Chugging towards Chiang Mai

Early enough, I found myself yet again in Bangkok. I wouldn’t have any time to enjoy it, though, as I was going to try to make it as soon as possible to this one old, archaic airport that’s mostly used for domestic flights. My plan was to make it from Phuket to Chiang Mai in significantly less than the 24 hours it normally takes by train, so I thought a nice halfway solution would be to train to Bangkok, then fly from there. Being the quintessential hub, the prices would be cheaper anyway . . . it looked like it was going to work out nicely.

The way I understood it, I’d be able to take the metro from the Bangkok train station to that airport, but it turns out I understood incorrectly, and in fact I’d have to take this one old train, that would normally continue on to other destinations beyond Bangkok, but just get off early on.

So I hopped on, and there was no space whatsoever. I found myself beside a girl who had been on the same bus from Phuket to Surat Thani, but that I hadn’t spoken to at all. We ended up being train buddies for the next hour or so . . . first settling on finding a place to actually sit.

Not long after this, we settled in to what was probably the crappiest train compartment I’ve yet been in. And by now, I’ve had some experience under my belt. If I did anything other than sit back in the bench, the seat of my bench would come unhinged. Period. Which was particularly a problem after a couple of Thai women sat down on my and my train buddy’s side.

I found out from this newfound friend what the Ping – Pong show in Thailand is really like. I had heard stories, but she laid them out more graphically for me than anyone else has yet done. Due to the fact that there’s a good number of people who are reading this that could conceivably be viewing this blog from a work environment, I’m not going to lay out the details here. If you want to, you can check it out later at : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ping_pong_show or by just writing to me and asking for what the deal is. Just remember, you can never un-learn things.

There was no mention made of stops as the train was moving, and I had no frickin clue when to get off for the airport. Finally, at one point, I spied the airport coming up out of the window. I think it was called Dong Mueang Airport. We came to a stop at that moment. Technically we hadn’t reached the airport yet, and an attendant tried to assure me in her own way that it would be the next place we were stopping at. So I waited patiently for the next stop. A couple of kilometers later, I’m let off, and I face the other side of the street to see that this is where the (closed) international departure terminal is. Which meant I’d have to walk back most of the distance just covered between those two stops to reach the domestic terminal.

Due to the train moving far slower than I could possibly anticipate, and having to backtrack this much, I missed the morning flight to Chiang Mai, and instead I had to wait a full additional four hours. Considering I had just come off of about 14, maybe 16 hours of transit from Phuket, this wasn’t a thrilling prospect, but what can you do? I bought some postcards and ran around looking for some food. The airport itself advertised having a Burger King, but I couldn’t find it for the life of me for quite some time, until finally I realized the problem was that the Burger King was beyond the security gates. Technically I couldn’t get my ticket until two hours before the flight, so I couldn’t get past those security gates to the king of burgers.

I happened to have almost nothing to do, but I realized I had one ace up my sleeve; my computer. I had a couple of computer games on it, something I don’t think about much while traveling, as I usually have better things to do with myself, but this proved to be a life saver. Although I did terrible in this game. An expansion pack of Civilization IV, that completely subverted the normal rules and socio-economic dynamics of the original game, I was a fish out of water. Those tricky designers.

It let me kill of those couple of hours, though, although I had to scour the entire damn place to find an outlet I could siphon electricty off of. Finally, the clock struck 1 or whatever, and I was able to go through those security gates to get to burgery goodness. I was a bit surprised to see the truncated version of Burger King they had available. But no matter, I could still get meat cheese and bread, and I was extremely hungry at that point, so that’s all I needed. I played that game some more, and did as much wandering as I could within this small terminal, browsing obsessively through their small print section that included a bizarre number of high end art publications in English. Finally, it was time to go aboard, and boy was I ready for it.

I found myself sitting next to a brute of a British guy, probably a little less than 10 years older than myself. Apparently he comes to Thailand pretty frequently as his primary vacation spot, and for him its all about the Thai girls. It never seems to end, you know? I tried to continue polite conversation with him for the duration of the plane ride, easy enough to do given it was going to be a fairly short flight. We make it to Chiang Mai, get off the plane, and are bombarded by ladies who work there asking if we want . . . SIM cards. Of all things. They seemed to be offering them out for free, but still, a bit weird, no?

