Despite the post-rain searing heat, I went walking and exploring, and the more I saw of Chiang Mai, the more and more I liked it.

The non east parts of the old city (the centre of Chiang Mai, a square zone surrounded by a long, long canal) are far, far more pleasant, more everyday liveable than the grimy hub of hotels and bars I had first arrived in. Fewer cars, some attractive buildings, more and more shops only with Thai script in the windows.

I found a small park where locals hired bamboo mats and sat chatting and eating lunch. Everyone's shoes off, the sun was out, burning, but we all grouped under the shade of the jurassic-high palm and eucalyptus trees. Every hour or so everyone adjusted their mats a few feet to keep up with the shifting mid-day shadows. The girls selling the mats told me the price in Thai and said thank you in Thai - it was nice to feel a guest in someone else's culture again.

I walked on, back eastwards, out of the old city and across the Mae Ping River. I saw a sign, "Love at First Bite", and followed it. Love at First Bite seemed very much the fancy place for well off young Thai things to go and spoil themselves, a delectable cake shop. I cowered inside the air conditioning and took a rest. I got a slice of apple pie for an extravagant 50 baht (one dollar is 40 baht, one pound 70, my room for the night costs 100 baht). It was delicious. Groups of young Chiang Mai-ers sit in the flower garden outside and chat, mobile phones laid on tables like pregnant duelling pistols. Celebrating for some reason, I ordered a second indulgence, this time chicken pot pie, also fantastic.

An interlude: The blue swivel chair

I wanted to share something with you, a small thing that had become very important to me. Whenever I became weary of being "abroad", the image that meant home, the only image that I longed for, was a blue swivelling armchair. In my parents' house, we have a now rather old fading armchair that swivels around - it sits in front of the television. In days past, I would sometimes spend a large amount of time slumped in this chair, in my dressing gown, perhaps with a recently made sandwich nearby, flicking between music channels (I don't have enough patience with TV to watch anything more demanding than MTV). For reasons not entirely clear to me, this memory seemed to absorb like blotting paper every shred of my nostalgia and home-longing.
I described this attachment with the blue chair to my dad two nights ago during our instant messenger "conversation". He replied, "The blue chair is no more" (gasp...). The family has replaced it with an apparently eminently more stylish black leather armchair, the vanished seat is now languishing in the garage and is due to sold soon. My dad kindly offered to keep it, and when I settled down somewhere, post it to me. In truth, however, although it was a blow to the stomach, I was happy for them to sell it. Perhaps these myths of an unchanging home are better off punctured.

A Lot of Thai

On Sunday, the Chiang Mai of my dreams materialised.
Right now it is evening, I am writing in a street cafe facing the Sunday "Walking Market", a street market that clearly is everything the STA Travel endorsed Night Market is not. There is more variety in this market, the prices are lower, it is as much or more for the locals as for the tourists, it is as much a Ramblas as a shopping trip, people mingling intimately with their eyes. Plus, there is lots of live music, food stands, fresh juice stalls, foot massagers, Thai Greenpeace trying to convert locals, monks pottering about, and street side bars to people watch in. I've been trying to touchtype with one side of my brain while my eyes watch the crowd, but my neurons aren't quite up to the job...

I heard about the Sunday market, and also how much more geniune it is than better known town bazaars, from my cooking instructor, Yui. Choosing to learn Thai cooking with her course, "A Lot of Thai", has been one of the good decisions of this trip. The Thai green curry I made today was probably the best dish I have ever cooked - ah, quite lovely, even in memory.
Yui teaches at her home, in a quiet neighbourhood - a deep lime vintage VW picked me up from my guesthouse, and with the two other students, today Yui showed us the rules behind Pad Thai, green curry, spring rolls, stir fried chicken with cashew nuts, sweet and sour stir fry vegetables, how to cook sticky rice, then a sweet sticky rice dessert with mango. I also watched her teach the more experienced student fish in curry custard and how to deep fry bananas. The food was wonderful, even more so in that we used no MSG and only a small amount of cooking oil. Yui said, "Thai people loove MSG, but I wouldn't let my family eat that".

