Chiang Mai
I spent all of yesterday walking and walking with my little “walking map of Chiang Mai” in my hand. The old city is surrounded by a moat and is square in configuration. It takes about thirty minutes to walk from one end to the other and I walked pretty much the entire old city.
I saw many Wats, some cool statues, and sat in the park to read “The Iliad.” Then it was back to the guest house for some food and to get some suggestions for things to do the next day. The food there was actually quite good and in large portions. And the owner seemed to know everything about everything to do around the area. Her husband is a westerner who puts together motorcycling tours of the area and we had a good chat.
Later that night I went to a local bar for a few drinks and ended up talking with the elderly Canadian owner. He has two bar/restaurants here in Chiang Mai and two in Phuket. He said he wanted to look at getting a place in Kampong Som in Cambodia, but it was more expensive than Thailand and there was way more red tape. No kidding.
Today I decided to go to the local mountain top and then onto the national park several kilometers away. I walked to the northern taxi station where all the red pickup truck taxis going in this direction are located. I was met by one of the drivers who asked if I was going to Doi Suthep and I said yes. He said it was forty baht which was lower than I had been told (should be sixty) and then told me that because I was the only one waiting to go, it would cost four hundred.
I laughed at him and then a Thai man came over and said he wanted to go also. They talked back and forth and this new guy said we would just pay two hundred each as he wanted to go and hadn’t been for a long time. I told him that for that price he should rent a motorcycle and he said he didn’t know how to drive one. Yeah right. I wished him luck, told him to honk at me if he finds eight other people to go, and walked in the direction of the mountain.
On the way I found that my pricey earphones no longer worked on one side, likely due to ear wax intrusion since I wore them all night on the train to block out the noise. And of course I didn’t have any more filters and there was almost no chance of finding this brand here. So luckily I walked right by a computer/IT mall and wandered around looking at all the knock offs they had. I picked one up that I thought said Sony, only to find that it said Sonia upon closer inspection. A helpful girl found me a pair for under four dollars and I was on my way.
At the next taxi station (a long walk away) I got on one with five other locals for fifty baht. The ride up was intense and nauseating. The driver wanted to get up and down as fast as possible and the entire way the road switched back and forth. It would have been great fun on a motorcycle, but I was nauseus by the time we got to the top.
There I found some less than appetizing lunch and sat down for almost an hour, wondering if I should try to hike up the three hundred steps to the top or call it quits. Of course I went to the top, but Chaing Mai was obstructed by haze or pollution. The ride back was just as bad. My symptoms are that of the flu or cold, so hopefully a good night of rest will do it. But that means I can’t book the mountain biking day trip for tomorrow as I had hoped, but hey, that just saved me fifteen hundred baht. If I feel good tomorrow I think I’ll just hop a bus to the Laos border.