Anyway, I said goodbye to the overbearing British dude and headed out of the airport, to look for an airport shuttle bus that the Lonely Planet guide mentioned. Not a single one in sight. So I went back to the service desks and asked, and they were just doe-eyed in their incompetency. So I walked away, and wandered around a little bit, not wanting to use the ample taxi pimps that were around. Got out my Lonely Planet guide again, looking for a map and some scale, and started moving in the direction that I thought was correct.

It looked like it was going to be quite the walk. My skin was still ridiculously rough from the sunburn, so I wasn’t really looking forward to this. A couple of other white people walked up and asked me if I wanted to share a taxi in to town. They were both French, if I remember correctly, and looked like golden age punks. I’d guess they were each right around 30 years old, plus or minus a few years. We walked in the direction we wanted to go anyway, hoping to find a taxi, and maybe twenty minutes later finally found one. It was ridiculous how long it took to find, but whatever. We got in, told them where we wanted to go, and waited. The guy was pretty cool; not that the girl wasn’t, but I spoke to the guy more. He had quite the assortment of tattoos (well actually they both did), and upon inquiring I found out thats his souvenir from every trip he takes. He gets a tattoo from the country at the end of the trip there. I thought that was pretty neat. There’s probably other people who do it also, but it still seems original to me.

They were going to a guesthouse that was right in the center of the guesthouse part of town. It was a bit more expensive than I wanted to pay for a room myself. So I took my chances and wandered around a bit, and called about 10 different guesthouses that were listed in the Lonely Planet guide. They were all fully booked. I went to this one guesthouse that had a copious patio area, and a friendly looking old dude working there, and figured he was the owner. I asked him if he had any ideas as to where I could stay, and so he suggested we go check out this one place nearby that he was friends with, that was a little pricier, but pretty nice, and would save me a lot of time in searching for a place to stay, as it was already fairly late in the day and the chances of finding a backpacker priced place that still had vacancies wasn’t high.

I took his suggestion, and found myself at a place that was called something like The Britannica or something, with a rather old British expat for an owner. I get the feeling I wasn’t his usual kind of customer, but whatever. I had the money, and that’s all that mattered. So I did in fact get a room, and sauntered up towards it, up a few flights of stairs. The room was hands down the most posh out of all the ones I stayed at during this entire month long trip. Here’s a couple of photographs:

It had a rather nice view on its balcony of all the other guesthouses in the area, and though I didn’t enjoy paying almost 20 USD for the day, I know I certainly got my money’s worth.

I took a shower and cleaned up and rested in general, and then went downstairs to check my emails and stuff. In particular, I was looking for some kind of correspondence from my friend Yara, who I had originally met in Bangkok and stayed with for two days, who, as I understood it, was going to have a small break from her elephant program this weekend and I’d be able to hang out with. Turns out I slightly misunderstood what she had meant, and that she wouldn’t be able to come to the city until the next day. For all intents and purposes, this meant I needlessly rushed up to Chiang Mai, and could’ve just shown up on Sunday morning on a really long train ride instead and been about 100 dollars cheaper.

But, that’s life, so I set out to do at least something for the day, and put all my stuff away to go get ready to see the night markets that Chiang Mai is semi-famous for.

The layout of Chiang Mai is fairly simple. Basically, there’s a big square moat with a lot of historical stuff and travel stuff inside of it, and then the rest of the city exists outside of it. Many travelers won’t see anything outside of this moat that’s still in the city of Chiang Mai except for the night markets, as most people who come to Chiang Mai do so to take part in other excursions that go outside city limits. The main night market is just east of the city, and an easy walk.

So I left the guesthouse and headed east, as soon as I figured out which direction east was (pretty simple with the help of the compass app on the iPhone. Love that thing.) On the way, I grabbed some pad thai at a little street stall, which looked basically like this:

And then crossed the moat to head in the direction I thought things were. I kept walking and walking for what seemed like a longish time; as it tends to be, it always seems longer when you’re walking towards a place you’ve never been to before. Eventually, though, I made it, or at least I made it to A market. Not necessarily the right one, as I found out. This market was extremely boring, and had just a lot of fruit and some other snacks, and a lot of regular clothes, mostly for like Thai people. 

