I think I'm going to like Chiang Mai, and by extension, Thailand. Chiang Mai is one of those interesting cities I think I will have fun unlocking.

It is funny, however, to have arrived in Thailand's tourist industry. And what a strange, polished industry it is... a glove that grips you so tightly you don't quite notice the constriction.

From the start in Thailand, one drops into the span of an interlocking Corporation, an entity providing everything you could think of to want. The tuk-tuk driver at the border promises to take me to a minibus station, which turns out to in fact be a guesthouse. Once on the minibus, it turns out to be taking us to a particular Chiang Mai guesthouse. This guesthouse has put on these mini buses at the Lao border to ensure a steady stream of customers...
Arriving at the guesthouse, the happy women behind the desk tell me, "This will be your second home"! The walls are covered with colour posters of tours, courses and events nearby. One tour that stands out is One Day Long Neck - unfortunately, it is not promising a longer neck within one day, which would have at least been appeallingly strange, but instead a tour to a small village where some of the women have... you can guess, I think. It makes the way I've travelled before SE Asia seem like an old man's foggy nostalgia - no more language struggling at a bus station to buy a ticket - book a ticket at the guesthouse and the bus will pick you up. No more plodding around looking for a cooking school where no one speaks English (how stupid!) - the only struggle is choosing from the eight advertised, all giving their customers colour cookbooks as a goodbye present. And it is all done with such low prices and such happy smiles, can one really gripe? Yet, I am almost reassured when my guesthouse's kitchen produces a fantastically tasteless chicken and cashew nuts on rice. There is at least some seeking required, still.

One journey completed

That night, I go to Rattana's Kitchen, a small and well thought out restaurant, apparently recommended by both the Rough Guide and the Lonely Planet. With good reason, the green chicken curry I had was wonderful. It was a joyful premonition to realise I am going to spend the next month eating incredible meals in restaurants for about 90p a time. I even had a second dish to celebrate, a Northern speciality red pork curry.

I then went to the famous Chiang Mai night market. For as long I have been imagining a year travelling around the globe, the icon, the fantasy that was most often conjured up by these dreams was Chiang Mai's night market. I think because STA Travel perpetually used it as a selling point for world travel, perhaps because the idea of starting anything at night seems exotic in England. A bewitchingly scented, odd tongued babble, lit by ghostly lanterns, where silks and nightmares in bottles and magic beans weapped in banana leaves could be purchased. To have got here and walked the market's streets was wonderful to me in a way that rendered the actual market irrelevant. This had been such a long road, the feeling of satisfaction was all about having reached the end.

I'm not an expert at these things, but it looked to me as though there were some lovely things on sale here, particularly the silk cushion covers, candle holders and little wood and paper lamp shades; and a lot of crap, such as the men's shirts, the frogs that make whistling noises, actually that kind of stuff predominates in these stalls. I got the impression that the quality of the products in the Luang Prabang's night market was higher, but I was too scared to ask any of the prices there, sure they were set for holidaying couples outfitting their houses rather than unemployed vagrants like myself.
As I walked under rain covers and between drooping wires, stalls lit by naked bulbs, Thai people sang to me. They sang in high tonal voices, "Special price for you", "What are you looking for?", "Where are you from?" - but never intending confrontation, more like a chorus to my walk.

The imagined Chiang Mai

I had in my mind many things about Chiang Mai. I was imagining a town that teemed with the quick feeted exotic, a city village of temples and haggling and dripping brows and strange deals done in open darkness. It turns out, at least from my initial investigations, that the city unfortunately does not resemble my dream very much at all. It is an impressively unappealling city, at least in the area I have been dropped in, not that anything looks looks really bad, but nothing looks even slightly good - which somehow seems worse. A bit like the most drab and dirty buildings of London or any other city - just almost all quite low rise. Certainly, a lot of Wats, but as these are like tiny walled recluses from the city, they don't alter its functional ugliness.
You can see the stink in the roadside air before you smell it. Cars and old vans crap out fumes unashamedly. So many cafes and restaurants have pavement seating, perhaps meant for another time of year - right now the open air is the last place I'd want to eat or drink in. Each street seems full of cars bustling, nowhere seems designed for strolling, nowhere are there roads which cars don't ruin. On the plus side, right now it is extremely temperate, which seems a strange miracle, as I know people who a week or two ago were warning me it was 41 degrees and unlivable.

