Outside Chiang Mai, there are low mountains covered in bright green jungle, valleys with floating threads of mist, and then dirt roads and flooded fields. The city itself feels like Bangkok's sleepy country cousin, with few tall buildings and many backyard chicken farms. When I looked out the window, I saw a lot of corrugated steel rooftops. Bangkok, when I left, was building itself up out of the newest and best of everything. Chiang Mai is less ambitious.
The old city is a rectangle surrounded by sections of reconstructed walls, a murky green moat, and two roads with heavy traffic. There are fewer cars than in Bangkok, but more motorcycles, and countless songthaew -- red or yellow pickup trucks that function as group taxis or very small buses. Chiang Mai's motorcyclists fear nothing but dishonour. Causes of dishonour include slowing down or stopping for any reason. Though nothing to compare with traffic in Indian cities, which was like an urban planner's bad acid trip, crossing the road in Chiang Mai is still something you don't do without a reason.
Inside the moat are temples, travel agencies, massage parlours, scooter dealerships, restaurants, and juice bars. I stopped at a juice bar, and they were playing a mix of soft rock classics that had all been reworked to give them a beachy, girl-from-Ipanema sound.
The temples are very interesting. Two had spookily realistic wax models of famous resident monks. One had a 'Monk Chat' program, intended to allow monks to practice their English by teaching tourists about Buddhism and Thai culture. I thought about chatting with the monks. It seemed like my amazing ignorance of Buddhism and Thai culture would be kind of a treat for them. But there were half a dozen monks sitting around and no other tourists, so there would have been a lot of pressure to produce chat. I'm not good at chat in general, and this was a highly specialized kind of chat.
Monks get priority seating on public transport in Thailand. On the Bangkok metro, and in the airport, there would be a row of icons above the priority seats: Crutches, a pregnant woman, a baby, and a monk's robe. There are large numbers of monks in Chiang Mai. The first I saw were in a shopping mall I cut through just after getting into the city; there were four or five of them in the Sony store, looking at laptops. This mall, by the way, would have disgraced any neighbourhood in Bangkok. It was disorderly and grubby, and there were no luxury-brand stores. It was a bit like a dying shopping mall back home; that stage when malls are a bit dark and worn and shabby and there are tables set up in the halls selling weird selections of merchandise.
Possibly because of the night bazaar, the new city is even more touristy than the old. It's full of bars with 6-hour happy hours, t-shirt stalls, fish spas, massage parlours, beer gardens, and restaurants. The restaurants all have English names, except one, which is German; Thai waitresses stand outside this one wearing Bavarian aprons and Tyrolean hats. The beer gardens are more or less actual gardens, which might be the result of a happy misunderstanding of the English phrase. All the 'beer gardens' I've otherwise seen have been crowded bits of ashphalt, fenced in with crowd-control barriers, where you can buy $7 Budweisers. They should have to call these sorts of operations 'beer ghettos'.
The number of massage parlours is very impressive. You think at first that you must be in the massage district, but they never become sparser. As you pass them, the women out front call 'massaaaaaage?'. This question hangs in the air wherever you go. The word loses its meaning, and starts to sound like the call of some ubiquitous tropical bird.
The idea of a fish spa is that you sit with your feet in a fish tank, and tiny fish nibble the dead skin off them. There's a fish spa every block or two. The success of the fish spas having shown that people are comfortable being cleaned by animals, it's strange that no one has taken the concept any further. Having people stand around with their heads back and their mouths open while birds clean their teeth seems like the obvious next step.
Whatever the night bazaar may once have been, it's been hollowed out by mass tourism and is now essentially the same as any tourist market anywhere; just larger, and open at night. There are countless stalls selling the same things; maybe a dozen sets of mass-produced merchandise account for 95% of the bazaar. It makes you feel a bit bad, as a tourist. It makes you think, what have we done, with our unslakable thirst for joke t-shirts and teddy bear dioramas and pencil sketches of Bob Marley? The stalls repeat themselves pointlessly for blocks and blocks, stretching down side alleys and into covered markets and adjacent open spaces.
One of the more interesting types of stalls sells selections of local insects (possibly fake) in glass cases. I didn't see anything as disturbing as the Toronto house centipede. The scariest insects I've come across in Thailand are the mosquitoes I sometimes found in my room at the guest house. Enormous things. When I found one, I was never sure whether to swat it or get it drunk and shove it in front of a bus.
What I did most days was to get up late and then walk around aimlessly, hoping to see something interesting and to not get run over. This is mostly fine, if you're unambitious, and I am. On Thursday, though, I started to get a bit tired of it, and booked a rock climbing trip for the following day
The following day, as I ate breakfast, it started to rain heavily. The climbing trip was off. I walked into the old city to get my deposit back, and spent an hour or so fooling about on the guiding service's bouldering wall. I expected to be weak, and I was, but didn't realize how soft my hands had gotten. I tore up them up impressively, losing six large and two small flaps of skin. This is probably the only bit of climbing I'll get to do in Thailand.