We cooked, ate, cooked, ate, then she took us to her local market. Nature must grow easier and wilder here than in cold England, the sun's energy more potent. Pink meteor-like "dragon fruit", different branches of the ginger family, different branches of the frog family, some fried on sticks, some toad-squatting resigned to their nets. Half a dozen types of rice in huge plastic bowls, pink eggs, deep fried chicken heads, tapioca puddings, six different chili pastes. I discovered that the Thai word for Guava is Farang, which is also the word for white foreigner... Yui explained that the story is that the French introduced Guavas to Thailand, and France, or Fr-ance, became Far-rang. She laughed, "But I think it is because of your big round heads"!
I asked her, as we paused above alive, dead and halfway fish, "If you were shopping, which of these would you buy"? She replied that her mother had always said a fish is only tasty if it dies a violent death. If it dies a "natural" death in a tank, the flavour evaporates.

Yui, along with, if you'll permit the generalisation, people all over Asia, found my rosy cheeks remarkable. My brother and I have inherited the Wallace family reddish complexion which brought me no end of insecurity in university. But in Asia, or at least Thailand, my strangely rouge-like cheeks and lips seems quite a thing of exotic envy. Yui already had remarked on this earlier, and as she walked on after catching up with one market friend, she told me, "The woman there just said to me, "He has a face like a girl" "! Yui assured me this was a compliment in Thailand. "It's a way of saying a man is handsome". She said, "I wish I had red cheeks and lips like yours!" - I told her with a smile, "Pinch more"! She laughed, "Nah, I just bruise"!

We drove back to the house, and as we ate dessert, and the official 3pm ending time of the day's lessons came and went unnoticed, Yui taught us how to carve flowers from the peeled skin of cherry tomatoes. She told us about fun things to do in Chiang Mai, and about quarter to four drove the three of us to the Walking Market. At one point I asked her if she liked Love at First Bite, she said, "Wow, who told you about that"? I rather proudly explained I had discovered it for myself...

It was wonderful to meet someone who didn't seem interested in perpetuating that financially rewarding wall between tourists and the city. That afternoon the full extent of how far Chiang Mai's guesthouses control us travellers sank in for me. Yui told us a story about how a man had booked a day's lesson with her when he was in Bangkok. He got to Chiang Mai, asked his guesthouse if they had her phone number around. They called Yui and informed her they expected commission for this "connection". She pointed out she had already booked this guy, she had no intention of paying them commission... "Since then, that guesthouse has never sent anyone to me". It is a comprehensive racket. The guesthouses extract a commission from every bit of advice and help they offer, even if a traveller asks for the address of a hospital. If a product supplier (like Yui) argued against this, they could be cut off from further business and referrals. Yui even worried that if our guesthouse found out she was telling us innocuous things about Chiang Mai like street markets, this would be seen as a challenge to their rule.
Yui preferred to give people a discount and work directly with them, rather than both parties paying a middle man. So, if you are thinking of doing a cooking course in Chiang Mai, book direct.

But, back to the Sunday market. I've spent the afternoon wandering around, this bazaar started at 10am and finishes at midnight. The market is generally about artistic, vaguely useful stuff like clothing or lamp shades or pretty candle holders. One stall, however, in a cul de sac off the main market road, is far cooler than this, my favourite stall by far here. It is a bizarre little selection of old watches minus watch straps, old torches of dubious functionality, old phones, including some payphones disconnected from their original wall, a Thai Airways inflatable life jacket, weary hats, empty whisky bottles, cutlery with specks of rust. I have no idea if it is meant to be a functional set of goods for poor Thais, a selection of antiques, or the most perfect wardrobe of kitsch I've ever seen. It's as if the old man who runs this stall has turned up for a completely different market, or maybe his stall appears in a different corner of the world each week, selling magic beans wrapped in banana leaf. I wanted to buy something from his table, if only to indicate my support for his mad mission, but as it was both rusting nonsense and rather expensive, I just had to walk on.
I came to a wide town square. At one end, three tall statues stood by a marble edifice/shrine - continuously, people in groups of two or three came up and bowed, knees and forehead to the stone, at this shrine (?). At the other end of the town square, a temporary little stage had been set up and four pre teen girls were dancing to pop music booming out of speakers. They bopped around in Spice Girls style formation dancing - it was incredibly Japanese Anime. With the centre of the square occupied by families sitting on the grass watching the talent show, teenage girls gossiping and running around, male teenagers practicing break dancing, it was a moment where it occurred to me that there was something, maybe, well, a bit mental about Thailand.