I feel quite justified in having had such a inaccurate dream of Chiang Mai, because I'm not sure which Chiang Mai I'm actually in now. The way a young Thai woman in a guesthouse expressed such surprise I had walked the distance from mine to this one, the way tuk-tuk drivers shout out prices to drive me around for a day showing me every sight, the way everything seems to be a tour and every tour seems to include a pick up service, I wonder how easy is it to set foot in Chiang Mai. Clearly there is a physical Chiang Mai, a "real" one, where streets conect to other streets, where people go to school and cook meals at home (this is Thailand's second city after all); but there is another Chiang Mai, overlaying this, an invisible city, yet this second Chiang Mai is much more likely to be the one discovered. With pick up buses and taxis, I wonder how easy it would be to spend two weeks here, shuttle from cooking course to pretty tourist attraction, and have no idea where the places one spends time are in relation to each other, to have no idea where local people eat or use the internet. I have a free map of the city, given out at my hostel - I showed it to some local people and they were helplessly confused at the searing mistakes it contained. It too was an imagined Chiang Mai.
Something I've never felt before on this trip: this lunchtime I was walking and realised I still had no sense at all what country this was. Entering Mexico, either at the border or in the capital, one is undeniably in Mexico. I imagine after 24 hours in India a thousand unique images would be blow-torched into one's memory. But after 24 hours in Thailand, what could I say about the country? People seemed nice, but everything I had done so far had been related to an industry built up to service me - had I truly taken a step in Chiang Mai? Had I really spent 24 hours in Thailand? I would love to do some research on Chiang Mai, find interesting neighbourhoods, ask the questions that puzzle me, but my usual tools and allies have turned perfidious here. There are stalls proclaiming "Tourist Information", but a second's look and these scream their true nature: they offer only "information" on the same tours everyone else offers. I pass a man on the street, we nod at each other. I am happy, a touch with the Chiang Mai I am seeking, then suddenly he is asking me the standard questions of inhabitants of the invisible city, "Where are you from? Where do you want to go today"? I sigh among spies. When even maps don't describe Chiang Mai, what chance do I have?

The rain my ally

But, that afternoon, the imaginary city began to crack as the rains came down - were the rains bringing me to Thailand? Throbbing, pulsating, cold rain, rains that turned sandals and feet filthy, clogged drains and collapsed navigation. The rain's fingers working their way inside my umbrella, directions made no sense and I took turns just to be under shelter. I was on a street with no guesthouses, a street where young men with old faces sold second hand watch straps. There are some items you only see sold in poor countries - they drop out of existence as people's wealth becomes rosier. I saw a dingy place where ten years olds played violent internet computer games for ten baht an hour (compared to the thirty I've been paying for email). I watched Thais desperately tear detritus from drain covers, big clumps of branches and leaves. I took shelter in a vegetarian shop / restaurant, empty beside me and the three old folk running it, I took a lemon juice plastic bottle from the great fridge and started reading the book I had bought earlier. The juice was disgusting. All the while, I was facing the street, and the Thais behind me were whispering their everyday conversation, but something made me wonder if at this moment the imagined Chiang Mai was slipping further, as though something of the smell and taste of Thailand was penetrating my weak senses. Or perhaps I was just substituting my own imagined Chiang Mai for the one on offer from the tour guides and brochures.

They shut at five, I walked on, my umbrella held up as a shield. I came to a barely lingering market, with open air food stalls getting ready for the evening surge. I sat and asked the waitress (surely the cooks' daughter, I imagined) for her recommendation; it was fried rice with Chiang Mai sausage. As I waited, I felt a sensation around my chest, looked down, a cockroach more than an inch long had got on to my tshirt and was quickly making its way up towards the naked skin of my neck. I brushed at it, it kept going, I violently slapped at it in horror, causing the bug to fly about twelve feet and the Thai family in the next plastic table to spin round and look at me. I pointed at the unhurt cockroach now wandering off and they smiled. I mimed putting it in my mouth and chewing, and they started grinning. This, finally, had been a little touch of reality, I felt sure.

Daniel, 7 May 2004, Chiang Mai