Or maybe a trip to Thailand’s highest spot, The Roof of Thailand, just sounds fun. Rumor has it there are waterfalls involved. Reason enough right there.

Doi Inthanon (doi is mountain) is named for King Inthawichayanon, whose given name at birth was Inthanon. He died in 1897, the last king of Chiang Mai, and his ashes are housed in a stupa at the highest point in Thailand. Improbably, Doi Inthanon is part of the same range that includes Everest, which, at 29,000 feet towers over Doi Inthanon’s 8,415 feet.

But before we reached the Roof of Thailand, there would be trekking and waterfalls.

Wachirathan Waterfall

Our first stop, inside Doi Inthanon National Park, was Wachirathan Waterfall. At ~250 feet, Wachirathan isn’t Thailand’s tallest waterfall, but it may be the most powerful. The volume of water is truly impressive.

There’s some rainbow action in the video, too.

Trekking

Back in the van, which held a dozen of us plus guide and driver, to our next stop, the Pha Doc Siao Nature Trail, a three kilometer trek that started at over 4,000 feet. I kept asking the others whether they felt the altitude when they tried to, you know, take a full breath while hiking, but all I got was pity. Bastards.

I wasn’t sure whether the end of this hike was Thailand’s roof or only its mezzanine, so nothing to do but carry on and avoid, if at all possible, fainting.

Here’s our guide, Lucy, introducing us to the two members of the Karen village who would be our docents for the hike, as we weren’t permitted to wander loose on the trail. If one of was slow, not naming names, one of the Karen would hold back and make sure we got back to the group.

I suspect this was more safety than anything. The path was super uneven and completely unmarked. If one were, say, panting to take a breath, one might get disoriented or trip over a tree root in the path. No one wants to be the weakest gazelle at the watering hole, so the extra help was appreciated.

The trek involved following a series of three waterfalls through the jungle, the third of which permitted swimming. We’d exit through a Karen village, and then some other things would happen. Not clear what the post-3km trek offered.

You will be, I believe, unsurprised to learn that the nature trek was just unfairly beautiful. Other jungles were jealous. On the negative side, though, we didn’t see any of the gibbons we were promised lived in the area. Lucy did share with us that Thai people, who will apparently eat anything (she listed monkeys and snakes specifically) won’t eat gibbons because they pair bond for life, like humans. Aspirationally. I just felt better knowing that as an actual lifelong pair bonder, Thai people would be unlikely to eat me.

We quickly came to the first of the trek’s waterfalls. We were cautioned not to swim, but that seemed unnecessary. It was no Wachirathan, but there was still an impressive water flow. There was no part of this fall that called out to me to risk my life by entering.

The water kept us company as we trekked to the next waterfall.

This was another no-swimming, no-problem waterfall. Not even the shadow of an inclination.

Our trek to the final waterfall took us through a valley that was used by the Karen for rice cultivation. The water had been diverted around the valley, and routed to the next waterfall, to prevent random flooding that damaged crops. The park was established in 1972, but the Karen and Hmong villages had been established right around 1900, so their agricultural footprint predates the park by a fair amount.

When I was at DC Comics I visited one of my artists, Steve Parkhouse, who took me for an excursion around his home in England’s Lake District. We were touring one of the national parks when we crested a hill and I saw a village in the valley below. “Who let them build a village in a national park?” Steve laughed. “The national park is just over 50 years old. The village is over 1,000.” Like that. Only newer.

Which brought us, blissfully, to the third and final waterfall, the one where swimming was permitted.

Here we have delightful proof that children are stupid in exactly the same way across vast cultural gulfs. Let the children teach us: we are more alike than different.

The end of our 3km trek took us to the Karen village of our guides, a hamlet of about 350 people. This turned out to be the highlight for me, which was a surprise, as I’d already visited a Karen village. But these two villages could not have been more different.

The first village I’d been to had been a Long Neck village, while this tribe was White Karen, who don’t use the neck-lengthening brass coils. But the differences went way deeper than that. As I mentioned, the White Karen village had been established around 1900, while the Long Neck villagers had fled persecution in Burma/Myanmar in the 80s. As a result, the White Karens owned their land and were Thai citizens, while the Long Neck village was effectively a refugee camp, the villagers having no actual rights within Thailand.

How this played out in the two villages was fascinating, manifesting in both art and architecture. But we had a couple of stops before we hit the village proper. The first was their coffee operation, which is an important part of their economy. Prior to its establishment as a National Park, this part of Thailand was thick with opium poppy cultivation. The government officially banned opium production in the fifties, but the effort picked up speed with a Royal Project in 1969 that focused on crop substitution. That’s why the Karen grow coffee and strawberries now.

This fellow was by the path roasting coffee by hand. If only he’d had some for sale. JK. Of course I bought his hand-roasted coffee. I’d most certainly also have bought his opium, but if any was available it wasn’t on offer to farangs.

The next stop was the Karen weaving shop. I’m sure most of the weaving is done in the home, but this is a central spot on the nature trail that gathers all of the village’s wares in one place. That’s the longest backstrap loom I’ve ever seen, by the way. For making the long straps on the woven tote bags? Maybe?

I will always share video of weaving. Don’t click Play if it bores you.

The two Karen villages’ vastly different profiles, one settled citizens, one stateless refugees, couldn’t have been more apparent than in their weaving. The Long Neck Karen had small backstrap looms they clearly carried with them when they fled Myanmar, while the White Karen had frame looms large enough to be cosplaying as backstrap looms. That difference leads to a notable distinction in the depth and richness of the patterns being woven.

Finally, the Long Neck Karen have made a virtue out of the vice of scarcity, weaving pieces that are more open float than weft. While the White Karen weaving does feature some open floats, it’s a design accent rather than the primary effect.

