Thailand: Chiang Mai, Pai, Cooking

---

Righty righty

Thailand: the land of a billion holidaymakers.

Having departed Laos via Luang Prabang airport, which is smaller than your average bus station, or even your smallest bus station, we flew into Chiang Mai in Northern Thailand, which instantly provided us with a bird’s eye view of the level of development in Thailand. The buildings and roads served as an announcement that we were arriving in a nation that was far ahead of its neighbours.

Having taken a taxi into Chiang Mai and done the usual 30 minute sweaty search for a cheap room, we settled on a little place inside the old city moat. Despite expecting it, we were both somewhat startled by the extent to which the tourist industry dominated every part of the town we had seen thus far. Bars, bookshops, cafes, all things that had been present in Vietnam and Laos, were here too, but it was in their design and furnishing that differentiated them so dramatically. Here they are hip, kooky, trendy, busy, but above all, they’ve had lots of money pumped into them. It was apparent within 5 minutes what was key to Thailand’s success as a tourist destination: they know what we want, and they have the means to provide it. If it’s smoothies above a bookshop or Premiership football with a pool table, everyone’s strongest desires are catered for.

These ‘desires’ are the hardest thing to witness. 60 year old perverts with young Thai ‘girlfriends’ are everywhere, and it doesn’t get any more bearable to look at. Laura is clinging to the hope that all of the blokes are being fleeced for all they’re worth. Doesn’t matter how many times you see it, or how friendly the old Western bloke in the hotel is to you, you can’t help but have absolute disdain for these characters. Anyway, on a cheerier note, I can grab a mango and pineapple smoothie and watch football.

We didn’t stick about long in Chiang Mai - we went to the night bazaar on our first night and had some great food for about a quid - but the very next morning we headed North West to Pai, a little town in the mountains near the border with Burma. This involved a trip on an infamous road - one that has 762 curves no less - utterly nauseating. We had to stop several times for vomit breaks. Me and Laura fortunately were vomit free. What was more frightening was the fact that we were the only people on the little minibus that were not Western old men with a young female Thai escort. Laura talked about old warts a lot, quite loudly. We had been told that Pai was a real retreat - one of the few true backpacker spots left in Thailand, somewhat remote, beautiful and quiet. So seeing Billy the Perv and his mates on the bus was not what we were expecting.

Nevertheless, we were not disappointed by Pai. To describe it as retreat would be a blatant lie, but it is a beautiful place. Nestled by a river amongst the mountains, hot in the day and cool at night, Pai occupied 4 days of our time, but we could easily have stayed there longer. We searched long and hard for a decent place to stay. I don’t know if Laura mentioned on her previous blog about the sanding, but in short, in Laos we spent a solid 7 days, in various locations, being woken up at 7 or 8am to the sound of electric sanding, metal cutting, and hammering - even in places that had no electricity. Thus, finding somewhere peaceful as well as cheap was absolutely paramount. After at least an hour of heaving our heavy rucksacks about, and a frosty encounter with a rip off merchant, we found a stunning place by the river. Although within spitting distance of the town, it felt very remote, was totally peaceful aside from wildlife, and cost less than 4 quid a night. It was another bamboo bungalow, with a mattress on the floor and a manual flushing toilet, but we are now well accustomed to such things, and it was great.

We spent our time reading, eating fantastic street food. At night the main street of the town came alive with vendors selling food, jewellery, t-shirts and everything in between. I was a particular fan of the VW Campervans that converted into coffee houses.

We rented a motorbike and explored some of the surrounding area, notably some waterfalls, which did not compare favourably to those in Laos. The highlight, however, was being stopped by 30 Thai Army Officers armed with machine guns, who wanted to search our bike. It was obviously some kind of PR stunt as they were being filmed by Thai TV and everyone was remarkably nice. It only took a few mins and we were on our way again.

Besides eating and drinking (lots of Song Sam whiskey, straight, which nobody could get their head around), we did very little else of interest. There was some live music every night, but the covers soon got boring. One Thai bloke singing Pete Doherty’s ‘For Lovers’ didn’t get the joke when I gave him my trilby, and that was about it. We did meet Cameron and Holly, a nice Australian couple on our last evening, with whom we had some pleasing larks. Cameron was a Dylan fan, and I promised him Suze Rotolo’s novel, A Freewheelin’ Time, and agreed to drop it off in the morning along with our email addresses. Unfortunately, our minibus was early and we didn’t have time to drop off the novel, so unless we spend several days searching through Facebook, they are long lost.

We got back to Chiang Mai on 13th Nov, searched high and low for a decent guesthouse, as we wanted to be somewhere decent for my birthday, and eventually came across an absolute gem. Lanna Lodge, set in depths of the alley network of Chiang Mai, proved to be a great find. It had things we hadn’t had for a while: a bed as well as a mattress, a TV, a fan, air conditioning, windows, and best of all, a view - lots of views. Our room gave us a 360 degree view of Chiang Mai. It was cleaned everyday and the owner, who teaches tourism at the university, was ludicrously nice.

