I was able to get to the train station in Bangkok by taking the Sky Train and transferring to the subway which has a stop at the Hualamphong train station. It's a busy place with tens of platforms with trains rumbling in wait of departure. I had wanted to purchase a first class train ticket for an enclosed sleeping berth but they were sold out so I went with the next step down, second class, thinking as a result the trip might be somewhat of an uncomfortable ordeal. I boarded my car and was pleased to find a comfortable seat set up as one of a facing pair next to a window. The sleepers were assembled by combining the 2 seats for a lower sleeper and swinging down an upper compartment from above. Immediately my misgivings about traveling second class were dispelled.
I was greeted soon after boarding by a member of the railroad staff, a friendly but frumpy middle-aged Thai man who probably could have used a little advice on how to best do his hair and make-up. Most have heard about Thai ladyboys, males who dress and act like they're not of that gender but of the other. Many of them appear quite stunning as they tend to go to extremes to try to overcome the undeniable realities of the chromosome pair that mother nature dealt them. This one was not one of those. He struck me as a short dumpy man with long hair who threw on some make-up and earrings, like one of your uncles in drag for a neighborhood parade. Anyway, Ladyuncle was very friendly towards me after finding out I was traveling alone and was quick to recommend a few items from the menu for dinner. I interpreted the friendliness more in a motherly manner than otherwise. As I had brought absolutely nothing on board with me to eat or drink, I ordered an overpriced dinner from the menu along with a soft drink and Ladyuncle protested with a maternal smile and a nod to my masculinity that a big man like myself ought to have a beer with dinner and a large beer at that. Glancing at the prices on the menu I winced a bit at this suggestion but then agreed thinking that maybe he was right and a big man like myself should have a big beer. Maybe Ladyuncle could see qualities in me that had eluded myself and everyone else I had known throughout my entire life. After securing my order for dinner and also breakfast for the next morning, Ladyuncle spun on his heel and sacheted away down the corridor with a slight air of triumph.
The train ride and sleeping arrangements were good and I arrived the next morning in Chiang Mai feeling fairly well rested. Ladyuncle had seemed especially enthusiastic at around 6:30 AM when he marched down the corridor clapping his hands and barking out in Thai to rouse any passengers who dared to remain slumbering. Later he presented me with my bill of 550 baht for the dinner (including a large man-size beer) and breakfast. Considering that the train ticket was 770 baht it would be more than just a stretch to call the train food a good value. I had noticed the locals and other inveterate train passengers had planned ahead and brought their own food and drink and were able to resist the onslaught of Ladyuncle's flattering sales tactics. As I was walking down the platform after shuffling off the train with my bags I cast a parting glance towards the train only to spy Ladyuncle leaning out a window smiling and waving to me as if he were a mom seeing her son off to some new chapter in life. I smiled and waved back. Sometimes you have to just go along for the ride.
Most train passengers arriving in Chiang Mai get from the station which sits well east of central Chiang Mai into downtown by piling into the back of a little red pick-up truck taxi with bench seats in its covered bed. These 'soorng-ta-ou's are lined up in the parking lot when the trains arrive and you just pick one and jump in. I witnessed a strange incident as I was waiting for mine to fill. A group of foreigners had filled up a neighboring vehicle and the driver was conversing with them at the back of the truck when he suddenly shouted 'Everyone out!' and backed away from the truck and began shouting and making a boisterous spectacle of himself in the parking lot as the passengers began slowly climbing out. He shouted at some of the passengers (at this point it was all in Thai) as they smiled back in a sort of puzzled way at his puffed up reddened face. When this had gone on for about 10 seconds he began looking around the parking lot at the numerous faces that were now turned in his direction and he seemed to reach a watershed at which he felt he was compelled to take it up a notch and continued the shouting and gesturing to no one in particular. I had never seen anything even remotely like this during my few weeks in Thailand and I believe it's not really in the Thai character to behave this way unless they've been gravely offended. His parking lot tirade sputtered on for almost a minute before he was finally spent and retreated off to a nearby building under the collective incredulous gaze of everyone within earshot. My guess as to what transpired is that the passengers colluded and tried to negotiate a flat group rate instead of each paying the indivdual fare. I can't imagine what else it could have been nor why the driver exploded the way he did and made such a silly annoying show of himself. Business is business. Just ask any of the thousands of Thais who routinely overcharge tourists and foreigners for anything and everything they can. The fare I paid to get downtown was 50 baht or about $1.65 US.
