Chiang Mai

for the longest time, we had been hearing from people who'd been there that chiang mai was some sort of oasis of hot chicks, gorgeous mountains, and a bustling nightlife. in fact, papa skee, who had been to thailand several times before, recounted an interesting story to us: apparently, his good buddy flew a bunch of his homies out to chiang mai to celebrate his birthday. what resulted can only be described as some sort of grotesque sex orgy, where the five of them handled 30-odd girls in about 4 day's time. if that doesn't make sense, that's good, because its not supposed to make sense at all. suffice it to say that the dude who was having his birthday party was determined to spend as much money as he could on booze and women, and managed to drop about $5000 in less than a week.

we had been hearing two main things about chiang mai from travelers we had met on our journey who had been there: first, that after cambodia, chiang mai would be a place where we could kick it with other backpackers in hostels and go "trekking" through wilderness -- whatever that means -- and second, that chiang mai supposedly has the hottest girls in thailand, which we were determined to judge for ourselves. (we were panning through some of papa skee's photos on his digital camera and came upon some shots of the aforementioned birthday extravaganza -- and we determined that yes, those girls were pretty hot.)

what we would discover in chiang mai is, up to this point in my travels, perhaps be the biggest disappointment of my extended trip.

this is not to say that people can't have fun in chiang mai; it's just a report on the situation we found after spending two memorable weeks in cambodia.

i'll start from the beginning.

first of all, skeelow had had enough of cambodia and wanted to get out of there. this was in part due to his prolonged stomach illness that sapped him of his strength, energy, and overall good looks. as i said earlier, when we met up with him again in phnom penh -- and this was after he had been eating solid food again for 2 days -- he looked like a ghost. i guess he may have also been a little bitter that jason and i had so many interesting stories to tell about our nights out that didn't (couldn't) include him. all i know is that by the time we got back to phnom penh, he was jonesing to leave -- and i couldnt really blame him.

the problem was, jason and i had some unfinished business that we wanted to take care of in phnom penh, so skye and i decided that it would be best for him to head to chaing mai a day early and check the place out before i flew out to meet him.

after spending hours unsuccessfully trying to book flights through air asia's website at various internet cafes, we finally gave up and booked tickets through a travel agency and pretty much got ripped off. to make matters worse, i didnt account for the motorcycle traffic in the morning in phnom penh and missed making my flight by about 5 minutes. i haggled with the people behind the counter, but there was nothing i could do. at the last minute, one of the nicer girls advised me to immediately head over to the bangkok airlines counter to purchase another flight to bangkok so i could make the second leg of my flight. begrudgingly, i went to the ATM, pulled out some more useless cambodian money, and bought a ticket for a flight leaving in like 45 minutes with cash. then, i had to pay a $25 exiting fee to the nice fellows in the cambodian government.

after all of this, i was off. the flights themselves were pretty normal. on the first flight, i sat next to this girl who had a real bigtime job in phnom penh that involved making name brands and marketing them. she was nice enough.

the real bitch of the whole situation was that now that i was on a different flight to bangkok on an airline other than air asia, i had to basically run off of the flight, fight my way through customs, pick up my bags at the bangkok air terminal, and rush over to the air asia counter to recheck my bags in for the second flight. that sucked, but i made it.

when i got to chiang mai, skeelow had emailed the name of the guesthouse he was staying at. he said that the pool was freezing. wonderful.

skye and i spent most of our time in chiang mai searching for cool things to do. he met some gay, old french guy by the pool named michel who was super-tanned, super-old, and wearing a super-revealing speedo. michel told him that he was a professional sailor who had spent most of his adult life gallivanting around southeast asia, serving as a guide to rich tourists. he told skeelow about awesome places in the phillipines and indonesia.

