61. Chiang Mai, Thailand April '01

Another blogging drive by, this time to Chiang Mai. We'll speed by because a) you've already visited it in one of the first entries, and b)the weather was so incredibly bad that we took very few photos. We had just bought a new place in Bangkok, and we were designing it with a mix of contemporary European furniture and Asian antiques, but we needed some functional Asian things to accent the decor as well. And Chiang Mai is by far the best place to go for home decor in Thailand, and probably in Asia. We ended up buying all sorts of kitchen, bathroom etc. pieces and shipping them back, so it was a productive trip, with the added bonus that we got to be indoor most of the time. Here are the only two sightseeing photos we took, which, as usual in Thailand, emphasize the utility cables more than the temples. Bangkok is the world leader in utility over aesthetic design, with dozens of cables draped all over every street and house, but Chiang Mai is pretty bad as well. As for the dainty parasol, I'll have to let Somchai explain that.

This is Doi Suthep, Chiang Mai's most important temple. It's outside the city atop a mountain (Doi is mountain in the Northern language still spoken in Northern Thailand). The temple is reached by a long staircase, with nagas, which as everyone knows are giant snakes with lots of heads, as decorative handrails. As you can see, despite the steep climb, it's very, very, popular. Once you get to the top, there are lots of prayer wheels to spin and bells to ring, and you can go off on a picnic nearby. There are good views of the city below, although these days the pollution interferes a bit. As you can see from my pose near the prayer wheels, I'm trying to be very respectful of the religious traditions, but don't worry, the atmosphere is nothing like a Western cathedral. It's a market, town hall and entertainment center too.

Here's a pic of Wat Pra Sing, another temple complex in the old town. After you've seen hundreds of temples (and when you come to Thailand, you will) you'll be able to tell the different architectural styles of the temples. This temple is a good example of a Lanna temple. One easy way of telling them apart from temples in central Thailand is that these are traditionally made of teak wood. Of course these also burned down all the time, so there aren't that many examples of the traditional building style left.

Here are some more photos of Wat Changlom. As you can probably see, the temple was rocked by an earthquake a long time ago, so I don't think there's a straight line in the whole place. But there are lots of atmospheric ruins to walk around.

Thailand's new year falls in April, and is called Songkran. Chiang Mai is considered ground zero for the celebration, and it's something everyone should do once, and only once. Songkran celebrations used to revolve around pouring water on your elders' hands as a mark of respect, but it has deteriorated into an all out water war, with groups riding around on pickup trucks with barrels of water to pour on passers by, and everyone has a water rifle to attack all comers with. The party (and it is a party, as everyone is drunk the whole week) is attended with gusto by foreign visitors, and popular backpacker hangouts like Khao San Road in Bangkok, or pretty much all of Chiang Mai, are crazy.

This is Wat Changlom, in the heart of the old city. It's an amazing old temple complex (wat is Thai for temple), named after the elephants you see here (chang is Thai for elephant). Chiang Mai used to be the capital of an independent Thai kingdom called Lanna, which was taken over by the Thai kingdom to the South in (I think) the 17th century. The Lanna royal family moved to Bangkok, and their descendants are still treated as very high ranking nobility. The last holder of the title died last year. In addition to being quite a high society party woman, she was famous for her purple hair, which always stood out in a crowd. (She married a commoner, so her children don't inherit the title).

Chiang Mai is a hugely popular tourist spot in Thailand, although I'm not a big fan of the place today. Thais like to go there because it's cold (for Thailand anyway) in the winter, and foreigners like to go there because it's vaguely hippy and laid back compared to the urban sprawl of Bangkok. But Chiang Mai today is pretty sprawl-y, lots of tourist kitsch, very bad traffic etc. But it also has a much better hotel and restaurant selection than when we first visited on this trip. We stayed at the Westin Hotel, which is hopefully out of business by now. It's an ugly tower block, with no views and really nothing to recommend it. Best bets today are clearly the Mandarin Oriental or the Four Seasons, but there are loads of cheaper options that are far superior to the Westin as well. In this photo, Somchai is standing in front of the moat that surrounds the old city of Chiang Mai and separates it from the ugliness of the new city.