From Opium to Oolong: A Day Trip to Doi Mae Salong

The geometry of this region was just stunning.

The view from the Phra Boromathat chedi devoted to the Queen Mother.

As part of the weekly schedule at the Friendly Farm near Chiang Rai, we would work a brief morning shift on Saturdays and then had the opportunity to accompany them to the city for the late afternoon and evening, at the end of which we would meet up and ride back home. We had Sundays off.

One week, having read of the nearby historic town of Mae Salong—where some Kuomintang from China hid out following the 1949 revolution, and where one of the king’s Royal Projects has transitioned the mountain slopes’ agricultural production from opium poppy to tea and other legal cash crops, and where there’s a wat—we decided to check it out.

Having spent Saturday night in Chiang Rai so that we could rent a motorcycle and zoom up the mountain Sunday morning, we commenced our zoom: Step driving, Pil clinging with both hands to the seat-bar behind him. It was a long, buttbone-battering trip. Our poor little motorcycle huffed and puffed its way up a steep grade, and more than once I, at least, thought we were going to have to push it. We coasted on truly the ghost of fumes into a little village high on the mountain and successfully filled up the tank. “Mae Salong?” we asked, pointing at the ground where we were standing. They shook their heads and pointed farther up the mountain. Puttputtputtputtputtputt-puttputtputt...

Finding an Old City in the New City

Exactly thirty years ago, in 1984, a lost city was rediscovered beneath Chiang Mai. It all began when some residents in a suburb of Chiang Mai found some ancient Buddhist tablets next to a temple. Abandoned to floodwaters and hundreds of years of silt, Wiang Kum Kam was held to be a myth….until archaeologists realized people were living right on top of it!!!

In 1286, King Mangrai built Wiang Kum Kam on the banks of the Ping River, to be to capital of his new Lanna Kingdom. But the rainy season was not kind to Wiang Kum Kam, and just ten years later, the King relocated the capital to the opposite shore, and the new city of Chiang Mai—which, hey hey, means new city in Thai—superseded its older brother.

Pil and I scooted out there one day in January during the dry season to avoid the flood. The ruins of Wiang Kum Kam are now (metaphorically) buried in the heart of a quiet suburb to the southeast. There are landmark signs pointing you in the right direction, but we got a little lost anyway, and made our way into the first complex of ruins via the backdoor of a temple (at the insistence of a monk). We had read that you can hire a horse carriage for a palfry penny, but there were none to be seen—just a few quiet noodle stalls also selling knick-knacks, and a lone group of Thai tourists.

On Doi Suthep; or: Gold and Elephants

Wat Phra That Doi Suthep, or Doi Suthep for short, is one of the most hallowed places in Northern Thailand, built in 1383 under the auspices of King Keu Naone and his elephant. As the story goes, said elephant was carrying a sacred Buddha relic on his back, and the royal party was following behind, with the intention of building a temple on the spot where the holy elephant stopped. Well, he made it all the way to the top of the mountain, then keeled over and died. Thus the temple was built right there. It's less than an hour away by motorbike, and those switchback turns are fun!

Another fun fact: when I tell people my name is Step, it is pronounced a lot more like Suthep than the part of a staircase, so the mountain and I feel much affinity towards one another.

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.

An Interview with Two Village Elders

This morning, Phil and I spent three hours clearing around tree trunks, piling on cow shit, and then rearranging hoses. This afternoon, we played with colored pencils. “There are a lot of things that you can do that don’t involve a shovel,” Marco told us at the beginning of our stay here. So Phil has been working on a map of the watering system here, which is complex, and includes a spot on the map lovingly referred to as the Land of Five Valves, because all the trees there are on a drip-line—no hoses! I've been drawing a kind of welcome map of the property, so that nobody gets lost in a banana grove when they come to the farm for a visit.

Last week, we had an especially cool project, with Marco immediately suggested after we said that we were writers. (Mostly out of relief that he could begin having us write his blog posts for him). We interviewed two village elders, Ooey Khambao (age 84) and Ooey Jum Supaeng (age 77), and wrote up what the village was like when they were born and how it's changed. (Ooey is a Thai term for grandmother or elder that precedes their name.)¹

So with Marco and Nok translating (and, of course, in turn fielding questions about Empress Baby Serena), we wrote a story that synthesizes their voices and their experiences. There's probably a little that we missed, but we tried to catch it all, and swear that we didn't make anything up, not even the tigers.