Days 92-96: Chiang Mai, Thailand

We flew up to Chiang Mai on Sunday, arriving just in time to go out to the Sunday Walking Market. This outdoor market stretches for half a mile along of one of the main streets of Chiang Mai, plus three cross streets, all of which are shut down for the occasion. It’s one big party and everyone is there – we saw more people that night than we did the entire rest of our time in Chiang Mai. There are hundreds of food vendors, plus people selling paintings, carvings, photos, clothes, and other goods. Not to mention dozens of musicians (many of them blind), dancers, and people from the surrounding hill tribes dressed in traditional costume. We ate so much we could barely walk, then sat down and kept on eating! The walking market was far more fun than any of the night markets we’ve been too (and there have been many), largely because there was more of a festive air – it’s not just for shopping, the market is a social occasion for everyone involved, even the vendors.

We spent the next couple days walking around Chiang Mai, exploring both the walled old city and some of the surrounding newer city as well. The old city has both a moat and a wall around it, although more of the moat has survived than the wall. Inside the roughly square mile of the old city lie dozens of Wats (temples), making it a beautiful city to wander through.

We took a day trip down to the Thai Elephant Conservation Center near Lampang, about 80 kilometers southeast of Chiang Mai. It’s farther from Chiang Mai than most of the other elephant camps, but worth the effort to reach. It’s a government run elephant rehabilitation center, taking in aged and injured elephants and helping them recover, as well as raising money for the treatment of other elephants at the elephant hospital on site. The elephants are incredibly beautiful and talented, and it’s fun to see them alternate between looking very old and wise as the peer at you, and becoming little kids when there’s something to play with or eat. They run several multi-day mahout training programs here that we’d love to attend, but again it’ll have to be put off for another trip.

On the way back from the elephant camp we stopped in Bo Sang and San Kamphaeng to visit several of the craft factories there, mass producing the traditional wares of these villages. We saw silk, silver, gemstones, ceramics, and umbrellas being made, as well as large displays of finished products. The umbrella factory was undoubtedly the most beautiful and fun of the bunch; the color of the umbrellas is astounding. The gemstone factory won the most amusing prize though; as soon as they realized we weren’t going to buy anything (took about 30 seconds), they tried to force us out the door, which of course made us dawdle all the more. They ended up being uncharacteristically rude for Thais, which really shocked us – we never did anything other than admire the rings, bracelets, and such.

Mary was feeling over-Watted on our last day in Chiang Mai, so I took a solo journey up to Wat Phrathat Doi Suthep in the mountains surrounding the city. It’s the most famous of the Wats in the region, and beautiful both for the temple itself and for the views down to the city, although it was pretty hazy and smoky the day I was there (burning of agricultural byproducts apparently). Afterwards I went to the nearby Phu Ping Summer Palace, high enough in the hills to escape the 90 degree plus temperatures of Chiang Mai and most of central Thailand. It’s very well manicured and the gardens are nice, but overall not much character to the place.

I ended my tour by going to a Hmong village, one of the many different hill tribes that populate northern Thailand. Although the village is clearly rather touristy, since I was there apart from all the big tours and during the off season, it was fun to wander on my own and watch the kids play and the families chat and weave. The tribal museum was interesting, if a bit like a National Geographic article photocopied and enlarged. It gave a good bit of background on the different tribes and how each was forced out of China over time and settled in different parts of South East Asia. As an added bonus, I got to see opium poppies growing, the main traditional crop of the Hmong. These were just for display, but there is still a large opium crop in this region, primarily in Myanmar and Laos.