TO DO

My birthday was a relatively uneventful affair, besides going to Monk Chat at a monastery. This was not something out of Father Ted; it provided us with the opportunity to speak to a monk about all things Buddhist, and all things monk. For the monk, it provided him with an opportunity to practice his English. Our chap was very nice, in his early 20s, and keen to tell us how happy he was, which was nice. We learnt more about the religion that so dominates this part of the world, which for that very reason made it worthwhile.

We went for a very pleasant meal in the evening, had some red wine for the first time in nearly a month, and generally enjoyed being somewhere with cloth napkins.

On Sunday we went across the river, had food at a little cafe in which the proprietor spoke no English, which was in fact a welcome change, and made our way to an art museum... or so we thought. It turned out to be a very strange little place, that effectively provided a nostalgia fest for anyone interested in objects, both Asian and otherwise, from the last 100 years. Everything from phonographs to Rod Stewart cassettes, and Buddha statues to photographs of humping elephants, was contained within this strange, dusty place. We were the only tourists there. In fact, aside from a cackling old man who liked to point our photographs to us, we were the only ones there. Laura then went down into meltdown, so we retreated back to the air conditioning, which in turn made us both ill in itself. In the evening we headed to a mall that is apparently where all the youngsters hang out. We had enjoyed our surreal adventures in shopping malls in China and Hong Kong, particularly in relation to the food courts, and we were met with more of the same here. It was nice to get into the outskirts of the city, sit on a bench, and watch ordinary Thai people go about their business. On returning to the hotel, our TV provided something marvellous: A Bridge Too Far. Not an absolute classic, but decent nonetheless, and it provided me with my own little nostalgic feast, a day after turning 24.

The next day proved to be a day of boundless fun. It was of course the day of the cooking course. Laura booked us on to the Thai Farm Cookery School, which is an organic farm situated outside of the city, and is rated as just about the best cooking school in the area. The list of things they grow on the farm is worthy of a prize in itself. I started off with a yellow curry and Laura a green curry. I asked for as many chillies as they would give me, and set to work. The results were splendid, but considering that we ate it for lunch in addition to four other dishes we had cooked: tom yam soup, vegetable coconut soup, papaya salad, and chicken and cashew nuts, we could barely make a dent upon the feast laid out in front of us.

In the afternoon we prepared various dishes, the highlight of which was of course Sam’s masterful spring rolls, which had the teacher purring... (I’ve put this in just to annoy Laura in case you hadn’t already realised). We got to take our food back to the hotel in doggy bags, along with a recipe booklet, and smiled for the whole evening, even though Laura managed to acquire a fever (it was about 32 degrees outside).

The other highlight of our time in Chiang Mai came in the form of a visit to the Elephant Nature Park. Thailand is loaded with elephant related activities, particularly in Chiang Mai, and no 2 or 3 day trek exists without an elephant ride or bathing session. This is precisely the reason we didn’t do a trek. Without getting preachy, the way the elephants involved in these treks get treated, in the vast majority of cases, is frankly evil, and we wanted no part in it. Anyway, we came across this place, which has featured, in an entirely positive fashion, in the National Geographic, Time magazine, all the major world newspapers, and every TV channel you could care to mention. The founder of the park, ‘Lek’ is a diminutive woman who has dedicated her life to saving and looking after elephants, much to the detriment of her own health. The park itself is an elephant paradise, and I hope that the photos we have taken go some way to illustrate the majestic beauty of the sanctuary. Tamed elephants go through a week of torture at the hands of their owners, before they are then used in treks, taught tricks, or most hideously of all, paraded through Chiang Mai or Bangkok as part beggar, part tourist attraction. There are 34 rescued elephants on the park, and we spent an entire day with them. We fed them, bathed them, and Laura even got a kiss from one. The park gets no funding from the government, so it relies entirely on the money generated by tourism. Jokia, an elephant blinded in both eyes by its mahout after it refused to work following the death of its baby, was my favourite. It required a tap on the trunk to let it know food was coming, which brings me to the next point: these kids can eat!

Elephants eat 10% of their own body weight, per day. We were feeding them huge baskets full of bananas, watermelons, pumpkins, and bamboo. They will easily digest a whole pineapple, and the noises they make whilst they eat are frankly superb. I’m not a big animal lover, and neither is Laura, but it was a truly stunning experience, and we felt totally justified, in every conceivable manner, in not doing a trek involving elephants. Any tourists giving money to the mahouts of elephants being paraded around Bangkok, thus encouraging the continuation of such acts will fall victim to our wrath!

So anyway, elephants good, chillies good, western perverts bad. Laura has reacted badly to the air conditioning, neither of our stomachs are coping too well with all the spices, regardless of how much both of us love hot food, but the good news is our malaria tablet course has come to an end, which should prompt something of a return to our usual physical prowess...

I type this now on our new little laptop thing, on the train to Bangkok, which although a sleeper, is an absolute loser when compared to the majesty of the Trans Siberian trains. The train was nearly 3 hours late, and the entire carriage is occupied by tourists complaining about the length of the journey... 14 hours - PAH! A drop in... a Siberian lake.

Got to stop typing now as the swaying of the train is making me feel sick. When I post this it will mean that we are in Bangkok. What fun awaits????

---