(This post will be updated with additional details and captions when time permits). Chiang Mai is Thailand’s second largest city and the largest Thai city in the north. Chiang Mai is a old city with origins back to the 1290s when the capital of the northern Alanna people related here from Chiang Rai. I had read that Chiang Mai is a lush pretty city with a population of about 125,000. Perhaps it is, but that certainly wasn’t the impression I got when walking around the old town and the area just south and east of the old town. The old town is a roughly 1 square mile in the Central Park of downtown Chiang Mai that was the old walled city with surrounding moat. Only a few remnants of the old wall remain. What I found was a much larger city with a kind of organized chaos vibe. I now understand that the city proper may contain 125,000 people, but the metropolitan area has a population of 1.2 – 1.5 million people.
There are many narrow streets and alleys with no organized public transportation. What Chaing Mai does have are scores of scooters, motorcycles with sidecars, tuk tuks, and songthaews (converted pickup trucks with benches and a cover over the bed that will take you where you want to go for a negotiated fee)
Many streets are without sidewalks and there can be any manner of obstacles at any time. I thought the fact that they drive on the left would also be confusing, but I haven’t found it hard to get used to. Perhaps it’s a result of being in Ireland and Japan fairly recently. Or more likely, it’s just that there is so much going on that the direction of traffic is just one of many things requiring attention that it doesn’t really register as different.
Given its ancient history there are many many temples inside the old city as well as outside the city and in the surrounding area. There are also numerous tourist activities from visiting elephant sanctuaries, bike rides in the countryside and amongst rice fields, raking bamboo rafts down small rivers, and visiting or hiking amongst hill tribes. Apart from wondering around the city and visiting several temples (know as a “wat” in Thai), I didn’t get a chance to experience any of the other popular tourist activities.There are mixed reports on the ethics of visiting elephant sanctuaries. While the riding elephants is no longer offered, I read that many places renamed their offerings as sanctuaries or “ethical” sanctuaries, but they to still train their elephants to tolerate humans or to be fed by humans. Other animal rights activists argue that a true sanctuary would let elephants be elephants without requiring them to be around people and that breeding, chaining, or using hooks or sticks on elephants would be prohibited. It is reported that some “sanctuaries” chain there elephants when the tourists leave and that many continue to breed elephants because they are a tourist draw and in order to continue there business.
I also enjoyed finding local markets and seeing the types of food for sale.
Instead of participating in traditional tourist activities, I along with a couple other members of Pangea Giving (see Thailand Page) visited several charitable groups working to help local communities and displaced Burmese people from Myanmar. (more to come)