(SIDENOTE: did you know that in some places in the phillipines, they don't bury their dead in the ground but instead, place their bodies inside of trees? so apparently in their tradition, a person is assigned a tree in some cemetery-like location and for his or her whole life, he or she carves exquisite depictions of his or her life and loved ones all over the bark of the tree while also carving out a large hole on one side of the tree. when the person passes on, he or she is literally stashed within the tree itself, right in the nook that he or she had spent his or her whole life carving... and you can go and see these places. they're mainly on islands that you have to take boats to, and traditionally, you can only go at night.... so from what i've heard, it's pretty fucking creepy. by the way, how fucking bullshit is it that we have to write "he or she" or "he/she" to make a sentence grammatically correct? i mean, can we petition the official department that decides these things and ask them to make "they" or some other word OK to use? i mean, that last little interlude reads like shit, and it's only partially my fault.)

michel also gave us a package of extra-strength immodium AD, the most potent anti diarrheal medicine known to man. he had also advised skeelow to drink the water that white rice is cooked in, which is interesting because that is the old-time traditional chinese remedy for an upset stomach. it's funny how different the west is from the east. here, they're absolutely averse to taking any sort of unnatural drug; in the west, we take chemicals for just about anything. which works better? in my opinion, for the little things like diarrhea, fever, cough, etc, i think it's probably best to stay away from that chemical shit. but, if you have, say, cancer or something severe and life-threatening like that, i'd go with the western medicine, just to be safe. in my experiences, i've never heard of a root or animal part that could cure cancer -- but maybe i just haven't seen enough stuff. but i digress. by this point, skeelow and i were pretty much backed up with all of the medicine we had been taking, so we were good on that front.

we hit up a lot of the open air markets in the old city that had probably the coolest stuff to buy that we had seen on our journey to that point. we met some guy who designed these sweet tee shirts that we liked a lot. we each bought like 5 we wore them almost every day for the rest of our time together. in fact, i am wearing one today. we even got the guy's email address because he wanted to see if we could market them to some stores when we got back to america. im telling you, the shirts are cool. trust me.

other than tee shirts and smoothies, there really wasnt much else for us to do... we decided against taking a trek through the mountains because it was going to occupy too much time and we had heard numerous horror stories about the shittiness of the whole ordeal. again, after being in cambodia for so long, we were looking to chill out. we had heard about some reggae area in the city, but never found it. everywhere we went, there were bars full of prostitutes begging us to come in and have a drink. to us, chiang mai was just like bangkok -- and we had had enough of that for a lifetime, thank you very much. again, we ran into a bunch of scumbag foreigners who were only there for the tail. by the end of the first night, we wanted no part of chiang mai.

the only thing that we discovered that we could do that we might not have been able to do elsewhere was to rent scooters without any proper operating licenses. we asked the guys at our guesthouse and one of the dudes went out and promptly brought two scooters back to us, one of which was being ridden by a kid of about 12 years old. they cost 200 baht a day, which is about $6.

neither skye nor i had ever really ridden a motorcycle before; in fact, both of us pretty much were against the whole idea of it. all throughout thailand, we had met travelers like ourselves who had all sorts of injuries ranging from road rash to massive head wounds from attempting to ride scooters. we didnt want to spoil the rest of our trip by incurring some sort of grievous injury, but chiang mai was such a disappointment, that we overlooked this danger and sped off into the harsh chiang mai traffic.

the city itself is interesting. the whole time, we were hearing (from travelers, lonely planet, etc.) that chiang mai was some sort of gorgeous place where the air was clear and the mountains were high. we didnt exactly find this to be the case. first of all, the place was polluted as fuck. there were tons of cars and motorcycles and all sorts of things that you wouldnt think youd find in a small city.

another thing we heard was that the city architecture was magnificent: an old city surrounded by a new city separated by ancient city walls and a moat. again, i am sad to report that there is absolutely no difference in the old and new cities save that one is within this moat thing, if you can call it that, and one is outside of it. the city walls have long been taken down and the moat thing is nothing more than a 30 foot wide sewage system that looks the same from just about any vantage point. one good thing about the moat was that it helped us initially figure out where we were relative to our guesthouse, which was just inside the old city.

i dont want you guys to think that all of our time in chiang mai sucked; it didnt. when we finally got going on our scooters after some initial hiccups, we headed out of the city towards the mountains. there was this giant temple on the top of one of the distant hills called doi suthep. from our guidebook, this seemed like the place to go in chiang mai. we had heard about all of these amazing waterfalls that you could drive to, but we discovered that they were extremely far away and had to be tackled early in the day to make it worth it; otherwise, we would be left in the mountains after dark on scooters that we didnt really know how to ride. so doi suthep it would be.

