Chiang Rai and Chiang Mai

I was going to title this post "The Chiangs" but thought better of it.

Chiang Rai

After a long travel day on the slow boat, I was planning to spend the night in the border town of Chiang Khong, but I got a second wind after getting off the boat and decided to push on. A group of us who had been traveling together for days took a quiet tuktuk ride from the boat dock to the Thai border and I announced that I wanted to make a joke about signing each other's yearbooks but I wasn't sure if the rest of the world has yearbooks. They don't, but it got a laugh. Thanks, Hollywood.

Chiang Mai was my next planned destination, but the buses only ran as far as Chiang Rai late at night. This ended up being a perfect option. Instead of taking on a third long travel day, I was able to break things up and spend some quality time in Chiang Rai before taking a shorter bus in the afternoon.

Wat Rong Kuhn

The White Temple was built in 1997 by the contemporary artist Chalermchai Kositpipat. He had extensively studied the architecture of Buddhist temples in Sri Lanka and endeavored to build one of his own. I enjoy this artist's work for the same reasons that I enjoyed the Buddha Park in Vientiane. A lot of temple artwork is inexplicable to me because it was created by monks who were exclusively following the design tropes of their own cultural context. Contemporary artists, on the other hand, haven't only been exposed to the artistic conventions of their local temples; they're also going to be familiar with the religious iconography of European artists. This makes their artwork much easier for me to interpret.

The entrance to the White Temple features an eerie lake of outstretched hands, then a long narrow bridge you have to pass to get to the temple. The hands represent worldly desires and the bridge is the path you must follow to avoid worldly desires and attain enlightenment.

When I arrived at the entrance there was a long line of Instagram couples waiting to have the bridge to themselves and enjoy the perfect photo session. This wasn't really possible. It's a long and narrow bridge that takes twenty or thirty seconds to cross at a normal walking pace. I waited and observed the spectacle for a moment before deciding that this was a line for pictures, not a line to cross the bridge. There were far too many people around for anyone to get a perfectly clear shot of the bridge, and there were plenty of people taking pictures along the bridge, so it seemed unreasonable to wait. When I passed, however, I was scolded by a Japanese Instagram boyfriend at the front of the line. Only later did I realize that they're in my first picture of the temple. (They're the ones rummaging around in a suitcase in the photo above. I recognize her dress and his stupid pants. And nobody else had a suitcase.) This means that while I waited in line at the ticket counter, bought a ticket, admired the artwork in the garden, and leisurely walked up to this spot, a line formed behind these two. All of these Instagram couples stood among the hands representing worldly desires waiting for a photo opportunity that would give them social validation. They obstructed the path to enlightenment and expressed their displeasure at anyone who dare to cross it. Perhaps I'm just a line cutting asshole, but from where I sat it was an ironic moment.

Elsewhere at Wat Rong Kuhn there was an art exhibit that started out like a haunted house with demonic artwork and unsettling music but led to an area with stillness and calm. Same meaning as the White Temple, but I really enjoyed the immersive artwork.

Wat Rong Suea Ten

It would have made sense to go straight to the Blue Temple, but I made a pit stop back at the hostel and started a conversation with a Dutch girl named Melalia (I think… I just heard a bunch of "L"s) who was playing guitar. She was killing time before check-in and I was killing time before catching a bus, so we went to the Blue Temple together.

The Blue Temple was built in 2005 and started out as a restoration of an abandoned temple that was previously on the site. The artist was a student of Chalermchai and a key player in building the White Temple. While it's a visually striking and beautiful temple, the artwork was in a much more traditional style and the meaning of the artwork was harder for me to ascertain.

Back at the hostel, Melalia and I passed the guitar back and forth and sang a few songs together. I've never had such a long stretch without playing guitar. My finger callouses are gone and I'm suffering like a newbie. Even when I've found a guitar in a hostel common area, it's not always clear whether it would be harshening the vibe to play it, so it was nice to have a co-conspirator. When it was time to leave for my bus, I departed in the typical detached backpacker fashion. No hug. No exchange of contact information. Just a wave goodbye.

Chiang Mai

For years I've heard people rave about Chiang Mai, but I can't tell exactly why it's so popular. Bangkok is the largest city in Thailand with 11 million people, and Chiang Mai is the second largest with 1.2 million (which is an extreme drop off). Perhaps people who want the amenities of a city but want a smaller and less chaotic city are more comfortable in Chiang Mai. I suppose I would have been more impressed if I went from Bangkok directly to Chiang Mai, because I've been all over the place now and I'm comparing it to so many other towns.

