So I woke up the next day, and got ready to do . . . something. Actually, this was set to be a good day. I had a few things planned for the day. The first of them was to go to a nearby temple on a mountain top, with my new friend Hannah. This temple is called Doi Suthep, and you really have to take a saengthaew (the name of special pickup truck taxis in Thailand) to get to it.
Before we went there, though, I think I had a lazy start to the day, hanging out in the hammock, reconvening with the other denizens of the night and finding out what their stories were from the previous evening, then doing a bit of reading, and having a far too early bottle or two of Chang. It was a nice way to start the day, as always. The sun was pleasant, and I was finally on the mend from the sunburn, or at least it was substantially noticeable.
Hannah and I headed out at around noon, and we walked from where we were to this university nearby. I wondered for a moment if the girls I met two nights prior were students there, but there was no way to know. There was a bunch of saengthaews lined up there, waiting to take people up to that very temple, as well as a few other destinations nearby, but it was a slow day, and we had to wait a while for the thing to fill up with other visitors until they’d finally take us up. I introduced Hannah to super cheap bottled water while we were waiting. These good 1, maybe 1.5 liter bottles that cost about..... 20 cents. Somehow she had never seen these prior. They’re a super distinct bottle that doesn’t exist in the States, and different from all the other more expensive bottles for that reason, which more closely resemble what’s also available in America. It tastes a little funky, but its filtered and purified, so, all’s well that ends well, right?
Finally they cranked the engine, and off we went to Doi Suthep. The other passengers were all Thai, which was kind of interesting. About 15 minutes later, we arrived at the temple. Famously, it has a bit over a hundred steps or something to climb to get up to it. Whatever. That’s nothin. We had an hour to explore and then we’d have to go back to town, or so our saengthaew driver said, so we clambered up, which was a rather short climb, and walked around to check it out. Unfortunately, the central part of the temple was under reconstruction, but it was still nice, and taking a step out on the edges of this mountain based temple offered a decent enough view. Here are some pictures (including the stairs)!:
It was just so so, compared to a variety of other temples I’ve checked out, but so be it! It was still nice to get out. Hannah and I walked back, and we still had like over half an hour to kill, so we wandered down the road a bit, and there was an orchid farm nearby. We didn’t bother with that, but we did get some lunch there, and Hannah explained to me everything I ever wanted to know but didn’t know I wanted to know about the yachting service industry, which is how she makes her money, and sounded pretty interesting. Sounds like a mostly undiscovered way of making decent money, and sounded mostly like she was doing pretty well for herself.
We scrambled back up barely in time to get to the saengthaew before it was time to head back to where we started at that university; from there it was another simple short walk back to the hostel, and then I settled in while waiting to go to a cooking class I had signed up for the previous day. Hannah settled in to go to . . I don’t know, I think she went to this tiger place with some of the other hostel guys, or something like that. I decided to opt out of it, because there was simply too many conflicting reports online regarding how it appeared these animals were treated, and I didn’t want to support maltreatment, so I decided to hedge my bets.
Also, I had found out I just couldn’t afford to go visit Yara at the elephant camp, which cost 75 USD for one day.
Anyway, I sat out in the hammocks some more, waiting to get going to the cooking class, which was an afternoon/evening cooking class. At one point, a Scottish girl showed up, who turned out to also be going to this class. I think her name was Iona, if I recall correctly. So we waited and waited some more together. The van that was due to pick us up was just a little late in doing so, but it wasn’t any big deal. I think we were at the cooking school by 4:30 or 5pm, and ready to rock.
The other people in my class were all pretty nice, if at times a little insular. On one half of the table we had a mixer, including a girl from France, a girl from Mexico, an old Dutch lady, and another girl from some place I don’t quite recall; the other half had a six pack of Americans who were all English Teachers, mostly currently based in China, though one was actually currently living in Chiang Mai researching the capacity of the area for English language schools or something along those lines. Those people were mostly quite pleasant, though one of them was quite similar to this one actress that I can’t think of the name of at the momemnt that I’ll place if I remember to do so later on. Nevertheless, the Americans were all their own little clique, and weren’t ultimately interested in interacting with other people.
