Mae Sariang & Chiang Mai, Thailand

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Back in Chiang Mai after spending a few days in Mae Sariang. MS is lovely - a really rustic little town. I was in a guest house on the river, and was nice to sit out on my littl (actually quite large) teak veranda, reading and watching the local farmer herd his cows through the river on the opposite bank.

I had hoped to pick up a trek from there, but it's low season, and most of the guides appeared to have packed up and gone on to more seasonal employment elsewhere. However, there were a couple of little villages within walking distance, so I saw a bit of the locale, including gatecrashing a temple festival, and forcing some poor women to let me shelter from the rain in her house because I though it was a museum. She couldn't have been nicer about it if she'd been running an actual museum.

I also met a few Karen tribes people at a hostel, on the edge of town, run by the Baptist church. The girls were in these fantastic, long embroidered white dresses. It was a Sunday morning, and I think I'd stumbled onto their (Baptist) service - there were a couple of lads with guitars playing to a small crowd of younger kids. Mindful of my habit of gatecrashing and forcing my way into places without an invite, I didn't hang around long, but left them to it.

Yesterday I caught a bus from Mae Sariang back to Chiang Mai. I'd hoped to fit in a visit to Mae Sot, but would have been a bit of a rush, so decided to give it a miss.

This morning I mooched around CM. Crossed the river and ended up at the small museum attached to Wat Ket. The museum is housed in some old outbuildings in the Wat grounds, and apart from the little old guy in charge of the place, I was the only person there. As I started to wander through the rooms, he switched a cd player on, and my tour took place to the backing track of some jazzy, plinky plinky thai pop music, that sounded about fifty years old.

The museum exhibits didn't seem to be arranged in any particular order; old coins placed next to bits of fossilised tree, next to some black and white photographs of a bunch of stern looking monks. Some of the labels were in english, but whoever had placed them wasn't able to read them, so some old coins wwre labelled A Vase, small buddha images were labelled Old Photographs of Chiang Mai, and so on.

Apart from the usual exhibits, there were lots of old pieces of electronic equipment and the like - an ancient television set, several old radios, some old tape recorders, both reel to reel and cassette, making the place a cross between a museum and a spare parts shop. More incongruous still were the tape cassette versions of Isely Brothers and Rod Stewart albums. When I found an old record player, with a stack of old 45s and 78s gathering dust on one of the shelves, with a copy of Mary Hogden's (who???) version of Elvis's Hound Dog, I collared the old guy, and asked him where it all came from, and what it was doing in his museum. Apparently, there was some english bloke called Mr Jack Baines, who had a company in Burma, and all the electronic equpment - the tellys, the radios, the typewriters, the Rod Stewart cassette, all came from his house. The guide didn't speak much english, so wasn't able to tell me much, but pulled out an old photo - black and white, sepia tinted- of five european blokes, dressed in cricket whites, and pointed out one of them as Mr Jack. He was blonde and moustacioud, and had that definite colonial air about him. The photo, clothes etc looked early 20C. It felt qute poigniant, all Mr. Jack's possessions ending up on dusty shelves in a backwater thai temple, thousands of miles away from home, with only the little old guy to remember who he was. I realise I'm probably over romanticising a little here, but there you go.

This afternoon, i did the girly thing, and went and had a massage at one of the flashy spas in Chiang Mai. Once laid down on the table, the masseuse switched on some plinky plonky music that I imagine she thought was relaxing. Unfortunately, it was an instrumental version of Chim Chiminey, from the film Mary Poppins, and thinking of Dick van Dyke's truly horrendous cockney accent had the opposite affect.

Anyway, had an hour and a half of pummeling, that made me thing of the Victoria Line, in rush hour, when all the buses are on strike - elbows everywhere. Once I got into it was actually quite relaxing, considering I was being beaten up!!

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Comments

[wendy street]

Could be a real man !
Surprised you have never heard of Jack Baines - I haven't either, but thought you might have. Actually, Neville Shute wrote about some English guy who ended up in Burma after the war - he ended up starting up a lucrative business and married a local girl. Shute often wrote about real people he met or knew.