I had brought a map with me and consulted it a bit, and decided that I might be a little north of the market I had intended to go to; going forward with this hunch, I headed south, and within ten minutes found myself at the real tourists’ night market.

This place was a collection of crap also, but crap of a different kind that lots of people actually want to buy. There were probably thousands of shirts with local beer labels on them, as well as various Thai place names, and so on, and so on. Lots of silk fabrics, lots of little craft items and such. I’m sure some people think that stuff is a lot of fun to sort through, but I’m not one of those kinds of people.

I had nothing else to do, though, so I wandered through all of it. A few hours later, I found myself pretty tired of it all, and wandered back towards my guesthouse. When I reached the east side of the moat, I didn’t cross, but instead hung out at to watch some jazz music at a bar. It was pretty solid. I sat down at a burger stand just across from it, and had a beer or two. Suddenly, I find myself talking to two young Thai girls. Apparently, one of them had a major crush on one of the jazz players, and apparently this group of jazz players are there peforming regularly. So I hung out with these girls for a couple hours and we just chatted about any old thing. They were just normal down to earth college students, and we had a pretty good time, and exchanged e-mail addresses; I still e-mail back and forth lightly with one of them to this day.

Finally, we agreed it was late enough that all of us should go back home and get some sleep, so that’s what I did. On the way back, it was obvious night had truly fallen, as all the tourists were gone, and all the prostitutes were out. Some of them were pretty scary looking.

I found my way back through the back streets to my guesthouse; the British man who owned the place was still awake and chatting it up with a few other old expats, having a good gruff old time, and I let them carry on on my way up the stairs, and hit the sack.

The next day, I got up early enough to get some breakfast and take care of some more administrative stuff. I got my usual order of fried eggs, bacon and toast, and iced coffee, and decided on which hostel I was going to try to go to the next day. I settled on Spicy Backpackers, which had a pretty darn good review in multiple sources. I picked up my things, grabbed a tuk tuk, and headed on over. I had called ahead of time to make sure they had space, then asked for directions; I was told to tell the tuk tuk driver to go to Amari hotel, which apparently all drivers would be familiar with, then find my way in through a gated complex right next to this hotel.

So I did what the lady on the phone told me to, and found my way into this gated suburban place, and wandered for a while. I saw one sign that mentioned the hostel, so I knew for sure I was in the right place, but I didn’t know how to actually find it. At one point, I saw a big collection of foreigners that were obviously from a myriad of different places, and asked them if they knew where it was I was looking for. I was in luck, they did, and they told me how to get there. Turns out it was in the diammetrically opposite part of said compound, but luckily, this compound was small enough that it wouldn’t be too tricky to find my way there.

Five minutes later, I find myself checking into one of the most homely hostels I’ve ever seen. They give you bedsheets to make the bed yourself, and then they give you a bowl, spoon, and mug that you can use as you will within their kitchen. The girl at the front desk was American, actually, which caught me by surprise, but they also had a vaguely Asian guy working there who seemed to be a bit more like a head honcho. I mean, he was definitely Asian, but I have no idea what country he was actually from. There are two other Spicy Backpacker Hostels in Laos, and supposedly there’s one guy who works at all of them, and it might very well have been this one particular man, so I figure he’s probably either Thai or Lao, but your guess is as good as mine. Here's a couple pictures of the ground floor:

I was shown up to my room, and passed by some bunk beds lined in the hallway. This was one of the more chaotic hostels I’ve ever seen, in a way, but the system worked. There was already a few people in my room, so I made my hellos, and ended up meeting what would be a good number of friends for the rest of my travels in southeast Asia. Its a little difficult for me to remember who all exactly I met at precisely this moment, but I think it was a guy named Tom, a guy named Evan, and a guy named . . . John? Maybe? Shortly after this, also, a girl named Hannah.

I don’t know, I guess there was a bit of magic to this particular place or group of people. We immediately arranged to hang out, and went and got some lunch nearby. I wasn’t going to stay with them forever, as I was finally going to meet up with Yara again in just a few hours. But I had a good start of getting to know them, and we figured on meeting up again later on in the evening after I had hung out with Yara, as it turned out Yara only had a little bit of free time to spare.

