Art and Adventure in Chiang Mai

Chiang Mai was definitely worthy of a trip up to the north, and I packed in quite a variety of activities into my six days there. My first day after sneakily getting dropped in town, I proceeded to drive myself crazy wandering about the city looking for a guesthouse and a trekking trip. Just like scuba course options in Koh Tao, this proved totally overwhelming, and per usual I handled in the most illogical manner—spending lots of time looking and then impulsively walking by one sign on a random street and signing up on the spot for a 3-day trek. Truth be told I think I got the best deal of anyone on my trek. It’s really just so hard to know because the Thai network of tourism consists of all of these little agencies feeding into other small ones, then bigger ones which are quite unclear to the unsuspecting tourist. However, the next day on the trek, when the sticky question of how much one paid for the trek came up, I kept mum because it turned out to my 1400 baht (just under $50) some girls had booked in Bangkok for just the two day trek paying 1900, and so on. I guess you just have to take your turn getting screwed over every few weeks in Southeast Asia, and sometimes you get cut a break. It ended up being even more of an unlikely wise decision on my part because due to the fact that it is now low season and I was this woman’s first customer of the day, I was pronounced “lucky” and when asking her about the best way to visit some markets outside of town, she volunteered her husband to act as my guide for the afternoon!

So I headed back to my original guesthouse, which at 100 baht a night (yes $3 for my own room with hot water, etc, so quite a deal if not the prettiest box in the world), showered, and was whisked of by air-conditioned car no less to see the arts of Chiang Mai in the small town of Bo Sang, which is famous for its paper umbrella among other numerous crafts. In light of my mentioning a love for ceramics, my guide (who spoke excellent English too) took me to the Baan Celadon factory that translates to “house of ceramics” in Thai. It was truly magnificent actually. These are some of the moments also when I’m grateful to be travelling alone because I’m not sure how many travel buddies would be eager to wander the ceramics store for an hour, no matter how exquisite. The shop attendant offered me some lovely iced green tea, and I wandered the large shop ogling the many intricately carved and painted vases, elephant motifs, bowls, etc. In the back of the shop there was the large factory room where one could observe men hard at work throwing bowls and women hunched over their piece with supreme focus. After this delightful excursion, I was shown the silk factory, lacquer workshop, gemstone factory, paper crafts and umbrellas, and the carpet and weaving factory. So many fine works and of course so many shopping temptations along the way (for better or worse my backpack provides a strict limitation on this matter). After a real treat of an afternoon, I spent the evening organizing for my trek the following morning and enjoying a night’s sleep not on a train.

Next day I was up and out early to meet the rest of my trekking group, which on the first day consisted of 11 people—one Swede, two Canadians, two Australians, two Swiss, one Korean, one Brit, one Russian living in Brooklyn, and myself. The first day we started off at a butterfly and orchid garden (they have these in every country I swear), before driving out in the back of a pickup truck to our first adventure: elephant riding! I ended up sharing an elephant with the Brit, a girl named Sarah, whom I literally met at we teetered on top of the elephant, and I ended up rooming with her for my last three days in Chiang Mai after the trek. Our elephant was one of the smaller ones and very cute aside from when he snotted on us after we fed him bananas, and when he splashed us heartily at the water station. I sat on the neck for part of the way, but retreated to the seat after sensing some instability. Altogether it was a lot of fun and (I hope) the elephants seemed to be treated pretty well. Then we were sent across the river in small groups in a hanging wire cage—very Indiana Jones. After some friend rice, it was time for what turned out to be a grueling three hour hike, and one again I was shamed into realizing my true fitness level: not great. The trek was mostly uphill to the village where we would be staying for the night perched off in the distance. We ventured across rocky streams and up long stretches of hills huffing and puffing. I was not alone in my agony, but as usual everyone was trying to put on a tough exterior until we arrived for the evening and the truth came out.

