Chiang Mai Seemed like Thailand's Santa Barbara to me

Culture Shock all over again. The last few days in India beat me up pretty bad. My fault -- too much traveling, too fast, a night on a train here, a grave yard flight there and a series of small bad-luck incidents left me feeling deservedly exhausted. Once on the plane, I realized that I had absolutely no plan for Thailand. I'd bought a Thailand Lonely Planet before I left so I cracked it and did some reading. I decided that I'd go north to Chiang Mai as fast as I could and just chill out where ever I ended up for a few days. The Airlines in Thailand are amazing. I landed at 6:30am. By 7:30 I was through customs and standing in line for an Air ticket and by 8:30am I was sitting on a plane going north. In Thailand, you can walk up, buy a perfectly reasonably priced ticket (about $80) and go. It would have taken at least $600 to do the same thing in the states. We think we are so civilized...

So, once again I was totally unprepared for the culture shock. In reverse this time. It's hard to explain what it's like to see padded stainless steel chairs and molding that looks like it was made in the past 10yrs, or modern looking cars, lights, marketing graphics, carpets. My god, airports w/ carpeting. -- To see those things like you were seeing them for the first time. Again. Streets that I'd be ready to eat off of. It was just strange.

I was really trying to just chill out so I didn't manage to take the camera with me much (or use it if I did). Chaing Mai is amazingly nice, a little touristy, but nice. They have what is called a night-market where malls and streets are nearly deserted by day, but as soon as the sun goes down, they open up and the streets are filled w/ vendors. As in so many places in Asia, stall after stall mostly selling the same items.

In desperate need of some exercise after India I rented a mountain bike and rode (almost) to the top of a nearby mountain. The view was really nice and made Chiang Mai look a lot bigger than it seems. Damn. No camera.

Gap's House Patio	One of my offices

I managed to get a room at Gap's House, which turned out to be an incredible place for the money. No wonder they don't take reservations. So I had to get a dumpy room at another hotel, and keep showing up the next morning until someone left. They did. A nearby coffee shop w/ wireless served as a nice place to work. The VPN didn't work w/ their internet provider (which seems to be the case in about 1/3 of the places I find) so there was a nice internet shop w/ a desk to work at across the street. My Office.

So, what the heck did I do for 4 days? Just a lot of chilling out, work, exploring the town and talking to people about where to go...

This is the quaintest little touristy town I've ever seen. And I didn't manage to take any pictures.
First a little lesson in Thai: Ph (as in Phuket) is pronounced like P (not F) but is aspirated. Like you'd say "P(uh)". A P, without the 'h' is not aspirated. Like Puh, without the uh. Now if you try that, you notice that P and B become nearly the same thing, w/o the aspiration so Pie ends up sounding a lot like "Bye" but without the vocal that B usually gets. Thai only gets more complicated from here. It's really hard to learn and I'm amazed at the people that do...

Bamboo Bungalows near Pie

I thought Pie would be small and quaint. It was, but it was basically just a 6 blocks square mall of guest houses, restaurants, bars and shops all catering to tourists, rather than a town. Someone mentioned that about 40 businesses had just gone in for this tourist season alone. There were brand new trucks marked "Tourist Police" driving around. I guess you go to them if you have trouble w/ a hotel or other bad element. Someone mentioned that something like a fifth or fourth of the stores, restaurants, and guest houses (along with a traffic light and a 7-11) had just gone in before the start of this season. Now, that's growth!

Have I become a travel snob? I never really worried about how "touristy" places were. But I guess that's starting to change. Really, other travelers/tourists don't bother me. I've never been someone who goes backpacking and gets sad when I see other people. But I think what I've found that I don't like is when the place that your visiting turns itself inside out trying to cater to visitors so that the thing that people came to see in the first place is buried beneath a layer of tourist-infrastructure. Maybe that's what made India so intense -- aside from the cheap guesthouses/hotels, they barely have infrastructure period, let alone, tourist infrastructure.

