Our bus rolled into Chiang Mai around 8AM. It didn’t drop us off in the city center. Instead, it dropped us off at a guest house/tour company who gave us a free coffee to keep us there while they explained all of the wonderful deals they have. We left as soon as we finished our coffee, combining forces with another couple to hopefully find a pair of rooms together. But unfortunately it was not to be – since it’s the New Year, rooms are scarce. We found one just south of the East Gate, Pratu Tha Phae, on Soi 3 of Th Moon Muang. It’s simple and bare bones – a bed, a folding table, a stool, a clothing rack with a few hangers, and a private bathroom. It doesn’t have air conditioning, but Chiang Mai so far is a good 10 degrees cooler than Bangkok and Ayuthaya, and the hotel cooler still, so we didn’t even need to turn on the fan when we sacked out until noon or so.
Chiang Mai has a central old city, surrounded by a somewhat crumbling wall and a moat. We wandered around the old city a bit, getting some surprisingly good coffee and a bunch of practical items, such as mosquito bite ointment, a shiny purple tshirt for The Private Eye, a small personal bag for me, and another prepaid phone card. Sundays have the Sunday night market, so as we wandered west, across the old city, towards Chiang Mai University we saw people starting to set up.
We were heading to CMU (academic readers are probably as initially confused as I was when I first saw it) because it’s supposedly the place to catch a sōrng-tāa-ou, a kind of communal cab made from a pickup truck whose bed has a roof and benches on both sides. When you flag one down, they’ll let you get on if your destination is reasonably along their existing route. Some of these cabs gather near CMU’s main gate to gather groups of passengers to head to Wat U Mong, a forest temple up in the hills behind Chiang Mai, some 12km away.
Riding in the back of a pickup as it wound up the hills, surrounded by lush trees and sweet air, the trip up was a delight. It felt a bit like winding into Tilden, but with a damper and lusher forest and without the distinctive smell of eucalyptus.
The Wat was beautiful, but of all of the temples we’ve visited so far, this was the worst experience I had. It was a strange, crowded mix of tourists posing by notable features and people coming to pray. Outside the Wat was a horrific traffic jam, complicated by all of the yelling and cooking fires. There were even food vendors within the Wat itself. This meant that as some people walked in a circle around a central golden pillar, praying and holding lotus flowers, they did so passing by empty soda cans and discarded corn cobs. The Private Eye said she was in a small shrine on the side when she saw a man come in, give the Buddha a bracelet, pray for a moment, then as he stood, start talking on his mobile phone. The lack of reverence in such a beautiful, secluded temple, its confusion between tourism, rote, and belief, well, all kinda sucked.
After the temple, we rode down the mountain in another sōrng-tāa-ou, but this time, rather than sit inside, The Private Eye stood up and hung off the back, seeing and smelling the forest pass by. We transferred to another at the zoo, and had a nice chat with a couple from Toronto who are planning on moving to Bangkok in a year or so.
And then back to the old city, where Sunday Walking Street was in full swing, with people shoulder to shoulder making a slow clockwise circuit up and down Th Ratchamandoen, each side crammed with arts, crafts, food, and clothes, the center filled with musicians, many visibly blind, busking. We finally made our way to Pratu Tha Phae, and found, right on our corner, the bar for us.
You see, it isn’t a building, more a trailer. Set up in the middle of the sidewalk. A trailer in that it’s pulled. It was a tiny, narrow bar in the center, with just enough space for a bartender and twenty so bottles of liquor and mixers, with coolers at his feet for beer and soda. The bar seats were all bicycle saddles, with roughly-welded foot rests. The bar and seats were raised, so you have to clamber up and sit with your feet about 3 feet off the ground. A worn, hand painted sign said “Cocktail Cycle” and the only real decoration was a string of Christmas lights with plastic straw pieces stuck over the ends to add color and texture (the bendy bit of the straw). It was, in short, a bar that belonged in Black Rock City just as much as Chiang Mai.
When we sat, it was empty except for one couple. By the time we left, it was full. The couple was born in Australia and New Zealand, but now live in Malaysia and work in Indonesia. He’s a gold miner, she works in orphanages. We talked about San Francisco, gold mining, and travel. We of course asked for recommendations – they both spoke glowingly of Gili Island, near Lombok, and he told us of a wreck dive near Bali. So when we make our way south, to the beaches, we have two items at the top of our list.
After one side car and one seltzer water we had spent the last few baht of our daily budget, and exhausted from the night bus, we walked 100 feet home.
— The Professor
The Professor and the Private Eye: Adventures Abroad 