| Submitted by: Mark R. Leeper United States |
| Submission Date: 09 February 2005 |
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There is nothing particularly
remarkable to report about leaving Hong Kong or Thai Airlines except
that I thought the orange juice was particularly good. The meals were
okay and made better by a chili sauce you could get to put on them. The
Thais seem to love spicy food and you can easily get something spicy at
every meal. We were laid over for an hour or so at Bangkok getting a
flight to Chiang Mai. (As an ironic omen the airport at Bangkok had
background music from West Side Story and the actual piece of music was
'I Like To Be in America.') Things were pretty uninteresting until we
got to Chiang Mai. Then they started to pick up. Coming off the plane,
those who'd come from outside the country were sent to Customs. There
they had all our luggage. Evelyn, who always carries on her suitcase,
checked it this once and, guess what, they lost it. Clearing Customs
was a grueling 'Anything to declare? No? Okay.' Then we figured out
by process of elimination which was Evelyn's check slip. She went off
with someone and came back in a few minutes with the news that her
suitcase was found in Phuket. It would be in Chiang Mai the next day.
Now the adventure really began. We had to navigate in a country with a
foreign language. I mean really foreign. You go to Europe, even
Russia, and at least the language is like something you've seen before.
The Thai alphabet is an incomprehensible (to me) set of squiggles. If
you saw the same word two different places it would take a fair amount
of effort to verify that it was the same word. It is easier to
recognize the same Chinese ideogram two different than the same Thai
word.
It was 8 PM and we needed a place to stay so the next step was to
go looking for a phone. The second step was to tell a taxi driver we
didn't want to go anywhere yet. Third step was to find our list of
hotels. Fourth, fifth, and sixth we told taxi drivers we didn't want to
go anywhere yet. Then we called a place. We discovered that their
rates had gone way up. We spent a couple of minutes shooing away taxi
drivers and we tried the Montri Hotel. They gave us a good price. We
told them we'd be there shortly. Next was the question of how to get to
the hotel. As it happened there was a taxi driver right there. How
much to the Montri? For five people, 20 baht per person. Binayak said,
'Too much.' He tried to bargain the driver down.
When I am negotiating prices, Evelyn occasionally used to jump into
the argument on the other side. When we were trading in our last car to
get the current one we'd agreed on a price, then the dealer claimed he'd
found something wrong with the old car and he would not give us the
agreed trade-in value. I said we'd agreed on a price. I had heard of
this strategy being used before. Evelyn argued that if there really was
something wrong they should pay us less for the old car. With Evelyn
arguing against me I lost. This was a problem more than once and
finally I got Evelyn to agree to a rule. If someone is negotiating for
your side you support them or remain silent.
A baht is pretty close to four cents American. The driver was
asking for eighty cents apiece for a fifteen-minute cab ride.
Considering all the luggage we had that sounded like a fair price and
the driver would not budge from it. I decided not to enter the
negotiation on the driver's side and just clammed up. I think Binayak
eventually realized that he was arguing over a very small sum of money,
less than a dollar, and we were off. The one problem is there was
seating for only four passengers so Evelyn sat on my lap.
Driving to the hotel the difficulty of our position became more
obvious to Barbara. She said we cannot speak the language or even read
a menu. We are in seriously foreign territory. My father worked with
some Japanese at one point who spoke and read no English. (Well, there
were members of their group that was true of.) They learned to go to
the grocery and get along quite well. They were, however, warned that
in the grocery they should not buy any cans that had pictures of dogs or
cats.
In the dark it looked like I could make our someone at a bar who
looked of European descent, so I was not much worried. I saw an
American sitting there. There must be a way for us to get along. The
hotel was quite comfortable and encouraging. We settled into our rooms,
turned on the air conditioning, and were home, at least for a while.
First thing we wanted to do was to see the night market. We got
instructions and headed out. We passed tantalizing, fascinating-looking
Buddhist temples and, yes, a few more Americans.
Then we got to the night market and my heart sank. The first
analogy that came to mind was 'Southern California,' but later I changed
that to 'Tijuana East.' There were more Americans (or Europeans) than
Thais. There was rock music blaring from stands selling cassettes. No
Thai music, all American rock. Most of the sellers were Thai but
everybody walking around looked American. I told Barbara if she was
worried about how we could read the local menus we could ask one of the
teenagers passing by. Or maybe someone in a local restaurant we saw
with the quaint name 'Burger Hut.'
I don't know where they all came from or what they were all doing
here. Barbara said she'd heard that a lot of American hippies liked
Chiang Mai. They are attracted by the proximity of the Golden Triangle
and cheap drugs, perhaps. You see a lot of tourist agencies offering
treks to the Golden Triangle region. I'm not sure if they are mostly
for drug runners or not. And I am not sure how many really were
Americans, as opposed to Australian or other people of European descent.
There really is a bordertown feel to Chiang Mai with things ranging
from just nice to just a little sleazy. You get a lot of Americans
throwing around money and a fair number of Thais who are willing and
happy to stock whatever is necessary to make Americans feel comfortable.
After looking around at what was being sold, we bought some bottled
water (about a third of the price of what it was in Hong Kong) and
headed back to our hotel.