Chiang Mai isn't surrounded by stunning natural beauty. It isn't a quaint little town with distinctive character. There's nothing unique about the architecture. It doesn't have a more impressive food scene than its neighbors. It's not known for wild parties. And yet it's absolutely crawling with backpackers with a few Thais around for decoration. Finding a Thai person in Chiang Mai is like finding Mickey Mouse at Disneyland. You knew he'd be out there somewhere but it's still a treat when you get to see him.

I stayed just outside The Old City, an area surrounded by a moat that seems to have the highest concentration of temples and walkable attractions. The quantity of temples in Chiang Mai is impressive, but everyone I've talked to on an extended trip through Southeast Asia gets to a point where a temple has to be pretty special to continue to be interesting. The most interesting temple was the He-Man Woman Haters Temple (I don't recall the actual name), which had an abundance of signs warning that women were not allowed in the temple. I suspect most tourists would accept this as a cultural practice and move on, but there was another sign that attempted to give a longer form and more polite explanation of the reasons behind the practice. With obsequious and apologetic tone, it explained that because women menstruate it would clearly defile the space, thank you for understanding. I've had my own "no, wait, let me explain" moments that caused much more harm than saying nothing at all.

I had seen many statues and artworks of a man with a goatee in tiger print robes, so I finally had to text my friend Daranee in Bangkok and ask who this is:

I guessed he was either the Buddha's Florida cousin or the Buddha's professional wrestling persona, but it turns out he's Maha Rishi. I don't know a lot about Rishi, but I know he's an important figure in the Vedic religion that was an ancestor to Buddhism, Hinduism, and Jainism. My epiphany was that I'm not likely to understand all of the artistic imagery in Buddhist temples without a greater knowledge of the Vedas. I suppose it's a bit like the necessity for Christians to study the Old Testament to understand the context of Jesus's teachings.

When I asked a few friends what they liked so much about Chiang Mai, they mostly told me about interactions with Thai people. That makes a lot of sense to me, although it's not an amenity exclusive to Chiang Mai. There really is something therapeutic about most interactions with Thai people. I can see how a slow week in Chiang Mai could be a wonderful experience if it's the right sized town to afford a lot of interaction with the locals, but today it's so overrun with tourists that I wonder if you get the same experience.

My friend Brittany is an incredibly gifted massage therapist who spent some time in Chiang Mai, so I asked her for a recommendation for a massage. She told me about a massage center that functions as a vocational training center for female ex-prisoners. When I first walked by to check it out, the customers outside had face tattoos and huge gauges. I'm always down for an AA meeting like that, but I seek a different crowd for a relaxing massage experience. I was feeling equally judgmental when I came around the next day, but I figured I should be open to the experience whether I liked or disliked it. At the beginning of my massage, as my therapist washed my feet, we sat face to face and I observed that she seemed to be a pretty burly and rough looking woman. I wondered if she had murdered her husband or drowned her kids in a tub or done something else really heinous. But by the end of the massage I thought, "Who? This angel? She must have been wrongly convicted. She could never do anything wrong." I was blown away by how nurturing she was. Traditional Thai massage involves a lot of stretching and moving people around into various poses that are almost a cuddling embrace. Her uninhibited laughter as she struggled to hoist me up was endearing. I wish I could take her home and bring her to work to give people reassuring hugs and temple massages whenever they're getting tense.

Khao Soi is the signature dish of Chiang Mai. It's a red curry soup with egg noodles and chicken breast. It's damn good. I've learned that most of the curry dishes found in American Thai restaurants aren't just considered tourist food here in Thailand today, they've probably always been considered tourist food. Most of these dishes were brought by the Chinese hundreds of years ago. Regardless of this history, Chiang Mai is proud of their northern heritage and Khao Soi remains a popular dish here even if it's not a regular Thai food.

Next stop: Bangkok. My bus to Pai was two hours late and I got an email from the hotel saying they don't actually have rooms and can't honor the reservation. There's a lack of affordable accommodation in Pai, so I decided I'm going to try to get back up that way another time. I'm feeling a time crunch balancing a few time constraints that are outside of my control. The most important is the meditation retreat. There are three different groups that hold these at different times in the month, but only one offered online registration. That group approved my application but recommended that I consider the beginner session at a different time in the month (which happened to be fully booked). The other two groups require in-person registration. Luckily they are all within a day's travel from one another. I'm planning to run some errands in Bangkok then get down to southern Thailand to get into a retreat. This retreat is my primary reason for being in this part of the world, so I would be disappointed if I ran out of time before attending one. After it's done I'll feel more free to meet up with friends who are traveling in Southeast Asia and want to hang out.