--

If you'll permit the generalisation, there seem to be two main groups of foreigners living in Chiang Mai.
The first, older and considerably older English men, living here to make a better life for themselves away from the cold wreckage of Brittania. All shades of grey Albion are here: One man, a tatooed lager lout patriach, with his similarly aged Thai wife/girlfriend walked into a cafe while I was there. He had, to my spying ears, that regretful silence of someone for whom self-expression had always seemed weakness. It was great the way he muttered things like, "Curry, I haven't had a curry in ages", or to her, after he had chosen his meal, "So, what'ch having then"? The TV was showing some brainless American program, home videos and cc camera footage. He sat and silently gazed at it. She sat facing him in silence. The scene was exactly, I felt, as if he had stayed at home...

The second group seems to be an incredible host of people working towards spiritual, mystical and physical improvement. Chiang Mai, at least for the foreigner, has a strange self development air, one outshoot of this are the fliers advertising courses in thai massage, self massage, yoga (several different branches), meditation, buddhist meditation, thai cooking, thai boxing, tibetan kung fu, tai chi, reiki healing, organic farming, photography, writers' groups - I've probably missed a dozen other categories.

Perhaps ironically, although I could probably do with some help from Eastern wisdom at the moment, often feeling quite down and lonely in Chiang Mai, that mood has left me a bit too low and lethargic to begin a course of spiritual improvement. Perhaps as I cheer up more in the coming weeks I will be ready to find Happiness.

But while my body and spirit malinger, my mind is unquestionably being fed. Chiang Mai's bookshops are absurdly plentiful and easy going, as though the English language itself has also come to the city for an easier life. An extensive second hand bookshop is a window into how much the world and humanity have to offer - a window I can spend days peering through. Chiang Mai has seemingly a dozen of these. Curious about Derrida's views on Grammatology? Even one of smaller shops has both his original texts and a selection of guides and reviews to help the reader along. Italo Calvino, Bruce Chatwin, Graham Greene, Somerset Maugham, Paul Auster... all begging to be investigated. In the painfully limited time and money at my disposal, I've so far bought and traded back in the rather uplifting "Jonathan Livingstone Seagull" and some of Salman Rushdie's essays ("Imaginary Homelands"), and have just began Rushdie's novel "Midnight's Children".

I came across the "Writers' Club and Wine Bar", run by a white moustached English man, Bob. It was an odd experience to chat with the older English regulars here about my writing and what I was doing with it. It was not hard to see why these men had exiled themselves from the mother country. Bob ran this bar with the local he lived with, a lovely Thai woman called Tong, who had nearly grown up children of her own. A few days later I came back to the bar in the afternoon - Tong started asking me, "Why aren't you going to bars, discos, meeting young women"? I replied that it wasn't my scene at the moment. She smiled, "Well, you can spend time with us not young women, we will look after you"!

In a way, I was quite disappointed that Chiang Mai is nowhere near as shocking or as salacious as I was hoping/fearing. There are indeed quite a few Farangs with local girlfriends/wives, but, it all seems people of more or less similar ages going out together... Hard to get inflamed about really. I maybe encountered three or so prostitutes in the city, and they didn't exactly do a hard sell. And, to disappoint several readers, while there were a few women walking around that looked, can I say, more he than she, it was no more than you might expect to run into in an Oxford Street cafe... But I had been hoping for some repeat and improvement on the American ex-pat grotesques I had seen in San Jose. Maybe some sweaty comb-over lecher with a groaning fat stomach and a twelve year old Thai on his knee, "She likes sweets, this one"...
Oh well, perhaps in Bangkok.