I met an interesting couple (older) with the observation that first places become safe, then the backpackers come, and then some small infrastructure gets built up for that. Once this is established, the tourist infrastructure keeps coming and starts getting aimed at people w/ more money (backpackers tend to travel cheap). Once that happens, things start to grow fast. So the upshot is that there starts to be a little formula for investment: watch where the backpackers are beginning to go.

So with the above in mind, and with no pics, let me just say that Pie is pretty much 85% tourist infrastructure. Quaint and interesting tourist infracture, but tourist infracture none the less. So, I took advantage of said infrastructure, got a quaint place bamboo hut by the river (about $12) and rented myself a another nice mountain bike. (About $2.50/day). Rode up to a nice hot-spring, but it didn't seem clothing optional, so I opted to stay dry. I forgot to take pics of that. I did get pics of a nice canyon w/ fins you could walk out on -- my legs gave out before I made it to the waterfall.

One of the touristy things to do in Pie is to take a "Village Trek" where you are guided to local villages.

I'd met some people on the bus and eventually we signed up on one of the "treks" sold by so many guest houses and other shops. Only two day, overnight in a local hill-tribe village. Three of us wanted the 3 day treck, but there was already this 2 day set up with some other Cannuks and a guide w/ really good English.

Anyway, the night before the trek, we were invited to eat the results of Marcelle & Richard culinary studies as they enrolled in a cooking class at a guest house. Damn, it was good and inspiration to take one myself when the time is right. There was plenty for all and some others came and joined in on dinner too later.

I'll note now that these were some really great folks, right up there w/ the people that I met in India.

So we hiked through jungle & forest, passing by small villages....

above-right: These are vines that have grown up around a tree, which eventually was killed off, but the vines became so thick that they stand on their own in the form of the tree.

A woman (not a man, only women!) bounces up and down on the end of this thing to pound the husks off of the rice at the opposite end of the "teeter-totter."

"Hill Tribe" people in Northern Thailand aren't Thai. They speak their own languages, originate from other countries, aren't necessarily Thai citizens, are (or were) nomadic and live in an extremely primitive way. Thai is their second language, if they speak it at all. This is the area known as "The Golden Triangle" of Burma [now call Myanmar], Thailand and Laos. Until recently, their cash crop was opium.

The guy in the center grew opium since he was a boy and was addicted since the age of 16 or so (he didn't know how old he was -- he was guessing 40, judging by crop rotations). He's since kicked opium but is now an alcoholic. Several years ago Thailand cracked down hard on opium growers. They were ordered to stop by the Thai govt on penalty of death. Some were tried, others just disappeared. He estimated 6000 people killed before the opium stopped being grown. Now it is mainly still grown a few miles to the north in Burma, out of Thai jurisdiction.

The village pictured above was an older style, nomadic Lahu village. The one we stayed at (below) felt like a movie set. Everything clean, new, solar panels and TV antennas. I thought it was the tourism. It turns out that they received a lot of money from the Thai government to a) stop relocating their village every time someone in the village got sick and couldn't be cured by the local shaman and b) stop growing opium. The former was an issue of conservation, as they cut down forests for their fields and frame their houses out of Teak (what would that cost in the States?), and the latter, well is an obvious issue.

I just feel compelled to note that, despite earplugs, the roosters started up at around 3 and kept going until 7. Aren't they supposed to do that at Dawn? Not much sleep that night...

You could pay extra to ride an elephant for the part of the day. I walked -- but I should have been charged to watch as it was so entertaining. The ride down the river on the bamboo raft was included and mandatory. The rafts were just pieces of bamboo tied together (with bamboo) and with all of us (and our stuff) on them rode about 1" under the water.

above: "mining" gravel to be sold for use in concrete The "trek" included a tour through a rather large limestone cave with a river running through it. You could pay extra to have a boat take you further in but we were too damn tired to even ride in a boat.