Leaving Chaing Mai

Asia » Thailand » North-West Thailand » Chiang Mai
May 8th 2009

Published: May 8th 2009

Now that I have travelled on from Chiang Mai, I want to note some final thoughts about it, before I forget.

It is a lovely city, the Rose of the North as the Thais call it. A small compact city, its centre moated and partially walled in a superb location with the delightfully named Ping River to the east and mountains all about. Only a few miles out of town are several national parks with amazing scenery and sights - such as Doi Suthep and the less commerciallised hilltribe villages.

It was not unusual to see water buffalo and actual farms within the built up area of the city and until recently elephants wandered there too, even close to the moat.

I visited an amazingly interesting museum called The Museum of World Insects and Natural Wonders. This is not so much a museum as a sort of gestalt work of art expressing the beliefs of the museum's founder and his wife. There are lots of wierd exhibits and many bear quirky notices (often in poetry) in both Thai and English, setting out Dr Manop's philosophy of life. One notice in particular commemorates the museum's first visitor - an elephant.

On the day the museum opened for business an elephant ambled into the grounds. This was in 1972, I think, and the museum is only about a quarter of a mile at most outside the moat! The elephant left the museum a gift and its dried feces are still preserved in a glass case!

I mentioned this to show how close to the wild countryside the city was only a few years ago, but it's worth mentioning a few more of the museum's exhibits.

The very first piece collected by Dr Manop was there. A vulture's egg! In fact, as the sign explains, what happened was that when Dr Manop was three his parents took him to the only photographer in Chiang Mai to have his picture taken along with his great-grandmotehr who was then 92. In those days photographers had to hide their heads under big black hoods and little Manop thought it was a ghost and started to cry and the photograph had to be abandoned. When they tried again, as they walked to the photographer through the Tha Phae gate, vultures were hovering over the tall trees that still grow there. Manop saw his grandmother bend down and pick something up and polish it. She told him it was a vulture's egg! Manop really wanted it, but his great-grandmother told him that he could only have it if he was brave and didn't cry at the photographers.

The picture that was taken now hangs in the museum and you can see the bulge in the three year old's trousers where he has pocketed the "egg", actually a stome of course. And that was the start of the collection.

Later on, when he was nine and in wartime he caught malaria and amost died. That started his love affair with the mosquito. He has discovered about 50 new species of mosquito native to Thailand and some are named after him. He catches tehm by acting as bait and when tey bite and start to suck he puts a small glass vial over them, closing teh end with a piece of gauze so they can breathe. There is a lot in the museum about different kinds of mosquito - Dr Manop thinks that they and all other creatures are important and necessary to preserve the world's diversity.

He greeted me when I arrived and thanked me when I left. It must be one of teh most interesting museums in the worls and a great one to bring young children to. Anyway - the point of all this is to show how close elephants used to wander to the city moat.

In other Thai towns I had noticed that shops tended to take up pavement space with stalls or displays so you often had to walk in the roads. Chiang Mai takes this to an extreme and often the shop fronts themselves are on the very verge of the roadway so that there is no pavement at all. But I felt perfectly safe walking there.

Having said that, they do have an odd system of pedestrian traffic lights. There's the red man - Don't Walk - and the green man -Walk - as usual but when you walk in obediance to the lights the cars keep coming. I checked and they do have red lights against them but the practice seems to be that if you can swerve around the chap crossing the road, what's the point of stopping? But they know what they're doing and I always crossed unscathed.

There were loads of restaurants and bars in Chinag Mai, serving both Thai and western food - or their interpretation thereof. In the BMP restaurant you could get a "continental breakfast". I'd have expected something including a couple of croissants but what it was was two slices of toast, butter, jam and sliced banana, mango, pineapple and water melon. And very nice too. I expect the continent thay were thinking off was Asia and not Europe.

Chiang Mai is kept very neat and tidy and appears well organised - apart from the "Songthaew Mafia" who have apparently prevented the provision of a proper bus service. However, I only saw the surface of things of course.

In a small museum I saw an article explaining the "long neck" phenomenom. The long necks are a sub-group of the Karen people whose women have historically put neck ring after neck ring around their necks until their necks appear very long indeed. In recent times this custome is continued because it promotes tourism to their villages. However, the article suggests that rather than elongating their necks the rings, in fact, serve to depress their shoulders. Thus their necks appear long but are actually of normal length.

I visited a fortune teller in the grounds of Wat Chedi Luang. That seems odd in itself - that I can have visited a fortue teller in a temple in Chiang Mai!

She told me that I had lived in Chinag Mai before in anotehr life, that I would meet a woman who would become my lover in about four months, that we would return to Chinag Mai together and that I was a good man. Who knows?

I liked Chinag Mai!

The airport worked efficiently too, when I flew down to Phuket. I didn't do so well. It hadn't occured to me that on a domestic flight you wouldn't be allowed to carry liquids, so I had taken a bottle of water for the journey. But they confiscated it at security. Fortunately, they did allow me to drink most of it, so it wasn't a complete loss. But then, tipped off by my attempted water-smuggling, they searched the rest of my hand luggage and found a bottle of Listerine and my Swiss knife that was given to me by the staff of Rosenthal Hass & Co. I didn't really mind about the Listerine (though I wasn't tempted to drink it) but I would have hated to have lost the knife.

Fortunately they put it in the hold and I was re-united with it at Phuket airport!

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