The Long Way Home: Chiang Mai

We had thought that the northern Thailand leg of our trip was going to be a single blog post, but we couldn't figure out how to narrow the variety of experiences down into a sane number of words and pictures.  So here's the first half!

We started our short 3 days in Chiang Mai with a relaxing mid-afternoon dip in the pool in the shadow of an old Chedi.

This was basically the photo on hotels.com that sold us on this place

French fries are part of a complete breakfast.

Then we set out to explore the town on foot. We were staying just outside where the city walls used to stand (some of them still do, but are not particularly well preserved), and strolled into the old town to check out some of the “must-see” temple complexes. Chiang Mai was a planned regional capital of the Lan Na empire that was built about 650 years ago, and is just about as dense with amazing stuff as Bangkok but with a lot less noise and smog. We frequently found ourselves diverting into random temples that were as beautiful and elaborate as anything that we saw anywhere else and ended up spending the rest of the evening just exploring.

This wasn't even on the map.

A beautiful evening for giant golden spires

"Rainy Season" = "No Crowds"

Reminded us of Angkor

The locals were exeptionaly welcoming and friendly, Elizabeth and Danger Monkey struck up a conversation with a woman who was at the temple for her daily prayers, but they declined to wait an unknown amount of time for the monk to show up and lead them in meditation. We did eventually make it to Wat Chedi Luang, a historically significant 14th century temple that was damaged in a 17th century earthquake, before getting a bite to eat at a small restaurant specializing in northern Thai cuisine. Michael was adventurous and got the pork-and-chicken-blood soup.

The next morning we had a cooking class, complete with a visit to a local market. By this point we have seen kind of a lot of Southeast Asian wet markets and tried to skip, but to no avail. We got a quick intro to ingredients where we did learn a little bit about Thai cuisine ingredients (which just goes to show that the world is fractal... the closer you look the more you’ll find!), and we let the kids run loose with a hundred Baht each (about $3 US). Eldest picked up some tea, Middle Child got a huge sack of dried mango, and Danger Monkey got a bag of deep-fried pork skin (“skin pops” was apparently the best translation). Then we went to the class itself, and had a blast and learned a ton about Thai food preparation. Big takeaways for us: dark soy sauce is 30% soya sauce, 70% molasses. Massage your noodles in the dark soy sauce before cooking for that even brown color, smash your lemongrass with the side of your knife to get the flavor out, pre-cook the potatoes for massaman curry, throw the pad thai noodles in dry, highest heat all the time, more peppercorns is more better. The resulting food was some of the best thai food we’ve ever had.

All other knives are inferior to this knife.

Helping!  She also peeled the garlic - her favorite kitchen activity.

Yum.

After an afternoon break at the hotel, we negotiated various fares with different “bus” drivers to go to

Google Maps is the universal language

Wat Phrathat Doi Suthep, the temple at the top of the nearest mountain. Every city of any size in Asia has a unique dominant transportation system, and in Chiang Mai they were the “Songthaew”, red pick-up trucks with a covered passenger compartment on the back, with no set route or fare. It was low season so we found a parked one and chatted with the driver, but the standard process is to basically shout at the drivers where you want to go and if that’s the direction they’re roughly headed you can hop in the back. We had to change rides at the edge of town for reasons that are not particularly clear, especially since for the way back we had one driver who brought us all the way from the temple back to our hotel... but we all still had to swap vehicles at the same spot (Michael’s guess was that it had something to do with anti-congestion regulations limiting access to the city center based on license plate digits, requiring us to hop in a truck that was allowed into town that day).

This is actually much safer than the modes of transportation that came later.

At the top of the mountain we hiked up the 300 steps past long undulating naga serpent sculptures to a Buddhist temple that was founded to house one of Buddha’s shoulder bones. The story goes that through some magic, while the relic of was being transported across Thailand to be given to a king, it miraculously split into two bones, each of which regrew into a whole bone. The local king decided to build a temple around one of them, and so tied it to the back of a white elephant and released it into the jungle. The elephant wandered up the hills into the mountains until it found the best spot, circled around it three times, and then laid down and refused to move. Or died, depending on which version of the story you hear. The temple was built on that location, and now pilgrims can circle the Chedi three times to bless their offerings before presenting them to the wide array of Buddha statues and shrines.

So shiny.

We all made small offerings to a wall of donation slots for different causes, to a recreation of the Emerald Buddha (another relic with a similarly suspicious origin story), to write our names on a golden cloth that would be wrapped around a Buddha statue, and some sort of sticky sculpture to which you could adhere coin offerings. Finally, our family was led in a Buddhist mantra by a monk and then blessed with holy water. The flavors of Buddhist philosophy that have gained a foothold in the US are largely devoid of the “carnival religion” atmosphere of Hinduism and Asian Buddhism, and it is hard to convey just how chaotic the temples feel and how participatory they are, even for lay people like us. 

Danger monkey wrote the number "3" in Chinese, because she is 3.  And it is easy to write.

Persistence

Of course it is necessary for every child to ring every bell

There was nothing on top of the platform, sometimes the pillars are the point.

We also found a couple of scenic overlooks and figured out where we had been in Chiang Mai from our eagle’s eye vantage point, and made our way back to town after picking up a couple of souvenirs of traditional northern Thai clothing.

It's a real-life map!

The next day we had a lazy morning, and were picked up by a car and driver for a 3.5 hour ride to Chiang Rai.

Chiang Rai is a market town – it exists almost exclusively as the place where farmers sell food and buy the things they can’t (or don’t care to) make. We explored the town itself the day we arrived and visited the Hill Tribe Museum – two or three rooms on the 3rd floor of a community center with 12-year-old information about the opium trade – and found the statue of the warrior-monk from Chiang Rai that (briefly) unified this part of Thailand. We were in basically the furthest-north settlement of any size in Thailand, so tourist attractions were a little thin on the ground.

Even Wikipedia couldn't tell us why this statue needed *2* whole platters of pigs heads and bottled water

The next day we checked out of our guest house, leaving them with nearly all of our luggage and a basket of dirty laundry, and set out in the back of a pickup truck for the start of our hill tribe trek – 3 days of hiking through the mountains visiting traditional indigenous villages.

The most hotly contested swing in Thailand