we brought out a big chiang mai map and tried to find it ourselves, but for the life of us, every place we went turned out to be a dead end. we ended up asking some monks after another failed attempt left us over by this small temple that definitely was not doi suthep. what we eventually discovered, after numerous pit stops, was that we had to go through chiang mai university to get to the doi. it didnt make any sense, but to this point in our stay, nothing about the place had made any sense at all. that was how it was going to be.

another thing that we had heard was that doi suthep was extremely close to the city and that we could even proceed there on foot if need be. again, not at all the case. the temple is about 16 km up this giant, windy mountain that has cars and trucks and tour buses and motorcycles running all up and down it.

it was on this windy stretch of road that skeelow and i finally became one with our scooters. we had no other choice. we slowly got used to banking the other way while taking sharp turns and using the horn while passing slower vehicles. the experience was liberating. i cant describe it in any other way. if you guys ever get the chance, do some scootering. you wont regret it, even if you do get some road rash along the way.

when we got up the the temple, it was already late in the afternoon. most of the tourists were descending the long steps to the temple as we were scampering up them. along the sides, there were the regular trinket hawkers and fruit salespeople that we were used to at this point. we got some awesome fresh squeezed OJ and headed up the steps. we found out that it cost some nominal fee to go up into the actual temple if you are a foreigner -- and only if you're a foreigner. it was cool though. skeelow didnt throw his normal hissy fit. we were on such a high from the scooter ride up and it was for a good cause.

the whole temple was adorned with opulent statues and decorations that were covered in gold leaf. because of its location atop a giant mountain, the view from the edge of the grounds was amazing. also, because it was so high up, the weather wasnt so hot and the air was much cleaner than down in the city. all in all, it was a good experience. it was nice to be out of the city if but for just a little while and it put an exclamation mark for us on an otherwise dreary experience in a place that we thought would be dope.

we had to leave quickly because it was getting dark and kind of rainy. the last thing skye and i wanted was to be stuck up on that mountain, or worse, on the road down. as we bombed it down that windy road, we discovered that going downhill was a lot easier than going uphill on our scooters, contrary to what we had believed. i guess thats why you've got to try things out for yourself; no matter what other people tell you about something, if you haven't actually experienced it, you may as well be reading fiction. we had to try chiang mai out for ourselves to discover that it wasnt for us and we had to overcome our fears of motorcycling in traffic to discover that we really actually loved it. to this day, i still crave the freedom of a motorcycle. there is no better way to see the place you are and no more convenient way to get around than on the back of your own scooter. that, my friends, is no lie -- but you're going to have to try it out for yourselves sometime to really get to know what im talking about. who knows? maybe you'll love it too.

ok, enough with the whole "take home message" crap; let's wrap this up. by the way, im sorry if this post kind of sucks. ive been writing it while trying to watch "into the wild" for the first time while sitting on darcy's couch. it's kind of not working out that well, so i apologize in advance if this post has little to no structure in its ramblings. the movie is making me think about my life, my travels, and my place in the world. if you haven't seen it, you should. i'm enjoying it very much right now.

so back to chiang mai: skye and i made it back to our guesthouse safe and sound, jumped directly into the freezing-ass pool and washed the sweat off of our bodies. that night, we went out again in search of fun but ended up just going to mickie D's because we were both sick of thai and other ethnic food by that point. had a filet o' fish, some fries and a coke. they were delicious. it was the first time that we had capitulated to one of the many mcdonald's along the way. sometimes, you just need some good old american home cookin' by some of the esteemed graduates of hamburger U. you know, it doesnt matter where you are on earth, mcdonalds always tastes the same and it was that consistent shittiness that made us feel so at home while we were eating it. im telling you, even if you never, ever eat that shit at home, you will at some point along your travels think to yourself, "hey, you know, i could really use some mcnuggets or a big mac or some fries right now." you dont believe me, do you?

the next day, we would be headed to pai, a little mountain oasis about 5 hours northwest of chiang mai where we believed we would be free of the hot weather and rampant whoreishness that had characterized our time in thailand to that point.