Chiang Mai, Thailand: February and March

How we came to all be in Chiang Mai in February

These are the first few weeks of our travel time, spent with the family.  The plan came about when Sean and I decided that we’d start our travels in Thailand in February, and we realized that it will be the only time in 2012 that we’ll have a set date and location.  Little did we know that as time goes on, we’ll end up with a series of flights and plans to meet certain people in certain places at certain times through our travels.  Nevertheless, mom and dad got flights to arrive in Chiang Mai the same day as Sean and I.  Then Jamie and Kazusa booked themselves a Japanese-length vacation to spend five days with us from Feb 26^th to March 2^nd.   And we arranged for Donna to come so that she could finally meet mom and dad!  By some sort of colossal date confusion, it turned out that Donna arrived the evening before mom and dad left… but we had some parental-vacation-overlap to hang out by the pool, go out for dinner, and spend some time together before mom and dad flew out.  Well, the whole family will ultimately have more time together next June in Canada. 

Mom and Dad’s layover at Incheon International Airport, near Seoul, South Korea

            Their original flight only had a few hours layover in Korea.  Then as flights tend to do, this one shifted and morphed and suddenly had a 12 hour layover with a free sleep at the airport hotel on the 21^st.  Pool under construction.  But oh well, we’re going to the tropics! 

            Sean and I had our flight from Incheon on the 22^nd, at a sickeningly early hour in the cold winter morning.  So we figured we’d go meet mom and dad when they touch down, escort them to their fancy pancy hotel, and then sleep at the airport jimjilbang (Korean sauna).  Dad, though, had other plans.  Soon after our series of hugs, hellos, big smiles, and mandatory questions about the flight (Are you tired?  How was security?  Good food in the air?  Got all your baggage? God, your eyes are red!  How many hours?  Twenty?! ) and the mandatory answers (Yes, Okay, Yeah, Yop, Oh is it that bad? Twenty!), we got right to business.  Take this magical flight ticket to the specific counter at the other end of the building, and trade it for a shuttle bus ticket and a sticker which grants you a room at the hotel.  Sneaky dad somehow convinces the ticket and sticker man that it is incumbent that he feels sympathy for the sad nature of our familial dilemma, and he should allows Sean and I to have a hotel room near our beloved parents.  Even though he has absolutely no reason to do this, he is swayed by the endless fountain of eloquence that is Jim Flood, and we end up with twice as many stickers and tickets as allowed. 

            Later in the hotel room, we had a catastrophic cream mix-up which I will not speak of here, but feel free to ask mom and dad about the incident with dad’s foot. 

            Did you know that Incheon Airport has a skating rink in the winter? 

            And that it’s rated the best international airport in the world, three years running? 

            And that the restaurants inside have the same prices as normal restaurants outside?

            And that the staff are all at least trilingual?

That’s enough about planning and getting to Thailand.  We had a few weeks there together, so I’ll just write about the random things for which I have pieces of memories in my scrap book. 

Linda Guestho & Trekk

            For a period of time, mom and dad and Jamie and Kazusa afforded Sean and I a room at the same hotel as them.  They reasoned that it would be insane for us to all come to Thailand to spend time together, if we were to end up sleeping in different hotels.  It was good that way, since we could all meet for breakfast at the hotel restaurant to eat together and laze about for hours and hours until someone got restless and decided to go somewhere.

            After this period of time, Sean and I booked ourselves into a guesthouse around the corner that was of a standard more becoming of our unrefined palates.  This guesthouse turned out to be owned and run by a German lady, and frequented entirely by German people. Except for Sean and I.  While we were there, we met lots of people in the common area, including a man who I think I’d heard other travelers talking about.  You don’t forget stories like this.  He’s a guy who travels only by boat and train, and he’s been doing it for decades while writing books and blogs about his stories.  These days, travel by boat is more difficult, but since he started so long ago, he has connections with people all over the place.  And like in most guesthouses, we met other people with amazing stories, and other people who were a little strange.  And we discovered that a room full of German people will switch to English when two Canadians show up.  That’s a neat thing that we haven’t seen people from any other country do.  We ate a cheap breakfast here every morning and spent some time hanging out with our new friends, and then wandered over to hang out with mom and dad at their place. 

Tuk Tuks with an amazed Jamie

Tiger and Wat Phrathat, Feb 27^th

            One of the things Kazusa really wanted to do in Thailand was see tigers.  So she found a place where she could do that.  It was one part of a long daytrip that involved being carsick most of the time, and amazed at everything else the rest of the time.  We started the day with breakfast and then all jumped into our driver’s van for a day of driving and looking at things.  After a day of deliberating over Sean’s and my restrictive budget and the level of generosity of our family, we arrived to a conclusion about the day’s plan, which involved a high level of cheapness on our part and a high level of sharing on their part.  In the van, we went North West, uphill into the mountains towards a hilltop temple called Wat Phrathat.  We stopped halfway up the hill at a lookout to admire the ability of fog and smoke to completely conceal the city below, and try to battle the beginnings of carsickness.  Then back in the van to the temple.  Some of us took this strange contraption of a diagonal elevator with a funny name that I was sure mom had made up, while a few of us took the hundred-something stairs that had long decorative dragons as handrails. 

            The temple itself is really beautiful, with multiple paths through small temples, beautiful gardens, and huge platforms with views that would be nice if it weren’t for the inconsiderate fog.  There’s also an inner courtyard where people go to walk around clockwise and say prayers while looking at a gazillions statues of who I assume to be Buddha.  

            Next stop: tigers.  Jamie, Kazusa, mom and Sean all wanted to go touch some sedate tigers, so we drove our carsick asses to this place where people can do exactly this thing.  Dad and I sat out, had some snacks, and watched people while they had photo opportunities with tigers and their trainers.  Kazusa had herself a cuddle session with a tiger, Jamie spent time with it while avoiding all the sharpest bits. 

