Viva la Chiang Mai

The water poured over each ledge like grain out of a silo, flowing and cascading generously into pools that lie beneath the mossy terraces. The further you followed the river, the further it went, winding up and up through the density of Mount Doisuthep on the western outskirts of Chiang Mai. In some places the sound was a light trickle, like filling a water glass at your kitchen sink, a slight, high-pitched pour. In others, the water created a deep, guttural resonance, like standing next to a dam when you can’t hear your friend calling your name from a few feet away. Gripping my camera tightly in one hand, I plunged my sandals into the water, slowly plodding my way through the pools and up the stream. The further we trekked away from our motorbikes at the bottom of the mountain, the further we knew we would have to make it to get back down before the grey rain clouds that were looming overhead decided to unleash on top of us. But there was something so intriguing about this river, tucked quietly, almost secretly, back into the side of this mammoth mountain that made us continue, onwards and upwards.


We did get caught in the rain on the way down, it hitting out faces like pins as we shot down on our bikes, luckily finding a small shelter in which to wait out the worst of the rain. I had made the trip up with two new friends. One is a professional photojournalist named Chris Sinclair whom I was put into contact with before I came. I’m staying at his apartment in Chiang Mai for a while with he and his friend who is passing through town. I’ve added a link on the right side of the blog to Chris Sinclair’s Web site if you would like to see some of his work. He is quite talented. A far, far better photographer than I am likely to be anytime soon.

My stay in Chiang Mai has been great thus far. It is a bit odd, though, going from living at the orphanage without even showers to this apartment with Internet access. I think I am going to use my time here to work on a couple of stories. I have some sources that I need to get into contact with here in Chiang Mai, so hopefully that can happen soon. Chris has told me that, of all the places he has been in Aisa (which is substantial), Chiang Mai is probably his favorite city. And I can understand why. It has everything that he needs as a professional right here (there is a Macintosh store a few streets over) but still has the feel of a Southeast Asian city (the prices are still cheap). And, within a motorbike ride of a couple hours, he can be in the northern Thai hills, cruising past rice paddies and the grass huts of village farmers. I’m looking forward to exploring Chiang Mai bit more over the next week. The following is a photo of Chiang Mai from above.


I was on a bus a couple of weeks ago having a quasi-English / Thai conversation with a Thai university student when I made the observation that there just didn’t seem to be very many gas stations as we drove down the highway, and told him about how there seems to be one every mile in the states. He agreed and sat there for a while as the bus lurched down the road. I could tell that he was putting an English sentence together in his mind because he was staring at the ceiling, his lips moving without words, then retracing those words adding new ones and so on, a tactic that I am already all too familiar with in my pursuance of Thai. When he had finally gathered his thoughts, he turned to me and said, with his smile on his face, “In America, you have many gas station, but in Thailand, we have many temple.” As he said this, I could see one of the pointed peaks, encrusted with golden dragons and Buddha images move past the window behind him.

He was right. I don’t have any official statistics on it, but just in my short travels thus far, I have been amazed by how many Buddhist temples there are in this country. They do line the streets, literally, in the frequency of gas stations in the U.S. And so, we made another visit to another temple, this one sitting at about 3,400 feet up 5,500 foot Mount Doisuthep, having a huge hill of stairs one must ascend to reach the main building. I’ve included a couple of photos below.


Thanks for all of your comments. I’ve really enjoyed reading them, and it makes me feel good that people are reading about what I’m doing over here this summer. I’ll be sure to keep you all up to date on any stories I write as they happen. So for now, keep enjoying your summers, and do yourself a favor by taking some time out every day to read a book. It’s been great for me so far.

Devil monkey

May 24
A couple of days ago I made a trip with a missions group here from the U.S. to "The Golden Triangle," the place where three countries (Thailand, Burma, and Laos) meet at the conjunction of two rivers. We hopped on some long river boats that had about as much character as their captains, and jetted off across the Mekong in front of our wailing outboards. We did a quick loop towards Burma and then down the other direction between Thailand and Laos. Our pilot eased the boat into a small, sketchy looking dock, and I made my most unimpressive country entrance yet. As we stepped up onto the bank and climbed the dirt stairs, we were greeted by an unsmiling man behind a small, tiki hut-looking desk who was there to collect our 20 baht (about 50 cents) for entrance to his country. I paid him my fee and he handed me a small scrap of paper that had some scribbly Lao writing at the top followed by: "LAO P.D.R. [more scribble] Wel Come To DonSao Is land." No, those are not typing errors on my part, this is exactly what the paper said. Great tourism PR if you ask me.

As I continued my way down the path I realized that this "Is land" was just a collection of tourist shops. I wondered how far one would have to trek through the jungle wilderness to reach an actual Loa city. I turned to one of my companions, a Shan from Thailand, and commented that I didn’t think this was what Laos was really like. "Yes," he replied with a sly grin, "this fake Laos."

