We Need to Talk About Chiang Mai

I should preface this post by saying that before this, I had never been to any city in Asia. Not even Bangkok, unless you count a harrowing taxi ride from the airport to the train station, where we just waited for six hours. (We’ll be taking the train back down to Bangkok at the beginning of April, so you can look forward to a funny comparison between third and first class travel. I salivate at the thought of a sleeper car.)

I can’t even say with honesty that I have been to any Asian city besides Chiang Mai, because nowhere in Laos that we have been feels anything like a city. Luang Prabang is an overgrown town with an outsize tourist population, a million wats, and European-style cafés that don’t exist anywhere else in Laos except Vientiane (where we haven’t been). The other provincial capitals we’ve visited, Sam Neua and Phonsavanh, were bewilderingly odd: like a cross between Soviet realism and a frontier town movie set, plus enough dust to coat an entire nation, not to mention my lungs and all of my clothes.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. According to this blog, we haven’t even gotten to Laos yet. Let’s get back to Thailand.

Chiang Mai is the former capital of the Lanna Kingdom, the land of a million rice fields, which migrated in the 13^th century down from the banks of the Mekong River. What we know as Thailand today was composed of several city-states, which bonded and squabbled amongst themselves until the Burmese bulldozed through in 1556 and set up camp in the land formerly known as Lanna for 200 years. Eventually a Thai prince swapped the yoke of Burma for the yoke of Bangkok, and Lanna was no more, though Northern Thailand still speaks Thai with a funny accent, at least according to people from down south. This, however, is a blessing if you are traveling to Laos, and happen to have learned Thai from Northern Thais who sometimes forgot to teach you the pronunciation in Central, or Bangkok, Thai.¹

Burma is still visible in Northern Thailand in a way that it isn’t in the south or center. Some of the wats have Burmese details, little flourishes around the Buddha alcoves that aren’t present elsewhere. Many of the dishes found their way to Chiang Mai after a long evolution down the Silk Road, picking up a bitter herb here or a dash of coconut milk there. Much of the food has Lao origins, too, since the non-tribal minorities of Laos and Thailand are ethnically similar, if not the same. Our favorite non-khao soi establishment in the city served laab, a Lao minced meat salad with copious herbs. I may yet start a Portland food cart called All You Need Is Laab.

In looking back over my photos from Chiang Mai, it’s crazy to me that we packed so much into our first three days in the city, when we’d just landed from over 48 hours of travel. By comparison, the week we spent there after two months on the farm was positively slothlike. Thanks to Marco’s suggestion, we also landed an amazing guesthouse in a pocket of green on the other side of the Ping River, well away from the nauseating falang karaoke dives. Unlike every other guesthouse I called, this one had a free room, incredible to me because it was so beautiful. Much time was spent lounging in the garden, sipping coffee and Thai iced tea, practicing our Thai with the guesthouse owner, possibly the sweetest woman on earth. We called her at 10 one night because the electrical socket in our room was shooting sparks, and she and her son came over to relocate us to an unoccupied bungalow. Plus, we rented a scooter for four days and her son not only drove me over there on the back of his Vespa (!), he also left his ID card with the rental place so I wouldn’t have to abandon my passport.

Thus we became adept in the ways of Thai driving: the larger vehicle has the right of way; if you can fit into a spot on the road, it’s yours for the taking; and the shoulder is really a single-file scooter lane. It’s much less stressful to find your own way around the city than to ride around in the back of a sawngthaew (literally, “two-rows,” thus named for the two small benches in the back of a covered pickup), worrying whether you enunciated your destination well enough. Plus, this way we could veer off the road for the scent of roasted roadside chicken.

¹ When we crossed into Laos for the first time, we were last in a long line of disembarked slowboat tourists checking into our guesthouse. Everyone remembered to switch from Sawatdee kha(p) (Thai) to Sabaidee (Lao), but when I said Sabaidee jaow, our hostess’s face lit up. “You really speak Lao!” she said, because in Northern Thailand and Laos, instead of saying kha to be polite, you say jaow. Then I promptly misunderstood the next sentence she spoke and all was lost.