I spent 9 days in Chiang Mai exploring the area by foot and bicycle while enjoying the northern Thai cuisine and inhaling the fragrance of incense that wafts out from the numerous Buddhist temples that dot the city's surroundings. There are a lot of foreigners in Chiang Mai and many of them seem to have figured out how to stay in Thailand at least semi-permanently. In comparison to Vietnam Thailand's visa policy is quite liberal. One option available in Thailand for those over 50 is a 1-year retirement visa that requires a bank balance of 800,000 baht (about $27,000 US) and can be renewed annually allowing one to remain in country indefinitely. Having a business or job is an option for those not yet at that ripe old age. Interestingly, most foreigners entering Thailand by air get an automatic 30 day visa with their passport stamp, but for those entering by bus it's only 15 days.
The central area of Chiang Mai is surrounded by a square moat that was once reinforced on the inside with thick walls, but of these only vestiges now remain at the corners and a few other points around the periphery. The moat is about 25 meters wide and still holds water and has an inlet stream at its northwest corner. I even saw a few locals fishing in it but am dubious about their prospects unless they were fishing for plastic bags or old shoes. But what do I know, they're the locals and I'm just another tourist.
Most of the tourists seem to gravitate towards the central area inside the moat and I was no exception. There's a higher concentration of hotels, restaurants, coffee shops, etc. there but there's also a lot to experience beyond the moat if you dare to venture out. The area just east of central hosts a few newer high-rise hotels and retail establishments including a Starbucks and a McDonalds both of which looked to stay fairly busy. To the west is Chiang Mai University and farther out a national park and mountain range.
If you're in Chiang Mai during the weekend don't miss the walking street events each Saturday and Sunday during which sections of street are closed to motorized traffic except for the occasional motorbike or vehicle of course. They're very much like street fairs in the US with a multitude of vendors selling anything you can imagine. I stumbled into the Sunday walking street since it was taking place right outside my guest house and I was suddenly jarred with the realization that I was the only one moving amidst a motionless crowd that were all facing a loudspeaker that was blaring out a song. With the strings of lights hung up and down the street and the flaming floats drifting in the surrounding sky, it was as though I had wandered onto the set of Apocalypse Now. My herd behavior mechanisms, which I like to live in denial of, then kicked in and I, too, stopped and faced the speaker feeling now much more comfortable that I was following the proper protocol of whatever was going on. It soon became apparent that the music was the Thai national anthem and this was how respect was being paid by the Thais and, by extension, all the tourists and expats on the street.
When the national anthem ended and I could once again resume going through the motions of a free thinking autonomous individual, I naturally drifted over to the food area. The selection and quality of what was on offer there was overwhelming. And mouthwatering. There was even sushi which I partook of in generous fishy quantities.
Note : My Bay Area friend Scott Klimo who spent 6 years living in Thailand and now has a family with his Thai wife informs me that it was the King's Song that was being played and the people were all facing a Thai flag.
The terrain around Chiang Mai registers much higher on the hilly scale than the coastal areas of Thailand that I've seen. The national park to the west boasts a respectable mountain, Doi Suthep, and there are a few trekking and mountain biking businesses that will gladly take you on a guided, and sometimes very pricey, tour there. I went the low-budget self-directed route as I'm wont to do and rented a good quality hardtail mountain bike for a day for $6 US and headed out on my own from city center.
After about 2 hours of cycling at about the halfway point of the climb I saw a sign and a parking area and, more than willing to stop and rest, turned off to investigate. It was a self-guided nature trail with a well-made sign map that described the many interesting sites awaiting those willing to trek its 1 km or so length. I hid the bike in some of the abundant tropical underbrush and started down the steps. Almost immediately I encountered a young man coming out who looked Thai to me but greeted me in American English. He was one of the multitude of American Asians similar to those I would see every day back in the Bay Area but now here we were running into each other on a hiking trail west of Chiang Mai, Thailand! He gave me a thumbs up on the trail and warned me of a couple of slippery spots along the way and also gave me a heads up on the monk. After descending down some fairly steep steps and crossing a strem I came upon a large rock that sat at the entrance of a cave and there, sitting in the expected lotus position and draped in a saffron robe and reading a book was the monk I had been alerted to. Judging from the personal articles laying about the place it appeared that he made the cave at least a temporary home. He looked up from his book with a monkly expression of serenity and acknowledged me with an unperturbed calm monkly smile. I responded with what was no doubt a goofy self-conscious grin not knowing how I should behave when springing upon a forest monk in his natural environs. The forest monk is an official variety of Buddhist monk in Thailand, a fact that I picked up from visiting some of the temples around Chiang Mai. Beyond smiles and nods we really had no further way of communicating, but I wish I had been able to learn something about his life there.