As I meandered further towards the back of the village, I noticed a small, wooden sign with orange lettering that pronounced (in English only, mind you) "Wild Animal" with an arrow pointing off to the right. Always giddy for a visit to the zoo, I plodded right along, thinking that there might be a petting farm up ahead. There were two cages and the first one held an animal that I quickly decided I would not be trying to pet. It was some sort of bear, called a "buffalo bear" in the best Shan to Thai to English translation I could get. The cage was the most shoddily-built contraption for holding a deadly animal I had ever seen and I stayed a few feet away. Soon, one of my companions gave the bear a carton of soy milk, which he proceeded to suck down on his back like a baby. Not so tough any more.
The other cage held a little monkey, the likes of which conjured memories of Curious George, getting in to all kinds of trouble. I stood and watched him bounce around in his cage, emitting a happy little chatter every now and again. He was just so human-like that I wished I had something to give him to play with or to eat. The best I could find was a piece of trash on the ground next to his cage, so I bent down to get it. As I did this, my head apparently broke the invisible barrier around the cage, and the monkey shot not one, but both of his spindly little arms through the space between the bars, grabbed a hold of two monkey handfuls of my shaggy hair, and then proceeded to draw them back in to his cage, ripping them from my delicate noggin. It all happened so fast that I wasn’t even sure why my head was in so much pain until I heard hysterical laughter around me and looked, dumfounded down into the cage to see the monkey glaring up at me with two handfuls of beautiful, dark blonde hair. Then, I believe just to spite me, he sat there and chewed off what I’m assuming was the dead skin left on the tips of my hair follicles. Ouch. In my amazement, I even forgot to take a picture of the little devil, so I’ll just post one of the bear. (The other photo is just riding around in the back of a pickup as is our mode of transportation everywhere we go. Cute little girl, isn’t she?)
Other than that, things are still going fine. I have decided to spend another week or so here in Tha Thon, or at least until I get a hold of a friend of a friend in Chiang Mai who is a professional photographer who I will be spending some time with. Please just keep me in your thoughts and, if it is your way, in your prayers.

A safe arrival

May 20
My face burns.

When I bought those razors at the tiny shop in Tha Ton I gave the frail Thai woman a big smile paired with a joyous “Khorb Koon Khrap!” (“thank you very much”) and then pranced along my way. Had I known how painful and humiliating an experience it would be actually using the tiny, paper-thin pieces of metal to scrape across my skin (with cold water and no lotion) in an attempt to remove some of my several-day-old whiskers, I may not have been so plum chipper. But, seeing as my toiletry kit was lost somewhere over the many thousands of miles of flying before I arrived in Bangkok, I didn’t really see myself as having much choice in the matter. We’ll just look on the bright side and call my first shaving drama another step towards “cultural immersion.”

So, as you’ve probably gathered, I arrived safely in Bangkok on Thursday just before midnight (which would be Wednesday at about noon for those keeping track as I am 12 hours ahead of you in [northern] Indiana now). I crashed at a guesthouse for the night and spent the next morning and afternoon wandering aimlessly around Bangkok, a city much like other large cities I’ve visited in southern Asia. When I’m in places like these, I’m constantly reminded of the way there seems to be no middle class: you’re either driving a BMW or a Mercedes or you’re peddling trinkets and living in a room with dirt floors. I did take the opportunity to play tourist and visited Wat Arun, a temple in West Bangkok. That is what the first few of photos are from. I’ve never been one for big cities in the first place, so it was a relief to get on the train that evening headed for Chiang Mai, a town in northern Thailand. The trip was about 13 hours and went straight through the night, which was nice as my car was a “sleeper” and the seats fold down into beds. I’ve always enjoyed the rocking of a train, so it and jet lag teamed up to knock me out by about 10pm.


I woke up the next morning and looked out the window to find myself in the middle of the jungle. There was more overgrowth and thickness than I had ever seen. It was quite beautiful really, even if I did expect Tarzan to come swinging out of a tree and wave at me as he was passing. As you move further north in Thailand the terrain gets much more mountainous. When we finally came to rest in Chiang Mai, the panorama held layers upon layers of cascading hills, a deep, lush green at first, and then a hazy blue and grey as they went into the distance.

From Chiang Mai I caught a bus to Chiang Rai, a city further north still. It was only about three and a half hours and it was there that I was to be picked up by a man I had been put into contact with before I left … or so I thought. When he wasn’t there upon my arrival I gave him a call and found out that I would need to take another bus, the one that goes to Mae Sai. Let me just type out what he told me from there as best I can remember…

“You take the bus to Mae Sai but you don’t go to Mae Sai, you get off at Mae Chan. Then when you ah in Mae Chan you see the big, blue gas station and you get on a green truck. The green truck goes to Mae Ai but you don’t go to Mae Ai you get off at top of mountain by military checkpoint. When you are at top of mountain sometime yellow truck come and you take yellow truck to Tha Ton and you call us an we come pick you up.”

Haha … yeah. Let’s see, I did find the bus to Mae Sai which had a super-sketchy driver that said I didn’t need a ticket but should instead just pay him … which I did. There was no real stop in Mae Chan, the bus only slowed for a few seconds while a few locals hopped on. When I looked at the woman next to me and said “Mae Chan?” she nodded her head in agreement about a half second before I threw my pack out the open bus door and dove out after it. When I had finished brushing myself off I stopped to look around and was met by silence and a few Thais sitting on a median staring at me blankly as they chewed on some unfamiliar fruit. Welcome to Mae Chan. They finally yelled something at me in Thai (of which I can speak about 25 phrases, the one they were using not being one of them) and we eventually determined that I did not speak Thai and they did not speak English. But I did figure out that I had to sit next to them to wait for the truck to Mae Ai (where I wasn’t actually going). We sat there and stared blankly at each other for a while, one of the men sitting in a lawn chair bursting forth in sing-song voice every once in a while with his apparently favorite phrase “Sorry, I doa nota speaka English,” in as perfect a British accent as he could muster. Pretty priceless.

I did make it to Tha Ton though and am staying at an orphanage that has almost 60 children, most of which have come from the Shan nation of Burma. They have been taking good care of me and I spent the day pouring a concrete floor and eating laichee, a succulent little fruit that sits inside a red, spiky shell. The last photo is an example of the way we mixed concrete. Some sand and concrete mixture compiled in a volcano-like shape with added water. Tomorrow I’m hoping to go to another village nearby where there are lots of Shan people with a woman who teaches English there on Sundays before the small church service.

Thank you for taking the time to check up on me. I’m not sure how often I will be able to update this, but I will surely do it as often as I’m able. Hope everything is going well with each of you!