Chilling Out in Chiang Mai

Chiang Mai is a laidback haven full of old hippies, middle aged burnouts and youth looking to find themselves. It’s an easy place to be. Friendly, warm, walkable, amazing food, relatively cheap, lots of places you can hang out and talk shit for hours on one coffee or beer. You can tick off all the expected things: temple, temple, laundromat, bar, temple, café, laundromat, massage parlour, temple, massive cockroach, temple, bar, white dude with younger Thai girlfriend, laundromat, temple, vegan restaurant, laundromat, temple…. Oh, and the ubiquitous 7-elevens. Priorities are clear here - worship and wash your clothes, you dirty hippie!

Cheap cotton or rayon printed elephant pants are part of the Chiang Mai uniform and everyone wears them, even locals and big leathery muscle dudes. It sure is a look. I am resisting the elephant pants.

This place loves holding markets. There is a night market, a night bazaar, a day market, a Saturday market, a Saturday Street Market and a Sunday Walking Market. The same tchotchkes are sold at all of them, with a few real handicrafts thrown in. Elephant pants are sold at every third stall in case you don’t have yours already. Despite the markets being full of dollar store tat, there is a thriving arts and crafts scene here. Even tiny bars will have live bands. Imagine three tables sat round a drum set. At the night bazaar we went from one courtyard where they were screech singing Adele, to one where they were mumble massacring Pink Floyd. Pretty sure I heard someone singing Coldplay’s “Yellow” in Thai from some bar.

The food scene is pretty groovy, too. With so many hippies around the vegetarian and vegan scene is well represented. There are kombucha bars for crying out loud. Restaurants will often give Thai food cooking lessons, but I don’t go on vacation to cook for myself, so screw that. Veg restaurants are the sorts of places where you find a spot on the floor or maybe on a lounge cushion on a platform in the window and spend some hours chatting with whomever is around.  One evening while trying to enjoy our Burmese tea leaves salad, we were ambushed by Peter, a golden retriever of a lad, an American who had been in Thailand for 6 months. He was concernedly unaware of basic facts of biology as well as how the how the world worked and peppered us for hours with questions and thoughts and seemed astonished by everything that we told him.

On one of our wanderings we found the most amazing café. Part was outside in a courtyard, part was ground level with a small manmade river running through it, and 2 stories were up in an enormous tree. It had a romance theme so there were round cuddle beds lodged in branches and all over the place, and cubbyholes to pair off in. K & I were there for their cold drinks and not the romance, but we did find a cute room to hang out in and order some delicious fresh juice sodas.

Our favourite eatery was a pickup truck with a wood burning pizza oven in the back, parked in an empty lot along the street. They threw up a few camping tables and chairs around the lot and started taking pizza orders around 6. You run next door to 7-Eleven for some quarts of Chang beer and the first pizzas roll out around 7:30. Those pizzas were extraordinary works of art! I had a pesto arugula jobbie with globs of fresh cheese and balsamic glaze on a properly blistered crust and an ume craft soda. I will be fantasizing about that pizza for the rest of my days. 

Speaking of fantasies, I never was one for a women’s prison fantasy, but after spending 2 hours being massaged by an ex-con while wearing someone else’s clothes, that may have to change. I found a massage centre run by women who were ex-prisoners and I signed up for a Thai traditional massage, which involved changing into some loose pjs so she could twist me around without restriction. Thai traditional massage is a full contact sport. They pull you with their arms, while pushing you with their feet, they wrap their body around you to twist your spine and kneel on you while pulling your arms backwards. My masseuse was lovely but I bet if she pulled some of those moves in the big house, others would leave her alone.

The really big deal in Chiang Mai are all the temples. There are over 300 temple complexes in Chiang Mai, which I believe is more than the number of weed stores in Ottawa. The styles and materials vary so it’s worth it to see as many as possible. Many of them are spectacularly ornate. One famous temple is teak and constructed with no nails. We saw 2 made of “silver” (silver, nickel and aluminum) and many with gold leaf and intricate interior paintings. In addition to our own temple rambles, we booked a walking tour with a former monk. This gave us a chance to grill him about Thai Buddhism as well as learn about 4 of the more famous temples in detail. He also lead us in a round of meditation in a monks’ meditation pavilion. 

In one of the outer temples of the big silver temple, I approached a monk for a blessing. He acquiesced, tying a red beaded cord around my wrist and absolutely smacking the shit out of the top of my head with his water whisk without his eyes ever leaving the YouTube video of tuk tuk accidents playing on his phone. Not feeling sufficiently blessed, I got another at Wat Chedi Luang by a monk who was reading something that at least could have been a holy text. He was much gentler on my brain box.

One of the cynical aspects of the temples is how they have all these ways you can pay to put your name and date of birth on this thing or that, or put money in the box of your weekday of birth as a blessing. They have lots of ingenious ways you can pay for prayers and blessings. The irony, as explained by our ex-monk is that prayers and blessings are not part of Buddhism. These are placebo temple creations to help support the upkeep of the temples. Buddhism is about action, not asking something mystical out there to help you. I could tell it was a bugbear of our guides’.