the horror, the horror > travels in indochina

Chiang Mai and beyond: No elephants were harmed, etc.

Posted by Sara

Ah, Chiang Mai—the first of our destinations we could idly imagine ourselves living in someday. It is more charming and of a more manageable size than Bangkok. The old city is surrounded by a moat, with cute, narrow, leafy streets winding off the main roads. Our guest house was on one such lane, along with many others. I imagine that in the high season the old city is full of tourists, but when we were there it was quiet and relaxed. A market at the end of our street supplied for our addiction to Thai mangoes, and we rented bicycles for getting around town easily, though these were better at night than in the death rays of the sun (only in these temperatures has the sun become for me something to be avoided!).

In Chiang Mai, aside from the usual wafting around eating, we took advantage of a couple of the touristy options. First up was a cooking course on an organic farm about 45 minutes out of the city. On our way to the farm we went to a market and learned about different rices and spices and about Thai ways of eating. Having previously wandered through such markets rather aimlessly, it was great to have a local tell us what was what, and to finally solve the mystery of pink eggs (look it up if you don’t know). Also, it turns out that Thais have rice with their soups to alleviate some of the spiciness. Here I’d been thinking that waiters were just offering rice to feeble farangs (foreigners) ordering tom yum.

Rice at the markets:

The farm itself was very pretty and tranquil. Over the day we cooked five dishes, getting to choose between three options for each dish. This included pad thai (hurray) and yellow curry. Any of you who are putting us up in London, prepare for a feast—if we can track down the ingredients. And yes, Robyn, we also made your great favourite, mango with sticky rice! There are mangoes in London, right?

Here’s Jeff cooking up a storm:

And here’s the lunch Jeff and I cooked:

Apropos of Jeff’s musings in his last post about language and communication difficulties, on the back of the truck riding back to town I overheard the following conversation between Jeff and a Dutch girl who was in Thailand to volunteer at an elephant camp:

Jeff: Do they have many elephants at the camp?
Ramona: Mini elephants? No, I don’t think so. Normal size. Asian elephants.
Jeff: 18 elephants? That sounds like a lot to me.

Before leaving Chiang Mai we also did a 1-day trek. There was not much actual trekking involved, but rather a day of action adventure, with elephant riding and waterfall swimming in the mix with visits to hill tribes. The first village we visited felt like it had been manufactured for tourists. It didn’t seem that people were actually living there, and there was hardly anyone around except for a couple of people selling crafts and one toothless woman who thrust her baby at us for a photo and then asked for money. The second village felt more real, with lots of animals, and people in the houses weaving or resting (it was just after lunch, and very hot). But on the whole these hill-tribe visits felt quite exploitative. We want to see how these people live, but I don’t really know how to get an authentic experience of this without being intrusive.

Anyway, here is my 20 baht photo:

On the trek up to the village:

A woman weaving at the more authentic village:

Probably our favourite event of the day was bamboo rafting down a river. We shared our bamboo raft with a nice Kiwi couple and rather prophetically dubbed ourselves Team New Zealand. The Thai men punting the rafts were full of jokes and mischief. Throughout the ride they were cracking the punting sticks (technical term) on the water to splash us, leaning on the rafts to make one side go underwater, and careening under low-hanging branches of trees. This was all very entertaining and fun until a giant spider appeared from inside the bamboo and ran up my leg. I’m not quite willing to point the finger, but it is entirely possible that this spider was planted as another funny joke. Once I had recovered from this excitement, Jeff thought he would join in the fun and leaned over to the raft next to us and yanked at a rope to pull one corner under the water. It turned out that the rope was rather loosely holding the raft together. Fortunately we were close to the shore, so the guys were able to fix it up before we continued. Then Jeff decided to be helpful and do some of the hard punting work at the back of the raft, which went fine until the stick got caught in a rock and he fell in. He went right under, but came up wearing his sunglasses and a big smile, and managed to catch the raft before we floated away. Hilarious.

Here is a picture taken whilst riding an elephant of other people riding an elephant (I realised later we should have swapped cameras). The baby elephant came along for the ride and did some very cute clumsy sliding down mud hills:

Food on this trip continues to be delicious, and we can’t get enough of the local specialty, khao soi, a noodle soup dish. The taste approximates tom yum crossed with satay and is really, really good. Unfortunately we didn’t learn how to make this one at the cooking course, but we plan to seek out a recipe online and give it a go sometime.

Most restaurants that we go to are those recommended in guidebooks or on the Travelfish website (a great site that I highly recommend to anyone travelling to south east Asia). This is partly because we are too wussy to go somewhere where we can’t tell what the food is, where the menu is in Thai, and where nobody speaks English. Does this make us wimpy travellers? We’ve still been experiencing a lot of wonderful, authentic Thai food and trying different things. But you don’t see a lot of locals dining in the places where we go, except for young pretty Thai women with older (sometimes elderly) white Western men. Interestingly, in Laos it is illegal for a foreigner to have a relationship with a Lao person, so I guess we will be seeing less of this in the next country.

Since leaving Chiang Mai we have travelled up to Chiang Khong—part of the trip in an old bus that doubled as a postal service—and had a night in a lovely teak guest  house overlooking the Mekong river. Today we ferried over to Huay Xai in Laos, and tomorrow head off on a 2-day luxury cruise down the Mekong to Luang Prabang. Jeff will tell you all about it in the next post.

Last view of Chiang Khong as we sail away from Thailand for awhile:

Love to you all

Sara and Jeff

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