October 10, 1990: The first thing I did when it got light was to
look out the window to see Chiang Mai by day. Most of it looked like
inexpensive housing and a few high buildings. Off to one side was a
chedi, a spike Buddhist spire. To another side I saw a temple with
three red parallel roofs decorated with nagas (serpents). Yeah, this
was the real thing, all right.
Breakfast was at the restaurant next door to the hotel. They could
accommodate the most prosaic American taste but they also had Thai
breakfast food. I had boiled rice and cuttlefish. There were two or
three piquant condiments to choose from. Good stuff. And I had a
couple of glasses of freshly squeezed orange juice.
After that we set out to change money and find the local tour
situation. It was, admittedly, already very hot but it was a nice wet
heat. Real steambath weather.
Street crossing seemed a real problem. The traffic never seems to
let up. You can wait a long time for a gap. Later in the day a German
who lives here saw us having trouble and showed us the secret. You have
to be careful of the motorcycles and mopeds who often don't yield the
right of way to pedestrians. But vehicles with three or more wheels
seem perfectly happy to yield to pedestrians. You just start to cross
the street and make shooing motions with your hands and the cars stop
for you. The German says he's been living in Chiang Mai for years and
he's never had a problem. It was pretty good advice.
We stopped at a modest temple and made a small contribution, and
saw a not very well-made Buddha. This was a fairly ornate sanctuary (a
'viharn'). We continued on to the Tourist Agency of Thailand (T.A.T.).
We picked a couple of tours we wanted to try. Both were recommended by
the T.A.T. One was to be that afternoon, one the next day. The walk to
the T.A.T. had completely washed us out in the heat so we took a seelor
back to the hotel. A seelor is like a small pickup truck converted to a
minibus. In the cargo section there are two parallel benches running
lengthwise. Then there is a roof over it, but the back seems
dangerously open.
Back at the hotel the elevator was out of order so we climbed the
stairs to our room. Four flights in this weather is no picnic. Evelyn
called the airport and they had her suitcase.
We took a seelor to the airport. On the way I looked at my
situation. Plain old Mark Leeper is here in the back of a pickup truck
being bounced around roads decorated with amazing Buddhist temples.
Yeah, I can dig it.
We got to the airport. Evelyn went to Customs and they got her
case. The Customs agent asked her, 'Anything to declare?' She said no.
He felt the side of her bag and said, 'Okay.' For that ritual we had to
come back.
We rode our seelor back to the hotel. The others had been able to
sit around the hotel when we had to drag out to the airport. I think
our ride was more interesting than what they did. You've picked a good
trip when all your bad luck keeps turning out better than the good luck.
Binayak picked a restaurant from the Lonely Planet book that he
could actually see from his window. For once a restaurant description
was of a restaurant still around. It was pretty good. We got chicken
curry, a fish in hot sauce, a minced pork dish, and a couple of others.
We paid maybe US$1.25 each.
Then we returned to our hotel to await the 1:30 PM tour that had
been arranged. This was the Temples and City Tour. This was billed as
four temples:
- Wat Chiang Man
- Wat Pra Sing
- Wat Chedi Lueng
- Wat Chet Yot
and the market place. Wat Chiang Man is the oldest of the wats in the
area, having been builtin 1296. One of the more remarkable aspects is
its chedi (or spire) supported by fifteen elephants. Chedis tend to be
solid. They are more monuments like obelisks than enterable buildings.
Wat Pra Sing is the Wat of the Lion. The lion is the symbol of
strength. There are several statues of lions. They are even more
stylized than Chinese lions. You see many snake images at Buddhist
temples. These are Naga, the mighty snake who brings the rain. Like
the Chinese dragon he is a good fellow in spite of his fierce looks.
And unlike the Chinese dragon he is as fierce and ugly as the artist can
manage. Often he is portrayed as if he were being eaten. In fact, it
is just the opposite. He is being spewed by Mogala, the dragon who gave
birth to him.
The Wat Chedi Leung has a massive chedi that was at one point three
hundred feet high but was partially destroyed by an earthquake in 1546.
It is now being restored to its original magnificence--assuming they
have some record of how it is to look. In England they preserved the
spot in Westminster Abbey where a bomb fell in World War II; that is a
piece of its history. So is the damage that the earthquake did to Wat
Chedi Leung. And that damage is more a part of history since it has
been that way for almost four and a half centuries. But the Buddha
deserves a perfect chedi and it will be restored.
Wat Chet Yot should have been next. And it is the most important
in the area. Instead we were taken to a rather dull open-air wat called
Wat Suan Dok. It is distinguished by the open-air construction and by
the vendors out front. Up till now the tour had been pretty good, but
this substitution, which we only later realized had been made, was a bad
touch. At this point, about ninety minutes short of the projected tour
length, the guide said the tour was over. This did not go over well.
The brochure said we'd be going to a market and we hadn't done that.
For me the market was not a big attraction. The others seemed to think
it was a major part of the tour. I am not sure what 'seeing a market'
means. The guide appeared not to know either. Essentially it was
interpreted as 'you're supposed to go shopping with us. |
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| Copyright © - "Mark R. Leeper" |
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