I went to meet up with Yara at the east gate of the moat, and it was really nice to see her again. There was a little food market going on at this east gate, so we wandered and I snacked while we caught up on what each of us had been doing in the past week, and she told me all about what she had been doing with the elephants, and what it was like living at this camp. It sounded pretty fantastic, and I looked forward to trying to go there within the next couple days to see it for myself.

We walked into the central part of town in the middle of the moats, where there was a big street long special Sunday market to check out, and where she had to go anyway to meet up with her other elephant camp friends, and where I was also going to meet up with my new hostel friends.

We ran into a lot of other people she had known from the elephant camp on accident, but not the people she was looking for. Finally, though, that changed, and she headed off. It had been a rather brief meeting, and if we’re all being honest, I was a bit disappointed, given how much effort I had put into trying to come back up to Chiang Mai to meet up with her again. The entire time I was with her once we met up again, also, it seemed like she was distracted by the prospect of meeting back up with her elephant camp friends, which also was disappointing. But, that’s life.

I spent the next hour or so trying to meet up with the hostel friends again. It was a lot easier said than done; it didn’t help that only one of the people from the hostel had a phone with a Thai SIM card, but he was out of credit, so he couldn’t make phone calls, only receive them; therefore, I was at the mercy of his ability to know I was calling him, which, in the din of this market, wasn’t as likely as one would hope.

It took a while, but finally, we made contact. I was then told they were eating food outside of a big gold temple. Which is about as useful as saying that they were eating food in Chiang Mai, as Chiang Mai has dozens of gold temples. This street alone had at least five, and the street was probably a couple miles long.

Ultimately I used this one cross street that had a lady singing in the middle of it as a reference point, and waited there for my other new friends to show up. 15 minutes later, they did, and along with the people I mentioned earlier, the American front desk girl, whose name eludes me but we’re going to call Sarah, and a Dutch guy named Jens tagged along. I forgot to mention I had met Jens earlier, after the lunch, while I was hanging out at the hostel playing guitar in a hammock in the front yard before heading out to meet up with Yara.

We were all relieved to have finally met up, and bounced out of that market after Sarah had found a few little knick knacks to buy for a friend of hers that would be visiting soon or something like that. We were headed for a reggae bar, apparently, and it was in walking distance. I actually had walked across the place the night before while wandering randomly at night, which reminds me now that I had spent some time in that area the previous night at a rock bar directly across from the reggae bar. I can’t believe I totally forgot about that! The rock bar had a cover band that competently pumped out covers of Muse, the Red Hot Chili Peppers, and so on. All the music that I’ve come to discover is stereotypical Western backpacker music in Southeast Asia.

The reggae bar was a pretty small place, but had a totally solid reggae band playing. I wasn’t about to rock out to it, but it was good. I found myself hanging out outside with the other hostel people, watching a couple of guys play with fire poi. If you don’t know what fire poi is, it’s basically like.... you have two strings that have a ball on the end, and you twirl them around fancily. If its fire poi, those balls are on fire. Each hand holds one of these strings, and the discipline is related to juggling and stick twirling and stuff. Its pretty cool. Check it out on youtube or something, if you feel so inclined.

That was well enough, but then Sarah decided she was going to have her hand at it, which was a bit surprising to most of us. Sarah is a rather short and somewhat heavyset girl, and didn’t seem like she’d be the type to know much about this niche hobby. Just by way of background, the two people who usually know how to do poi are Pacific Islanders (where it was created) and hippies. She didn’t really seem like a hippy, despite the fact that she was working at a hostel in central Thailand.

She wasn’t amazing, but she was competent enough, and could do a little more than I had ever learned to do with poi.

FLASHBACK

So a few years ago, when I was still living in San Diego, I lived in an apartment away from my parents for the first time in my life. I lived with a few other college guys, and one of them was a guy who goes by the name of Psalm (or at least that is how its pronounced, not spelled, and I like to think it really is spelled that way).

Aside from Psalm, all the guys there let me live out being a silly guy in a way that living at home just didn’t. Although I didn’t drink at the time, I joined with them when they did, and we did plenty of stupid late night things and generally goofed off.

Psalm in particular was pretty open to my own weird ideas of a good time, ranging from learning how to throw cards to, well, poi. Another really, really good friend of mine back in Southern California has done Tahitian dance for as long as I can remember, and introduced me to the idea of poi one way or another. I thought it was pretty cool, so at this time, decided I was going to learn it.