Ladyboy Cabaret, March 1^st

Kazusa and the Ladies

            Kazusa is the engine that drives motivation.  Everywhere she goes, she has a million ideas for all the things she wants to do there.  It’s like she has this inventory of the zillions of things she wants to do around the world, and she’s ready to whip out the list for any given country.  When she goes to Canada, she wants to see polar bears, Niagara Falls, whales, and eat beaver tails.  Sadly in Canada, reality has to kick in when the size of the country is taken into consideration and you realise you can only do a couple of things on the dream list.  In Thailand, I think Kazusa got most of to-do list crossed off.  With the tigers cuddled, the temples epic, and the shopping successful, the only thing left was to see a ladyboy show. 

            Ladyboys are an interesting part of Thai culture.  They are men (or should I say ladies?) who range anywhere from transvestites to transsexuals.  Ladyboys in Thailand are, unlike in most other countries, socially accepted and generally understood to be perfectly normal.  We had a lot of conversation with Thai people about how they feel about ladyboys, and how it is that a mostly homophobic country has no negative feelings about ladyboys.  To me it sounded like a double standard.  But ladyboys are not seen as being gay, somehow, they are just seen as people who live in a different way and are really fun to party with.  We also had long confusing conversations about how exactly it is that ladyboys are neither gay nor straight, but we came to no logical conclusions about how this is possible. 

Anyways, most cities have a population of ladyboys, and in some cities they perform at clubs and bars.  In Chiang Mai there is a nightly cabaret in the night bazaar, a super touristy shopping district within the city walls.  I assume that this cabaret is a toned down version of the more exclusive private ones, but it was still seriously booby and leggy.  Sean and I went with Kazusa and dad while Jamie walked around the market with mom.  I won’t go into detail here about the show, but don’t you worry there were definitely cowboy hats, skilled dancers, hilarious songs, customers on stage, and a great many ladyboys who’d you never guess were at any point in their life male. 

Your smiles will tell you what makes you feel good

            Not much of a story with this little scrap of pink and purple paper, it’s just one of the many different happy things that sugar packets tell you before you empty them into your unsuspecting cup of coffee. 

Unsuspecting cup of coffee

Strawberries

            This colourful background is something I took from one of the many tourist pamphlets and brochures that anyone can get anywhere.  Hotels and tourist offices have dozens of them for anything that might be of interest to people.  From cooking schools to farms, temple guides, maps, events schedules, hotels, boat rides, shops and businesses, and other such things.  One day we went to the TAT office, the tourist admin of something or other, which has walls lined with brochures in English, French, Chinese, Korean, Thai, and other languages.  I love pamphlets.  They are so awesome.  Partially for the free maps, partially for inspiration, and mostly for scrap booking.  I have no idea what this giant picture of strawberries was for, but I took it because it was pretty. 

Wat Jet Yod and the Chiang Mai National Museum, February 24^th.  Jamie’s birthday without Jamie

            Not too far north from the city walls there are a few things to see.  After consulting a few brochures and mom’s Thailand book, which was half underlined and covered with stars and notes of all the things she wanted to see, we made a day plan to see some tourist things.  Wat Jet Yod is a really beautiful temple complex with massive grounds, manicured gardens and grass, huge temples in different states of repair, decay, or awesomeness.  One of the things I like about the Thai landscape is these giant old trees that have long colourful strips of fabric wrapped around their trunks, and dozens of branches and poles leaning against the trunk, looking like they’re somehow supporting the tree.  Another thing is the variety of temples.  Some are made of bricks, others white plaster, many have ornamental golden roofs, and they’re all of different sizes.  Some are multi-storey buildings that are the size of a city block, and others are tiny things tucked away between buildings in the city.  Somehow I’ve lost all my pictures of this particular temple, which included a lovely picture in which Sean and dad very passively ignored me while I put flowers behind their ears and told them to look pretty.  Too bad. 

Giant tree with 'supports'

I think that’s all for page 2, each of my pieces of paper have been accounted for now. 

Now for the logistics

Don’t try to walk from the airport to town.  It looks like it’s just a couple of kilometres, which it is, but it’s a couple of long dusty kilometres along highways with confusing and chaotic intersections and overpasses that never come in handy.  Unless you’re into long dusty walks with nothing nice to look at, I recommend not doing this walk.  Especially when you’ve just quit smoking that very day, and you’re not used to walking with 10kg of stuff on your back. 

There are some nice hotels a few kilometres outside of town, like ours.  And there are some equally nice ones within the city walls that are about the same price.  The problem is that the convenient ones don’t have websites, and the inconvenient ones do.  So if you’re into booking ahead, you’ll probably end up staying far, and having to pay 100 baht every time you want to get to town and then again to get back home.  If you’re not into booking ahead, and you have the patience to shop around, you can find really beautiful places for seriously good prices. 

This songthaew goes to Doi Pui and Pooping

Tuk tuks, songthaew, private hire, public buses.  There are lots of different ways to get around within and without town.  Tuk tuks are cheaper and go exactly where you want them to go.  These are motorcycles with an attached carriage-like thing.  For about 50 baht, they’ll take you a few kilometres.  Songthaew, pronounced song- tow (like the tow in tower, or the ow in ka-pow!) kinda have set paths along major roads.  You stand on the appropriate side of the road, flag one down, discuss your price, and jump in if you agree to said price.  Sometimes they’ll just tell you that they’re not going there; you have to take the blue one, not the white one, something like that.  The beauty of Thai culture is that they won’t just leave you lost and stranded, they’ll point you in the right direction until your lost-and-confused look fades away from you face.