A Mad Dog in Thailand

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It’s a Thai Score
Part II – Chiang Mai, oh my!

by Mad Dog

The phrase asking about the bathroom was too long for me to remember— not to mention that if I used high tones when I should have used falling ones I might accidentally end up asking for a date with their father—so I didn’t worry about it.

It’s a 10-hour bus ride from Bangkok to Chiang Mai. That’s a long time to watch roadside Thailand zip by, ponder why they showed a video as soon as we pulled out of Bangkok and then left the screen blank for the next 8½ hours, regret that we didn’t pass The World’s Largest Bamboo Toothpick or the Sticky Rice Sculpture Museum, and talk to Kim.

Kim was sitting next to me because the bus hostess—kind of a rolling flight attendant—told us to sit next to each other, this in spite of the fact that at the time we were the only two people on the bus. And would be until it made three more stops in Bangkok trolling for passengers. But it turned out good. We kept each other company, neither of us drooled when we napped (or at least she was nice enough not to mention it), and we hung out a couple of times in Chiang Mai.

The trip also gave me time to look through the guide book and learn a little of the Thai language. The sad truth is foreign languages don’t come easy for me. My memory’s so badly tuned that new words go in correctly and come out like a dyslexic word jumble. So whenever I’m in a new country I focus on the essentials: please, thank you, hello, goodbye, and where’s the bathroom.

Thai is tricky. Like many Asian languages they not only use sounds that don’t exist in English, but the same word can mean different things depending on whether it’s pronounced with a middle tone, low tone, high tone, falling tone, or rising tone. Whatever that means. They all sound the same to my farang ears. Buddha help a tone-deaf Thai person because they might as well not have ears at all for all the words they’ll understand.

One of 300 temples in Chiang Mai They do make it easy with sawatdee, which means hello, goodbye, good morning, good afternoon, good evening, and good night. It’s the Thai aloha. I added kor and kob khun to my vocabulary, but the phrase asking about the bathroom was too long for me to remember—not to mention that if I used high tones when I should have used falling ones I might accidentally end up asking for a date with their father—so I didn’t worry about it. I figured if I stood knock-kneed and jiggled around a lot they’d either point me in the right direction or give me Ritalin. Either way I’d be fine.

The oddest thing I ate was fried worms. Or maybe they were grubs. It was hard to tell since the girl selling them didn’t speak any English—not even numbers to tell me how much they cost.

The last important phrase I learned was mai pen rai, which means “no problem.” Think c’est la vie, que sera sera, and “I’m here for four days, so what’s a few hours’ wait if it will help maintain international relations.”

[NOTE: These are phonetic spellings. The written Thai language is indecipherable to the untrained eye, and lord knows I’ve been called untrainable by more than one person, so I’m sticking with phonetics.]

Language is more difficult for the traveler. We have to learn at least some of each country’s language while the natives can focus on English, since so many tourists speak at least a little bit of it. Interestingly, the first thing most natives learn is numbers. It’s amazing how many places you go where people can’t say hello in English but can tell you how much something costs.

* * * * * * *

Chiang Mai is Thailand’s second largest city, having a population of 250,000, or about 4% as many as the largest city, which is Bangkok. The only traffic jams are on Saturday afternoon when families flock to the arboretum, zoo, and waterfalls to relax. The city has 300 wats (temples), almost as many as Bangkok, but in a much smaller area. The tuk-tuk drivers are cool and have that mai pen rai attitude, having all failed the BAT, the Bangkok Aggression Test. It’s walkable, cool at night, and has a pumpkin-shaped house nestled in the hills outside the city. What more could you want?

How about a Thai massage?

These are famous, and I had to try one. Especially since I have a feeling the ones I see advertised in the Tenderloin area of San Francisco aren’t as innocuous as they’re supposed to be. Maybe as therapeutic, but in an entirely different way.

Tu cooking dinner A friend recommended his wife’s best friend, Tu, and I put myself in her hands and feet for two glorious hours. Thai massages are anything but wimpy. And they’re only 240 baht (about $5.58) for two hours. I went back on my last day for another session and a week later I still feel great. And don’t think I’m recommending her just because the home-cooked dinner she made was delicious, thanks, no doubt, to my expert grinding of the red curry paste. While that made my stomach feel better, the massage helped the rest of me. Her shop is on the right hand side of the entrance to Wat Suan Dok. Dinner isn’t included.

Possibly the best thing I learned during my stay in Bali—aside from the fact that geckos take a crap in the same place every day—is how to drive a motorbike. I tooled around the hills outside Chiang Mai.

But that won’t pose a problem since finding good food in Chiang Mai is a breeze. Food vendors, markets, and restaurants are everywhere. I ate sate, red curry, green curry, pad Thai, tom yam (spicy soup), lots of sticky rice, and things I couldn’t identify. I stayed away from the Pizza Hut, McDonalds, and German restaurant that had a Thai hostess wearing a traditional German peasant costume. What can I say, schnitzel in sweet yellow curry just didn’t sound good that night.