That was fine though, as I already had my hands full, between the other people, as well as the cooking itself.
Before we cooked at all, our teacher, a cute little Thai girl who actually looked pretty Chinese (as you’ll see soon) gave us a tour of their produce garden first, demonstrating the different kinds of plants commonly used in Thai food. These include such things as Thai eggplant, which does not at all resemble the purple plant you’re familiar with, basil, lemongrass, and my favorite, ratshit peppers.
Here’s a picture of our teacher holding a ratshit pepper.
It’s called that, in case you don’t possess a creative enough imagination (i didn’t), because the size and shape of it basically resembles a rat turd, though the color of it is comfortingly still pepper-ish. This is the most spicy pepper that Thailand produces, and for those of you who lack the constitution to consume it, you’ll be knocked over almost for sure. Here's some more pictures from the garden:
Afterwards, we went on a short walk to a nearby market to see the way that such goods might be purchased normally in Thailand, as well as having a lecture on different kinds of rice. It was pretty pedestrian stuff, but hey, what do you expect? On the way to the market, though, I had a lengthy conversation with our teacher, and got to know her a bit. I forget what exactly her college major was at the moment, but it was something super generic like communications or something like that. She still hasn’t graduated, but as you might guess, she’s fairly young, so it’s not like it’s a problem or something. She still needs to do some work to help pay her own way, as well as help her family, so she found herself falling into this cooking teaching position. At the time that she first obtained the job, she actually had no idea how to cook. In truth, this reminded me of my own experience of an SAT tutor in the states; I taught people how to ace the test despite the fact that I just had a decently above average score of 1400 (back when it was a max of 1600), whereas most SAT tutoring companies require employees who got like a 1500 or more.
She reassured me that since the time she was hired she’s learned how to cook quite well, but I didn’t really care one way or the other, as I myself know that your ability to teach something is not necessarily strongly related to your own ability to do it yourself.
She was pretty cool, and I was glad to have made her acquaintance. Her English skills were pretty solid, though she had a habit of saying “everybody” when she should have said “everyone”. Its hard to explain exactly how this made a difference, but it did. Not that it mattered.
Anyway, after the market visit, and an explanation that they no longer buy chicken meat at the market, but instead get it at a regular grocery store due to a few people getting food poisoning in times past, it was time to cook.
We had to vote on which categories we’d cook from, as the school had maybe 6 categories; appetizers, regular couse, soup, curry paste, curry, and dessert (the curry paste and curry itselves were mandatory). We could only choose two others. I wanted to learn some kind of appetizer, but regular course and soup won the day, which was still fine by me. I just don’t care about the soup.
I’m still not quite saying it right. I don’t quite remember the organization of their courses anymore. But whatever the case, what I ended up cooking was Hot Basil Chicken, Green Curry, Tom Yum Soup, and Pad See Ew. Tom Yum soup is a hot and sour soup, and we made it with prawns, but I guess it could have any kind of meat in it. Pad See Ew is my favorite noodle dish in the entire world, and has huge pieces of cooked vegetables (I hate raw vegetables, but still feel the need to eat vegetables in general, so this fulfills a good role for me) along with super tasty noodles, plus all the other normal ingredients (meat and spice). It should be said that Thai noodle dishes, when ordered at a restaurant, also usually include a heap of spice, a heap of sugar, and a bit of lime on the side, and ours was pretty much no different, though we got to add those ingredients while cooking instead.
The cooking itself happened in phases; we’d cook one dish, bring it out, then eat it. Actually, that’s not entirely true; instead, we cooked our noodle dish first, then ate it, then we made the next main course dish (for me, hot basil chicken), but left it at the dinner table, then proceeded to make our respective curry pastes, followed by the curry, then finally the soup, and had a feast of those three dishes together.