On the subject of writing, incidentally, I got my first rejection yesterday, from the Guardian newspaper:

Dear Daniel
Many thanks for your email suggesting an idea for the travel pages based on your experiences in Chengdu. The travel editor has read your proposal but has decided not to follow up on your idea.
I wish you the best of luck in approaching other publications with your work.

--

Chiang Mai nightlife

But, skipping back in time to that first night, the night of the Sunday market, I got out of Bob's bar at quarter to one, and walked purposefully until it dawned on me I had no idea where I was going. I walked past a dog sprawled outside a chained up shop, and for reasons private to the dog, it felt I needed to be prowled after and barked at, until I was 200m further down the road. I walked on, now suspecting I was in fact going the opposite to the way I needed, but unwilling to tussle with the dog again. I walked a direction that seemed appropriate. I passed a dustbin with some black rubbish bags - too close, it seemed, the bin and black bags started trembling at my presence. Rats, long thin grey rats, shot out and bounded towards and through a nearby rat sized hole in the pavement, one by one, as if a magical pool shot was clearing the table into the top left corner. I jumped rather high. Although it is said that in London, one is never more than five yards from a rat, I suppose they must be English rats, reticent and skilled at keeping out of the way, so I can't recall ever seeing one back home. After my feet landed I took a few paces forward to get away from the bin. Those steps brought me to a metal gate, and instantly, from behind it large dogs exploded with hateful machine gun barking. I was quite shaken by this point.
There were few people on the anonymous streets. A sheet of paper, with exquisite timing, blew across the road in a silent breeze. A very tall blond man was coming towards me. I asked him for advice an instant before I noticed he was swaying like one not entirely in control of his faculties. Through tight eyelids, he towered rather too close to me, "Huh"? He gave me some directions and staggered off, but by now my mind had come to a decision: "Taxi".
A tuk tuk, Chiang Mai and Thailand's bizarre taxis, eased to a halt as it saw me. The animal known as "tuk tuk" is something that really needs to be seen rather than described, but they are small, have three wheels, three seats and a metal skeleton rather than a body. The driver sits in the front, and for 40 baht the wind was then roaring past me as he took us to surely unadvisable speeds. His tuk tuk had three ray gun style lights facing towards me inside the car. One white light in the middle and two red on either side; from each red light a large fluffy yellow teddy bear hung on a string. Whenever he slowed down the three lights would pop on - it was such a moment from Flash Gordon, I almost broke into song: "Flash, Ah-Ha, he saved every one of us"!

A little more on Tuk tuks

Possibly this is just the low season, but there seem quite a unwarranted number of tuk tuks loitering around Chiang Mai, probably enough for every tourist to tear around in one, re-enacting a climatic scene from Mad Max. Tuk tuks either drive around looking for business, or park somewhere and accost me in the hope I'll give up my crazy walking thing. Every conversation they initiate with me takes exactly the same form, 1. "Tuk Tuk"? 2. "Where are you going today"? (If a no response, then..) 3. "So, where are you from"?
Plus, tuk tuk drivers have no capacity for restraint - if you are on foot, by definition, you want a tuk tuk. One morning I walked up a little street and back down. On the way up, "Hello", "Tuk tuk?", "Where are you going?"... Bare minutes later, exactly the same questions as I headed back through them. I waited at the street corner, due to be picked up for my second day of cooking with Yui, unfortunately standing next to a parked tuk tuk. The driver pulled his belly aloft, and came over to me:

Him: "Tuk tuk"?

Me: "No".

Him: "Tuk tuk"?

Me: "No".

Him: "Tuk tuk"?

Me: "No".

Him: "Tuk tuk"?

Me: "No".

A pause.

