Northern Thailand: Chiang Mai

Chiang Mai turned out to be a really laid back city, as I'd heard from other travellers. It's an ancient city, known as Thailand's "Number two city", with a moat surrounding a wall which contains the original town. We could walk around easily, and for the more out of the way places, red songthaews are plentiful and pretty cheap. The guesthouses and hotels are all clustered together near Tha Pae Gate, once of the entrances through the wall into old town. The city is replete with backpacker delights such as banana rotis, fruit shakes, toast and jam and butter, and fruit and yogurt with muesli. Traditional thai breakfasts are savory, headed in popularity by the Khao tom, or rice soup. I happen to love this delicious rice soup, but it's a stretch having it every morning for breakfast, so I have recently taken to having the "farang" breakfasts as well. Once in a while you want to have something familiar.

A highlight of Chiang Mai was meeting up with Ject, a friend of my friend/mentor/former professor, Jim Carter. Ject did part of his doctorate work at the USGS in Menlo Park in Jim's lab. Ject took us to his favorite restaurant near Chiang Mai University where we had amazing thai food I would never have known about much less order on my own. Delicacies like young coconut shoots and sayote salad were delicious! We also spend a lovely evening at the Sunday Walking Market and it was so good to have a local explain what all the foods were, and answer our questions. We had an excellent time with Ject. He does research on giant fireflies!

Another memorable experience in Chiang Mai was the Thai cooking class Mamie and I did, in which we learned about the traditional ingredients and cooked five dishes from scratch, down to pounding the curry paste. I made green curry, tom yum soup, wide rice noodles, pumpkin in coconut milk, and something else, which I forget just now. It is actually quite easy and everything turned out delicious. The hard part will be getting the ingredients back in the States.

We also visited the Thailand Elephant Conservation Centre near Lampang. When we arrived, the elephants were just getting into the lake for a bath before the show. It was so fun to see them playing in water, obviously having a great time, and watching the interaction between each elephant and its trainer. The show was nice, and I liked watching the demonstration of how the elephants used to work with logs, pulling and piling them up, back when that was their primary job during the timber age. One of the main reasons why there are so many elephants and rescue and conservation centers for them is because they were let go when they weren't used for logging anymore. It takes a LOT of food to feed an elephant - about 260 kilograms, or about 500 pounds, on average a day. After the show, Mamie and I walked over to the nursery and saw two very young elephants, one with its mother. The other was about a year and a half old, and it is a rescued wild elephant. Watching him was heartbreaking because his mother didn't have enough calcium when he was feeding, and consequently, he developed bowed legs. It is hard for him to balance, and every step is a struggle. Now they are adding calcium to his rice diet; I hope that does something...Elephants really are amazing creatures, and true gentle giants. They are so big and lumbering, but they have such grace despite their might. They're also really smart. As an example, after the show, the audience could feed bananas and sugar cane to the elephants. I watched one elephant as he accepted one piece of sugar cane after another, and handed each piece up to his trainer (who's riding on him) for storage. When the glut of food stopped coming, he reached up to the trainer and enjoyed the sugarcane one by one!

Getting to the Elephant Centre and back was interesting. They dropped us off on the side of a highway and we made our way down the road to the Visitor Center. When we left, we had to cross this highway to hail down a bus back to Chiang Mai. We waited just a little while before this old junker of a bus stopped, with the attendant jumping off the bus, shouting "Chiang Mai, Chiang Mai". So we got on, and the fare was a heck of a good deal, but I had to scoot down the bus, which was completely packed with locals, and sit on the floor, which just happened to be over the bus engine. After a little while, the floor got unbearably hot. I pulled out my Thailand guide book, which had plenty of girth, and sat on it for most of the trip. Mamie ended up front between the bus driver and the attendant, sitting on a wood stool.