Only problem was that I didn’t know where to buy any. So I figured I’d make my own! Psalm thought this was pretty cool or at least funny, and joined me in my trip to the local pharmacy, where I made easily the oddest purchase of my life: a couple of rubber balls, rope, and duct tape. Yeah, that raised some eyebrows.

So, after a month of injuring myself due to the high density of those rubber balls colliding with my shoulders and thighs and whatever else, a mutual friend of my Tahitian dancing friend got me a legitimate set, which had a much, much lighter density, and was a lot safer to practice with. I never got too far with it, but I got far enough to appreciate the sport some more.

/end flashback

So I could pretty well appraise her skills, and it was pretty good for an amateur, and the fire had no effect on her ability to carry on, so that was pretty cool.

At some point, there was a couple of rather pretty girls sitting near us. And, well, what do you expect?

Tom and I talked to them, in particular. These girls were both Israeli, though one looked decidedly Russian (and it turned out she was ethnically Russian). She was also really pretty, and it turned out she was quite intelligent, and creative. Early in the conversation, Tom did a great job of snubbing both of the Israeli girls, by buying a rose from a wandering beggar, pretending to offer it to the Israeli girls, then giving it to another girl before they had the chance to accept, at which point he had really quit the conversation, even if he didn’t know it. Ladies, if ever there was a time to comment on a blog, please let me know how stupid of an idea this was on his part, as it seemed pretty idiotic to me.

Suddenly, two guys show up. I guess they wanted to dance with these girls (by this point we had made our way onto the dance floor and grooved to the reggae a bit). The girls were not interested. Aside from the fact that they were, you know, not interested, they had more of a reason to not be, as it turned out these guys were also Israeli, and were in the Israeli armed forces at the same time as these girls were, and the girls recognized them (it wasn’t mutual).

Eventually we headed back outside, and those Israeli guys followed, and it ended up being a 6 party conversation. I think this made Tom even less happy than he had already become. It was amicable enough, though, so I had no problems with it. Not long after, we all decided to go to another place. By this point, the other hostel friends had all become distracted by whatever or whoever, and we had gone our separate ways.

This other place we were going to is called Spicy Club. Here’s the wikitravel entry on this club:

“Spicy is a hectic after hours place with good drinks, dancing and lots of girls looking to party - be warned, they almost always ask for money. Also be warned of the washroom staff who will provide you with an invigorating massage whilst you are washing your hands or worse when you are at the urinal and then ask for a tip. A place for farang men to pick up prostitutes.”

I wish I had known that before going there, but I actually didn’t see to much of it at the time, since I was already with a group of people. When we got there, Tom disappeared. I have no idea where he went, to this day. We got inside, and now there was a pretty awkward imbalance of four people who speak Hebrew and English and one person who speaks English. What do you think happened?

I didn’t really have any intentions of having anything happen at the end of the night; I was staying in a hostel, after all, and I believe some decorum is called for in these places. However, one of the Israeli guys, eventually, cuts in, finally, explaining that his long term girlfriend just broke up with him and he needs some comforting. After having explained earlier in the night that he had a long term girlfriend and therefore wasn’t going to be doing anything bad in Thailand. At this point, there was no room for me, and so I removed myself from the club, seeing Evan from the hostel tended to by some random Thai girl on the way out, forcing me to chuckle a bit despite myself, and wander around just a bit more, not really wanting to pay the tuk tuks the extra fee they charge for night rides, especially since I’d be going entirely on my own.

A short while later, the Israelis piled out, and sat down close to me on the edge of the moat. The Russian-Israeli in particular asked how I was doing for a couple minutes, then the four of them got caught up in each other in Hebrew yet again. Another ten minutes later, and I was tired of it some more. A few attempts to haggle with tuk tuks later, the Russian-Israeli girl offered to give me a ride back to my place on her motobike. I figured what the hell, but she had no idea how to get there. A whopping three scary minutes later (my first time on a motorbike, let alone the back of one) and I found myself dumped off at another bank of tuk tuks and a wish of good luck in finding my way back.

So I paid what I had to pay, the price of foolishness, and made my way back to just off from the Amari Hotel.