Him: "Taxi"?

An email from a monk

I sent Can an email from Chiang Mai, saying sorry that I would not be coming back to visit him. He replied - here is the email he sent me:

dear Daniel.

How are you ? for me . i'm find although you don't come to see me and visit
my village . but i'm very happy to you e-mail to me . where are you now ? or
you go back to your country already or you still travelling .
Daniel: now i have very big problem . because it's very hard for me . if i
stop to by form the monk now. At first i no have clothing . so my parents
they are very poor . they can't help me anything . because my parents they
no have job to do. so it was very hard mor me and i can't get money form my
parents .
Daniel : i mean i need you help me for clothing and can you help ? if you
don't help me . i don't know how can i earn the money . because i am still a
student and also monks or novice can't get job to do .
however i hope that you don't request form me and i hope that you can help
me and pity me .
About my english not so good and if you don't understant please tell me
because my english is just a little bit . however i hope that you can help
me and i thank you addvance ..............
This is my address : monk Ken sanaphan
p. o . box 1013
wat sop
luang prabang
laos
I think that if you send it to me please write aletter and amount of your
money on aletter and put the money into the letter between postcard or
picture and also by register . i hope that for make sure and safety ...so if
you have idea please tell me know
However please me know about your travelling and i hope to hear form you
very soon ...
I wish you have a good luck travelling and go back to your country by
safely...........
your friendship
Ken

Although the tone of the email peeved me a little (it just seemed to suggest that my wallet had been the big interest for him from the start), I couldn't really say I would do any different in his situation. I deliberated, but decided that as I had been happy to help him financially back in Laos, I shouldn't blush now he had come out and asked me. Also, my friend Gari read my story on Can and had offered to chip in fifty pounds. I decided I would match that. Was this a sensible thing to do, would Can use the money wisely, would it make him "happier", was I being tricked - I didn't know the answers to these questions, but, this was something I wanted to do.

The problem was how. I wasn't too happy with Can's idea of posting cash to him. The other options seemed to be to getting some organisation in Luang Prabang to act as a recipient for a money transfer, or to ask some traveller heading to Luang Prabang to carry the cash and give it to Can.
I spent an hour searching for the site of a community minded English/Lao design company I had encountered in LPB, thinking that they would be ok to help out, but my inability to remember its name (something like OckPokTok) probably didn't help. I wasn't sure what I should do.

Checking out of my hostel, a young American guy and girl were sitting by the reception desk. The male half and I got chatting about what Laos had been like - they were heading there that day. I walked away, and wondered if I should take the absurdly foolish step of entrusting them with the money for Can. I felt like they probably could be trusted, in all likelihood, and couldn't think of a better way to get the cash to Can quickly and relatively safely. I wasn't sure if Gari would think my doing this very, very stupid, but I decided I could pay it all myself if he wasn't happy.
We got talking, I explained what I was after. Perhaps I didn't explain myself very well, or come across very well, as the girl was clearly not very happy with doing this. However, the guy seemed enthusiastic, so I went to a bank and came back with seven 1000 baht notes. We exchanged email addresses, the American guy showed me his travel diary with all his details on the front page - which was a nice act, an effort to make me feel more secure. As I had everything ready, even envelope prepared, the girl came back to the table, visibly unhappy. I decided I didn't want to push this on them and said, "Look, if you don't want to do this, say". She asked, "Could we get in trouble for doing this, for encouraging him to leave his monastery"? I responded to that lots of Lao monks stayed in the temple for some years, then tried to leave and get an education... but I could see that in her mind this whole thing seemed not good. And given that I had decided to do this on essentially non-rational grounds, I couldn't hold a grudge with someone making an instinctive decision in the opposite way. The guy now agreed with his girlfriend, he apologised to me, I got up and left, bitterly disappointed. Not sure what I will do now. Suggestions welcome. Ironic that instead of them running away with the money, my initial fear, the difficulty was in fact getting them to take it from me.

Daniel, 14 May 2004, Lampang