In the departures lounge in Chiang Mai airport, a group of children in traditional dress were playing traditional music on traditional instruments. All the passengers were huddled up in the other end of the room. The children looked a bit demoralized.
The old city is a rectangle surrounded by sections of reconstructed walls, a murky green moat, and two roads with heavy traffic. There are fewer cars than in Bangkok, but more motorcycles, and countless songthaew -- red or yellow pickup trucks that function as group taxis or very small buses. Chiang Mai's motorcyclists fear nothing but dishonour. Causes of dishonour include slowing down or stopping for any reason. Though nothing to compare with traffic in Indian cities, which was like an urban planner's bad acid trip, crossing the road in Chiang Mai is still something you don't do without a reason.
Inside the moat are temples, travel agencies, massage parlours, scooter dealerships, restaurants, and juice bars. I stopped at a juice bar, and they were playing a mix of soft rock classics that had all been reworked to give them a beachy, girl-from-Ipanema sound.
The temples are very interesting. Two had spookily realistic wax models of famous resident monks. One had a 'Monk Chat' program, intended to allow monks to practice their English by teaching tourists about Buddhism and Thai culture. I thought about chatting with the monks. It seemed like my amazing ignorance of Buddhism and Thai culture would be kind of a treat for them. But there were half a dozen monks sitting around and no other tourists, so there would have been a lot of pressure to produce chat. I'm not good at chat in general, and this was a highly specialized kind of chat.
Monks get priority seating on public transport in Thailand. On the Bangkok metro, and in the airport, there would be a row of icons above the priority seats: Crutches, a pregnant woman, a baby, and a monk's robe. There are large numbers of monks in Chiang Mai. The first I saw were in a shopping mall I cut through just after getting into the city; there were four or five of them in the Sony store, looking at laptops. This mall, by the way, would have disgraced any neighbourhood in Bangkok. It was disorderly and grubby, and there were no luxury-brand stores. It was a bit like a dying shopping mall back home; that stage when malls are a bit dark and worn and shabby and there are tables set up in the halls selling weird selections of merchandise.
Possibly because of the night bazaar, the new city is even more touristy than the old. It's full of bars with 6-hour happy hours, t-shirt stalls, fish spas, massage parlours, beer gardens, and restaurants. The restaurants all have English names, except one, which is German; Thai waitresses stand outside this one wearing Bavarian aprons and Tyrolean hats. The beer gardens are more or less actual gardens, which might be the result of a happy misunderstanding of the English phrase. All the 'beer gardens' I've otherwise seen have been crowded bits of ashphalt, fenced in with crowd-control barriers, where you can buy $7 Budweisers. They should have to call these sorts of operations 'beer ghettos'.
The number of massage parlours is very impressive. You think at first that you must be in the massage district, but they never become sparser. As you pass them, the women out front call 'massaaaaaage?'. This question hangs in the air wherever you go. The word loses its meaning, and starts to sound like the call of some ubiquitous tropical bird.
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| Why should I donate to your temple? |
Whatever the night bazaar may once have been, it's been hollowed out by mass tourism and is now essentially the same as any tourist market anywhere; just larger, and open at night. There are countless stalls selling the same things; maybe a dozen sets of mass-produced merchandise account for 95% of the bazaar. It makes you feel a bit bad, as a tourist. It makes you think, what have we done, with our unslakable thirst for joke t-shirts and teddy bear dioramas and pencil sketches of Bob Marley? The stalls repeat themselves pointlessly for blocks and blocks, stretching down side alleys and into covered markets and adjacent open spaces.
One of the more interesting types of stalls sells selections of local insects (possibly fake) in glass cases. I didn't see anything as disturbing as the Toronto house centipede. The scariest insects I've come across in Thailand are the mosquitoes I sometimes found in my room at the guest house. Enormous things. When I found one, I was never sure whether to swat it or get it drunk and shove it in front of a bus.
What I did most days was to get up late and then walk around aimlessly, hoping to see something interesting and to not get run over. This is mostly fine, if you're unambitious, and I am. On Thursday, though, I started to get a bit tired of it, and booked a rock climbing trip for the following day
The following day, as I ate breakfast, it started to rain heavily. The climbing trip was off. I walked into the old city to get my deposit back, and spent an hour or so fooling about on the guiding service's bouldering wall. I expected to be weak, and I was, but didn't realize how soft my hands had gotten. I tore up them up impressively, losing six large and two small flaps of skin. This is probably the only bit of climbing I'll get to do in Thailand.
In the departures lounge in Chiang Mai airport, a group of children in traditional dress were playing traditional music on traditional instruments. All the passengers were huddled up in the other end of the room. The children looked a bit demoralized.