I was on Team Extreme, or Team Green, or Team Extreme Green, depending on how ridiculous you wanted to be; with Thai curries, Green is the spiciest, so naturally that’s what I chose, along with three other girls, and while they sliced up the various ingredients, I pulverized them oldschool with a mortar and pestle, until it was sufficiently obliterated into a paste that could be used for the purpose of cooking. Here we are doing exactly that:
We then each got our own big glops of the paste, depending on how spicy we wanted it to be; before dividing it, it looked like a a heart, such as this:
Our teacher then broke my heart, and gave me the spiciest part of it, and I added even more peppers to it. In general the teacher would tell us how many peppers to add to make something Thai spicy, versus what their conception of Western spicy was. My general rule of thumb was to add one more pepper to the total of what was said to be Thai spicy, and people thought I was a lunatic. I disagree.
Honestly, there’s not a lot more to say about the process of cooking Thai food at this school. The actual cooking is very simple, with no dish taking more than three minutes once the ingredients are prepared. They all follow a very simple recipe of adding a bit of palm sugar, oyster sauce and fish sauce, and takes very little effort. If you want to be lazy and impress people, cook Thai!
The feast afterwards was fantastic, though. I couldn’t begin to describe how pleased I was with the results of my creations. Here’s pictures of it all:
It really tasted just as good as any Thai food I’ve ever had at any Thai restaurants, including the ones in Thailand itself. Not exaggerating in the slightest.
While I ate my wonderful food, though, I started to notice a burning sensation. Then, a burning sensation flooded in and overwhelmed my ability to feel much of anything else. I tried to keep my cool (hardy har har) and not let on to it, but apparently the torrents of sweat running down my face let people know something was wrong. At first, they assumed it was my +1 rule of spicy peppers; I knew immediately, however that it was because I had never washed the pepper oils from my hands after cooking my various dishes, which was necessary in general, but even moreso for me given my +1 rule. After wiping my cheeks and my brow a couple times, I had basically destroyed my ability to look like a normal human being, and my face was on fire for a couple of hours. I just dealt with it; its not like there was much that could be done at the time, you know? I tried washing my face with salt, something I never thought I’d have to do (washing with salt is how you dispose of pepper oil, also known as capsicum, in case you were wondering).
The food was still so good that I didn’t care, though. Afterwards, the school took us back to our respective homes. Up until this point, I had spoken with Iona a pretty good amount, but it was clear that no further befriending would take place; when we reached the hostel, I sought out Jens, a guy that I had met on day one, and we hung out a bit.
This poor guy. My god. Ever since I had known him in Chiang Mai, he was going to the doctor every day. Apparently he suffered from a low white blood cell count for some reason that as far as I know was never quite detected, and so for several days was mostly incapacitated (not quite that severe, but he couldn’t go do anything super active). He was a really nice guy though, and might even come visit me in Shanghai sometime in the near future. We went and checked out this random concert that was happening around the corner from our hostel; it was pretty bad though. It started out acceptably subpar but decent for Asia, and got worse with every song. Several songs later, we gave up, got a few drinks, and kicked back at the hostel until it was time to go out yet again.
We went to the same reggae bar as the previous night, and with mostly the same crew, though the Israelis weren’t there this time (probably for the best). On our way to the bars, I had my first ever full fledged motobike experience; the previous night, I had spent all of two minutes on the back of that Israeli’s girl bike going nowhere; this time, I rode all the way from the hostel to the bar on the back of that girl who worked at the hostel’s front desk’s bike. It was pretty insane, and though she might’ve been completely sober at that point, it certainly didn’t feel like it. I was a bit scared, but life’s good, and it worked out.
At the bar, it was more like a friend’s night out, though it was a little more ambiguous with this front desk girl in particular. She was a fairly surprising person; turns out she was a student at Yale, no small feat. She didn’t like talking about it, though, supposedly, and prefers the belief most people have of her being a pretty rudimentary girl. I don’t know what to really think about it, but hey, it’s not like it really matters. We danced a good amount and bar hopped a bit, but as some point, I somehow got shafted yet again, and this time decided I wasn’t going to waste any time going home, and grabbed the nearest tuk tuk.
I got to sleep pretty darn quickly, I didn’t waste any time.
