When we arrived here on Sunday morning, and everything seemed lacklustre, I was willing to accept that the fault was probably ours and not Chiang Mai's.

Maybe no one likes Chiang Mai when they arrive here - you're overly cold from the Iceland-like conditions in the overnight sleeper train, and you've just spent the hours from 10pm to 8am tossing fitfully in your sleeper bunk wondering why the Thai Railway Authority doesn't see fit to turn off any lights in the so-called 'sleeper' carriages ...

However, having been here twice before and not having loved Chiang Mai on those occasions should have forewarned me about my likely luke-warm reaction.

Each time we've come here, we've had a prosaic purpose and this trip was no exception. Previously, we'd come through here on our way overland to Laos. Next, we were escaping the deep chill of a Northern Chinese winter. Now, this time, we were simply fed up to the gills with the noisy grind of hanging out in Bangkok, and figured that Chiang Mai would make a decent break.

Tired and cranky and sick of trudging from crap accommodation to even-crapper accommodation, the city began to wear us down as soon as we arrived.

A pall of disrepair seemed to have settled over everything here, compared with how it had existed in my memory. All the same signs were advertising trekking, only they had weathered and faded and begun to crack in the intervening years. Cooking schools and fruit-carving outfits were spruiking themselves the same as ever, but the backpackers had gone. At the famously tawdry nightmarket (polyester boxer shorts with elephants on them are a hot item here), we watched dejected women packing up truck-loads of trinkets that just weren't selling. Everything seemed a bit dusty, a bit tired, and very, very mournful.

I can't be sure whether tourism really has dropped off here, or whether the dispair in the atmosphere is something I'm imagining.

I was surprised to note how much this slowdown - real or imagined - threw me. After all, we always made a point of laughing into our shirtsleeves every time we saw a trekking sign that made claims about 'non-tourist area that have never seen foreign people before!' The idea of heading off in a 4WD to gawp at people who were now selling Coke and souvenirs to eake out a living seemed dire.

But at some level, the fact that Chiang Mai was formerly full of people who wanted to do just that gave it a buzz and a liveliness. Business was booming, and there were plenty of tourists to go around. Although places that fit this description are often decried as paradises lost, they have a kind of heigtened sense of excitement that runs through them, too.

The place seems to be settling down to a somewhat quieter existence. The long-term expats seem still to be here, and the locally-oriented businesses are doing well. There's a swank new Italian restaurant in town that pulls in scores of well-heeled Thais, farang residents and tourists. The Chiang Mai 'mardi gras' - a seasonal street parade - floated down the main streets the other night in a vision of gold and spangles and traditional Thai motifs. By Thais and for Thais, there weren't really many tourists in sight.

Somewhat ridiculously, it surprises me that the world has kept turning and that Chiang Mai is a different place than it was only four years ago. Funny how travel can freeze a place in one's mind, preserved in memory, and not really at all related to the how and why of the way things are now.