Sunday a.m. here. I have a bus ticket to Chiang Khong and am leaving Chiang Mai shortly, with reservations. I had a good time the last couple days.
Yesterday I hiked over to the other side of the river to check out some temples there and to wander the quiter residential streets. The soi -- lanes -- off the main streets are fun to explore. They are mostly residential, except in the backpacker areas where a lot of homes are converted into guest houses and internet cafes, and most of the homes have nice gardens. I stopped at one little patio cafe run by Indian immigrants and had a really refreshing masala iced tea. I'm definitely going to find the recipe for that.
Back on the river I signed on for a short cruise on a scorpion tail boat. It's a corny tour for 15 dollars, just a few miles total all in the city limits, looking at architectural highlights along the river. We saw a couple of enormous beautiful Banyan trees estimated to be over 500 years old and that had dozens of Kingfisher birds roosting in them. We stopped at a little canteen and had some great delicious rice and lychee juice.
The upside of these overpriced tours in the off season is that you can get the guides off their patter and talk to them a little and to any other guests along. I thought I would have the boat to myself, but at the last minute a couple of Australians showed up. One was a professor and the other a grad student of peace studies in Melbourne and they are in Thailand for 8 weeks for a retreat at a conflict resolution camp of some kind at a Buddhist monastary. They said they are quite isolated and wearing white pajamas the whole time and not seeing much of Thailand except for their fellow novices, but they got a one-week furlough to run roughly the same path I am taking in two weeks.
In the evening I went to the Saturday walking street, which is what they call it when they close off a street for a market (on a Saturday.) The vibe at this market is very different from what I've learned to expect in Vietnam. There's a lot more variety and originality in the arts and crafts and a lot less cynicism. All the vendors seemed to enjoy being there and were having a good time talking to customers, which was mostly locals instead of tourists. It's a good thing for my budget that I'm carrying everything with me on my back, otherwise I would have spent a fortune on souveniers. Everywhere you go, there are musicians and dancers performing for tips. The best part of the market was sampling from all the different food stalls. A typical serving was either $.17 or $.34, so for about $1.50 I sampled about 5 different dishes I had never heard of or seen before.
In that same neighborhood, I went to Wat Sisruphan were they have informal conversation tables with the monks and quick introductions to meditation, where we learned to get in touch with our suffering. I had a head start; see my previous post on my difficulty sitting on the floor.
-Robert