My last day in Chiang Mai was decidedly different from those that came before. This one I spent entirely solo, almost. I decided I was going to check out a few of the last things that caught my interest in writeups about the city; in particular, it was my goal to visit some of its many temples, and to also check out its women’s correctional facility, where they offer massages, craft knick knacks, and a cafe as ways to reform female prisoners. Yep, pretty weird.
It was a really peaceful day, which I think I needed at that point. There’s not a lot of stories to tell.
Oh yeah, before checking out temples and prisoners, I also made a point of checking out the copious numbers of used bookstores in town to grab a couple books for the road, such as this one:
I did manage to get to the women’s correctional facility, but I was too late to nab a inmate massage, so I contented myself to some Thai iced coffee instead, which was presented on a inmate-crafted doily (am I getting that right?) Something that was a little weird was that the only other people there at the moment eating or drinking were all Thai military. I tried to imagine the weird sociological implications of the military dining at a place where all the staff are inmates, but I didn’t want to carry those thoughts too much further. Here’s some pictures from the place:
I visited a couple of temples, and it was mostly standard fare as far as temples go. One exception, however, came about from a temple that you could see rising from above the rooftops of the central part of town, composed of crumbling stone, and it looked like something out of Indiana Jones, so I weaved my way towards that temple, and it was pretty cool.
Here’s some pictures of it. Its pretty photogenic, so its hard to choose just one.
On the other side of the massive central piece of stone, while I knelt down to take a couple of photos, a small group of Thai college students approached me and asked if I’d fill out a survey, which was about the traveler’s perception of Chiang Mai in its myriad forms. What we liked, what we disliked, what we thought needs to be improved, and so on. They didn’t understand everything I had to say, exactly, but that’s alright. They were pretty nice, and it reminded me yet again that I need to start taking pictures of the people who interview me, as it tends to happen rather frequently. I think I’ve done six surveys in my travels so far. I did get this one picture as I thought of it after we had parted ways, but its a bit awkward, as you can see:
While we were doing the survey, all of a sudden, dogs just like these:
Flooded in from all around the temple courtyards. Whereas previously they had been sleepy and doing nothing in particular, they all gathered in one pack and started barking at the temple. It was pretty bizarre. And maybe three minutes after they began, they dispersed and went back to their sleepy states. I’m not a particularly religious person, though I certainly have more than my fair share of thoughts on religion, but this was a pretty weird experience, and I have no idea how it could possibly be rationally explained. If you’ve got any ideas, let me know.
I wandered some more after this, and its never too far to another temple, so here’s a few photos taken from inside the cloisters of a few templegrounds:
I was more or less content with my time in Chiang Mai, by this point. I had bypassed a few of the more popular tourist destinations there. One of them is a place called Tiger Kingdom, where you can go and play with tigers. I did some research on it, though, and there were so many conflicting reports about whether or not it seemed like the tigers were drugged . . . in any event, it was certainly exploitative, and I just couldn’t bring myself to support it. Some of the other people in my hostel, such as Jens, did go check it out, and they had a really great time. I won’t begrudge them that, but I just wouldn’t go.
In addition to that, the word “trekking” is huge in Chiang Mai. Trekking involves usually a slew of things, depending on where you’re doing it. In Chiang Mai, it would usually incorporate some medley of elephant rides, hiking, rafting, visits to ethnic minority villages, etc. Some of them included overnight stays at the villages. Looking through a lot of brochures, though, I couldn’t help but feel that most of these were also pretty exploitative. One of the minorities in particular is pretty famous in a National Geographic kind of way, for the women wearing these neck rings that elongate their necks over time; instead of referring to these people by their actual names, the brochures usually referred to them as “Long Neck People”, which I just felt was so not classy.
There were a couple treks that looked like they might be semi-responsible; if I did more research, I feel confident I’d be able to find even more responsible treks. However, the majority of them certainly aren’t. So, for any of those reading this now, considering going to Thailand, please do take this into serious consideration. Our travel itineraries impact societies through reward and punishment cycles, and have a large impact on shaping them for years to come. I, and many other people like me, feel like Thailand might’ve been impacted in such a largely exploitative way that it might be hard for them to ever recover. I hope I’m wrong.
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