The oddest thing I ate was fried worms. Or maybe they were grubs. It was hard to tell since the girl selling them didn’t speak any English—not even numbers to tell me how much they cost. I looked at them sitting in the tray. And yes, they were already cooked. She smiled. I smiled back. She scooped a few up in a spoon and offered them to me. They didn’t taste like much, but they were crunchy, like a good snack food that just needed a little salt, a flashy package, a catchy name like Crispy Critters™, and an advertising mascot named Gary Grub to make it big.

I asked her if my trying them meant “Survivor” would be sending me a big fat check for a million baht, but I’m not sure if she understood since my Thai is only three words better than her English. But I’m pretty sure she told me I’d clinch it if I took my shirt off and paraded around the market, so I did. It turns out the Chiang Mai police are very nice. I guess they’re used to farang.

Two temples down, 298 to go I rented a motorbike, which is definitely the way to go. Possibly the best thing I learned during my stay in Bali—aside from the fact that geckos take a crap in the same place every day—is how to drive a motorbike. I tooled around the hills outside Chiang Mai, stopping at beautiful temples, glorious vistas, waterfalls which Thai people can visit for 20 baht while us farang pay 200, a house shaped like a pumpkin, and the King and Queen’s arrival at their palace by helicopter. The last stop wasn’t entirely voluntary—the army troops standing in the middle of the road made sure I stopped.

There was an elephant camp, a snake farm, a monkey school, and a buffalo camp. It seems the Thais love wild animals, they just don’t love them that wild. I also visited a hill-tribe village.

There are a lot of Westerners in Chiang Mai. In some parts of town they outflank the Thais by 10 to 1. But it’s easy to wander the small streets and alleys and not see a single one for, oh, eight minutes at a stretch.

Hill-tribes are scattered throughout northern Thailand. There are a number of them around Chiang Mai, mostly Hmong, a tribe that wandered out of southern China a couple of hundred years ago and ended up in Thailand. To this day they wish they’d renewed their AAA membership so they could have gotten a decent map. Over the years they’ve retained their time-honored traditions, attitudes, clothing, and way of life. Well, as long as you assume that two hundred years ago they were hawking souvenirs, charging to see a one-room museum, and wearing beautifully embroidered costumes while posing for cheesy photographs. For money, of course.

You can’t blame them. After all, they were pressured by the government to abandon their traditional livelihood: tourist hunting. Just kidding. Actually they used to grow opium poppies which is frowned upon these days. Thus they were encouraged to stop planting pretty flowers and instead open their villages to tourists. Now every other storefront in Chiang Mai offers treks to see them, so van after van rumbles down the bumpy dirt roads to check them out. At least we can be thankful no one’s thought of opening HmongousLand. Yet.

* * * * * * *

It’s simple to identify them—when they’re not taking photographs they’re writing in their journal. Couples were doing it on the bus to Chiang Mai. Groups sat in restaurants having dinner, each person scribbling away instead of talking or eating. And they were sitting on benches, writing away when they should have been looking at the gorgeous temple in front of them. What will they do with all these journals, invite their friends over and make them sit and read every word? It makes a slide presentation sound absolutely heavenly.

There was the restaurant that claimed to have “your flavarite food,” a line any ad agency in the world would be proud to have come up with. And there was the dental clinic that boasted it was “full time.” Scary to think what those part time clinics do with the other half of their day.

I started to get worried since I don’t keep a journal. Do they know something I don’t? Did I miss the page in the guide book that said immigration checks for it on the way out of the country?

“Ticket, passport, and journal.”

“I don’t have a journal.”

“No journal? That will be twenty days, twenty thousand baht, or twenty peppers eaten at once.”

It’s a good thing this isn’t Singapore or I’d really be in trouble.

* * * * * * *

A lot of non-Americans were wearing shirts trumpeting American universities. This is pretty universal. I started stopping them—Westerners and Thais alike— and asking if they went to Harvard, Yale, Texas A&M, or whatever school their shirt was from. If they understood me, of course they said no. I told them I did, then added that I thought it was great that they proudly displayed my school’s logo. If they ever get to talking among themselves I’ll be known as the most educated man in all of Asia.

I wonder what my fortune says I enjoyed the signs. There was the restaurant that claimed to have “your flavarite food,” a line any ad agency in the world would be proud to have come up with. Then there was the dental clinic that boasted it was “full time.” Scary to think what those part time clinics do with the other half of their day. There was a sign in the bathroom at Wat Doi Suthep which read “Please don’t go up to the sanitary with feet.” And there was another temple that, instead of having a donation box for poor people as most did, had one that asked to “Please donate to the poor dogs.” I dropped in some money, even though there was no assurance that my hard earned bahts wouldn’t be subsidizing some pampered Pekinese’s diet of pad Thai flavored Alpo.

I had my fortune told in a temple, but since the paper I was handed was printed in Thai and Chinese I have no clue what’s in store for me. I saw muay Thai (Thai boxing) which was preceded by a cabaret show that included a Cyndi Lauper imitator. I fought my way through the night bazaar, wandered around the Sompet market where I could only identify 1 out of 100 food items and randomly tried a few that didn’t look like grubs, and I had some pretty respectable croissants at J.J.’s Bakery. Not very Thai, but c’est la....I mean, mai pen rai, you know.

Part I - Hijacked by a tuk-tuk driver