a very nice quiet setting. It was hands on and it was an open air kitchen. What a nice day.
The next day we wanted to get out of town to visit
Wat Doi Suthep overlooking the city and see some waterfalls. The songtow driver we hooked up with had other ideas. He had a few people he was taking to the wat then to the winter residence of the king and after that to a hill tribe village nearby. We decided to go along for the program. It turned out to be a very nice day. The story on the Wat is that a Buddha relic in Chiang Mai miraculously cloned itself so they wanted to build a new wat for it. They put the relic on an elephant and turned the site selection process over to the mighty beast. After walking around for a few days it came upon the site of the future wat, turned around three times and dropped dead. Well I guess that settled that. The wat was really magnificent and the view great except that it was a little hazy. From there we went to the royal residence which the king in his infinite beneficence allowed is to tour. They had the nicest gardens I've ever seen anywhere. It's good to be king. After that we went to the village which was basically a shopping stop.
Fellow travellers
We toured around with these Thai Army guys one day in Chiang Mai. That's our sawngthaew driver's finger in the corner. Our fellow travelers were two Thai army guys, one of whom spoke a little English, we had our pic taken with them.
With that we left Chiang Mai for Chiang Rai, a 3 hour bus ride. We did the normal Wat touring and planning the next day and decided that the best way to see this area was to rent a car. We rented a little Honda Jazz and went up to a Chinese village about 1 1/2 hours away. The story is that this Chinese regiment was fighting the Burmese in Burma when the Nationalist government fell to the communists. The regiment figured that as they were on the losing side of the revolution there was no future for them in China so they marched into Northern Thailand and settled there. Once there they got into the opium business. Their commander became one of the most notorious opium warlords in the north. In the '70s he surrendered and they moved onto other cash crops. They now grow some very highly regarded tea and coffee and get a lot of tourists like us coming through to give them cash for their crop. It was nice to get out and
drive around and see the small towns and countryside.
The deal seems to be that the valley floors are good farmland and have been settled for centuries by ethnic Thais. As problems have arisen in Burma, Laos and China refugees have settled in the higher less desirable lands. One of the largest groups are then ethnic Karens from Burma. They are fighting a war against the Burmese government. Hundreds of thousands of refugees have fled to Thailand to escape the fighting. As they are very poor the can only afford to live in the old traditional ways, thatched roof houses, subsistence slash and burn agriculture. These villages look really quaint to tourists and have become one of the main tourist attractions in Northern Thailand. The epitome of this is the long necked ethnic Karen villages. In these villages enterprising Thias have found refugee ethnic Karen women from Burma willing to wear the disfiguring brass rings around their necks in villages built for this purpose. We skipped the long neck tour villages.
The next day we took another drive and visited Doi Tung (flag peak) which has two, you guessed it, Wats built on the mountaintop near the Burmese
Wat Phra That Doi Suthep
One of the most sacred temples in the north. It is reached by climbing 300 steps. border. This is the oldest stupa in Lanna the kingdom in the north that preceded the Thai kingdoms. It contains a Buddha relic, of course, a piece of his clavicle brought here from India in like 700 AD. After the Wat we drove on this great little road along the Burmese border up to the northernmost Thai city of Mae Sai. The border area was highly militarized, they need to manage their Karen refugee problem. We had to pass through a military checkpoint every 5 k or so. Mae Sai was a not so pretty little border town. We had lunch at a boodle shop and moved on.
On the way back to Chiang Rai we visited a cave. Not having proper torches, we rented these funky gas generator torches and explored the cave. It was a really nice cave.
The next day, Feb 21, we caught a bus to the border town of Chiang Khong. We plan on catching a slow river boat down to Luang Prabang in the Peoples Democratic Republic of Laos from across the Mekong River in Huay Xai. We are not sure what we Will find in Laos in the way of tourist infrastructure.
Wat Phra That Doi Suthep Gong
Kevin was very excited by this gong. They only opened up to full scale tourism about 10 years ago. There is only one ATM in the country. I am not sure about the net, so if you don't hear from us for the next few weeks you'll know why.
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Mark
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Gong Envy
Need I say more.... Welcome to daylight savings time - baby!!! Spring is here (I hope).