Now I’ll be honest, the hill tribe we visited were quite disappointing. Perhaps I should have known better but I was expecting some authenticity. Wrong—the closest we got was some children selling their bracelets and many woman harassing us to get a traditional Lahu massage. Somehow I managed to avoid both. We had a good dinner of chicken curry and pineapple for dessert, then had a traditional Lahu evening—sitting around the guitar man singing American ballads—oh, Thailand! The best part was that we could hear another group engaging in the same traditional village activities, only their guy knew how to sing Mr. Jones. At last, at the time of 9pm (and I stayed up the latest—not so much to do there after dark) we hit our mosquito-net enveloped mats and slept until the cows, pigs, and roosters awakened the world. I guess that was pretty authentic. Although according to my mother the hill tribes weren’t so authentic 30 years ago either, and to be honest, having all these damn tourist wandering through every day clearly does not help the situation. I just wanted my little traditional dance, to snap some pictures and go, so I was just part of the problem I suppose.

The second day we hiked a couple hours through a few more villages before stopping at one for a swim in a lovely waterfall and a noodle soup lunch. Another bit of trekking later and we had reached another impressive waterfall and then we were off to our secluded jungle camp for the night, another nice large thatched-roof hut perched by a stream. After dinner we sat around a campfire and listened to some more guitar, including one very popular Thai song which will forever be stuck in my head—do do do do da dum, blah blah blah blah blahhhhhhhhhhh. The next day we set off for our final adventures: white-water rafting and bamboo rafting. The white-water proved quite adventurous after all when our raft was flipped and our guides lack of skill and English speaking abilities were brought to the forefront, poor guy. The four in our boat were all rescued from our respective rocky perches and given another guide who took us down the rest of the river with only a few more hiccups. Another river survived! It was a bit scarier than the Nile because although the rapids were not nearly as big, the “river” was very narrow and had lots of rocks popping up everywhere and we seemed to have a knack for hitting every one of them. After this slightly harrowing experience, we had a mellower ride on a long bamboo raft before it was time for pad thai lunch and our ride back to civilization.

Continuing the Thai adventures, I signed up for a cooking class the next day which included a trip to the market to learn about rice, curry pastes, etc, before heading up to the instructor’s house in the hills outside of Chiang Mai where we learned to make six dishes: tom yam soup, mixed vegetables, spring rolls, pad thai, green/penang/ or massaman curry, and mango and sticky rice, as well as numerous variations on these dishes. We each had our own cooking station and got to season to the dishes to our desired spice level (three chilies for me!), and even do adventure cooking—creating a huge flame when frying out mixed vegetables—only to be tried in this open air kitchen, not a NYC one I’d imagine. That evening a cooking class friend and I took a moto up the windy mountain rode to see the spectacular view from Doi Suthep temple.

The following day I treated myself to one more class: a Thai batik class. Batik is all over Asia, but it consists of a method of using hot wax to create a design and then paint colors within and around it before washing of the wax and exposing the design. Apparently Thai batik is traditionally much more colorful than Indonesian and Malaysian batik. I had just the loveliest time that day. First of all, even though there is usually a minimum for two people for the course, the woman, Ann, agreed to take just me. She picked me up in the morning and drove me to a nice big house she shares with her husband and 7 year old daughter outside Chiang Mai. After treating me to tea and breakfast cake, she taught me the basics of Thai batik, the canting tools, the wax, etc. and then I chose a fish and lotus blossom pattern for the first cloth, traced it, and outlined it with hot wax with varying success and much help from Ann. After that I was given free range to paint and blend with the watercolors until I was satisfied with my efforts, and then shown how to use salt and sugar to create different bubbling effect on the painted material. Then it was time for a home-cooked lunch of pork with hot basil, fried egg, steamed rive, and vegetable soup (all delicious), during which her daughter joined us (it was her last day of summer vacation!) and we chatted about university life in Thailand among other things.

Next I was given a thicker cloth pillowcase to paint and I chose a flower pattern, painted on the wax again, blended and experimented with the paints, and then learned another technique of creating a crackling technique using paraffin wax over the paint. Then I learned to finish and seal in the colors before removing the wax and seeing the final product! After a long but good day of art, I was sad to leave this happy little home of suburban bliss, but headed back into Chiang Mai to make my next set of plans: border crossing into Laos. Now this should be interesting…