Perhaps it was due to my own lack of perception, but I didn't notice any of the other natural attractions posted on the trailhead map, but it was an enjoyable mountainside hike through thick foliage and over a rushing stream. Periodically my ears were assaulted with a loud high-pitched tone that resembled something you might hear while passing by a busy machine shop but this came from some local species of fauna, maybe a cicada-like insect.
I resumed the arduous task of hauling my sweaty self up the hill happy that the route to the top was all on pavement as it was taking considerably longer than I had anticipated. There were very nice views of Chiang Mai to be had all the way up and I came across the ruins of an ancient temple while exploring an unpaved side road as I neared the summit.
After finally reaching the summit I was relishing the thought of turning around and retracing my path of the past few hours in a rousing exhilarating fraction of that time. This was where my high end bike and its good brakes really proved their mettle as you wouldn't want to do this descent on a dodgy bike. I was easily able to stay with the flow of traffic and even managed a couple of adrenalin boosting passing manouvers on the 10+ kilometer drop back down into the valley to Chiang Mai. I didn't start the descent until about 4 PM and when I wasn't too focused on remaining on the pavement and on my side of it, I looked up enough to catch about half a dozen cyclng Thai's huffing their way up the hill. I was happy to have fellow cyclists on the hill and was impressed by the fact that they had the common sense to wait until the temperature and sun had dropped before engaging that strenuous climb. This was another case in which it was no difficult task differentiating the locals from the clueless tourist.
One aspect of Chiang Mai that can't escape notice when looking down from above is the air pollution. While not terrible and hopefully not too unhealthy it's there, a gray smoky haze puddled on the valley floor. I was told by a resident expat that at certain times of the year it gets quite bad as a result of the slash and burn agriculture still practiced by those selfsame hill tribes that draw so many visitors to the area.
While I didn't bother visiting a hill tribe village as they've mostly all evolved into developed tourist attractions, I did briefly interact with a hill tribe member near the start of my bike descent from the top of Doi Suthep. He was walking up the road strikingly and oddly dressed and holding what appeared to be hornlike musical instrument that might draw comparisons with something out of a Dr. Seuss book. I had to pull over and check him out. He was most likely on his way home after working the tourists down below who disembark the buses to visit one of the royal palaces open to the public, but he didn't seem to mind pandering to my curiosity. He indulged me by blowing on the horn contraption and producing a sound that could not be called music even in a generous regard and then pointed to a cup fastened to the end of his noise-making collage to remind me of another kind of generosity as I had now taken so much of his valuable time. After fishing around in my pockets for a tip worthy of the live peformance my ears had just been treated to he did at least allow me to a photo to remember it by.
I also had an elephant sighting while in Chiang Mai, thereby fulfilling all my initially misguided expectations of what I would see there. It happened after dark as I was strolling along the moat that surrounds the central area. The lumbering pachyderm and his rider, known as a mahout, were across the road stopping at each business while soliciting donations and attracting quite a lot of attention. I've read that this has become that fate of many of Thailand's elephants that were once used in logging operations but have now been rendered obsolete due to reduced logging activity and the adoption of more modern methods. Having been indentured to destroy their own natural environment and then turned out on the streets I hope elephants such as these are not in fact cursed with their acclaimed memories.
One of the more impressive Chiang Mai temples, partially restored.
At an eclectic little museum at a temple east of central Chiang Mai, these antique Thai irons were heated with live coals.
A view into some nice open space along the west boundary of Chiang Mai University.
I liked the name of this club in central Chiang Mai though I never ventured inside.
This funny little car from maybe the 60's was in a central Chiang Mai temple parking lot. A Datsun Bluebird.
View down into the city's valley from the flanks of Doi Suthep mountain west of Chiang Mai.
Quirky hill tribe man giving me a roadside demo of his 'musical' instrument.
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