Here’s what I picked up from the White Karen village. Those are rich and subtle.

And here’s what I picked up from the Long Neck Karen village.

I’m not suggesting for a moment that there’s a qualitative artistic difference between the two villages’ work. Both are beautiful. I’m suggesting that the obvious differences in execution are attributable to their different circumstances, that the decisions aren’t purely aesthetic, but are tied to their social and economic profiles. I wasn’t expecting a master class in microeconomics on a hike and a swim, but you have to hold yourself open to the universe.

The final lesson came when we reached the village proper, where our van was waiting to pick us up for the next leg. The village was so much more built than the Long Neck village. It might look like corrugated tin lean-to construction, but it was solid.

This is what tipped me over, though. Fucking dormer windows!

Compare that with the Long Neck village, whose building designs are constrained by the materials available. No architectural details for them, just pure utilitarianism.

Many years ago, on a DC junket, I found myself at Skara Brae in the Orkney Islands, one of the world’s oldest neolithic cities. You could see the foundations of the housing and the street grid. What was most fascinating to me was that there was evidence of indoor plumbing, the oldest, I believe, ever found. Which spoke of a society with enough labor bandwidth that not all of it needed to be focussed on subsistence.

You don’t get indoor plumbing without the equivalent of a city planning function, and you don’t get city planners unless you value their efforts enough to feed them, since they’re busy city planning instead of hunting. There’s an entire value system embedded in something as simple as sewage lines.

That’s what I thought of when I saw those hilarious dormer windows. There’s a value system embedded in those windows, that says we value beauty over efficiency, joy over utilitarianism. And we have the necessary labor bandwidth to manifest those values in silly, silly windows. The Long Neck Karen, on the other hand, are just trying to survive, and their buildings, as they will, reflect those values.

Made It, Ma! Roof Of The World…

At this point it was clear that our 3km trek was not terminating at the Roof of Thailand. Would there be another trek to the highest point in Thailand? I dearly hoped not. I hadn’t actually tweaked anything, but more than one of my joints was throbbing. That 3km was over very uneven paths, and knees and ankles took a beating.

So I was delighted to get back in the van, and surprised when, just a few minutes later, we pulled into the parking lot for the Roof of Thailand. Which was only a modest walk of 250 meters from the parking lot. That’s service! I’d just assumed that reaching the summit was its own trek.

It wasn’t a trek, but it was a ball of confusion. For starters, the sign that says “The Highest Spot in Thailand” isn’t. It’s just the sign at the beginning of the trail. You can even see the trail behind it winding higher on the mountain. I mean, you can’t even trust the signage.

Next up the path was the stupa holding King Inthanon’s ashes.

If you continue around the path, you go behind the stupa.

You can see the little square plinth just in front of the stupa’s base. For awhile, that was the tallest thing on the mountain, but so many people were traipsing up to it that it put the integrity of the stupa at risk. So on the other side of the path they built a new plinth, a couple of inches taller than the old plinth, so that could now be the highest point in Thailand, and people would leave the poor king’s stupa alone.

One nice thing about Thailand’s roof. At over 8,000 feet up, the air was deliciously cool. They’ve still never had snow up there, which is fine, but it was a refreshing break from the turgid lowlands.

Dueling Pagodas

Our final stop on our long day was the twin pagodas, one for the king, one for the queen. The setting was peaceful and the pagodas were quietly beautiful, as opposed to the not infrequent Clown Car approach to Thai temples. Looking at you, Wat Rong Khun. Let’s take a restful break before we head back to Chiang Mai.

Our Real Final Stop

Before hitting the road for real, two hours back to Chiang Mai, we stopped at what Lucy called a local market. I mean, technically true, but only in the sense that every market is local, if you think about it. But not at all true if you think the common English meaning of local market is a place where locals shop.

This place was inexplicable for so many reasons. First, there were dozens of those stalls, stretching in both directions. So that’s a lot to parse, right off the bat. What made it doubly hard to parse is that every stall carried the same snacks. In the same packaging. With the same labels. At the same price. There could honestly have been one stall.

This was all clearly a front for Big Snack. At first I thought, well, they may be buying big bags of this stuff wholesale, but at least they’re bagging it up for retail. But then I saw that the labels were identical. I honest-to-god think they’re all just buying the pre-bagged snacks from the same supplier and stacking them on their tables. As a demonstration of native Thai stacking culture it was awesome. As a local market it was… weird.

Ephemera

A couple of things that didn’t fit elsewhere.

More Me!

My daughter, Ruby, is pathological about having pictures of us on our travels. I’ve consistently demurred, as I think in any given setting we are always the least interesting thing. But I couldn’t escape my guide for my tour of Wat Doi Suthep, who insisted on taking my picture, which I shared on the post. Well, that made Ruby clap her little hands together in delight, like Veruca Salt stealing a squirrel, so here we are again. Please. Blame Ruby.

But Wait, There’s More…

These kinds of tours can make or break based on the folks. Some people are wrapped up in their own thing, which is often us, to be fair, but mostly people are there for the experience, and sharing it with the rest of your tour group is part of that experience. Which is to say, this was a pretty good group.

With one standout, who warrants specifically name checking: a charming Frenchwoman named Doris Buttignol. I know, I dunk on the French all the time. But only because it’s easy and fun. But when faced with an actual French person, I’m unexpectedly open-minded.

Doris was interesting to talk to, which we did off and on over the course of the day very pleasurably. But at lunch she confessed that she’s a documentarian, which immediately made her more interesting to me. Not that I operate at her level, but writing the blog requires looking at the world through a lens and trying to understand it, rather than letting the experience just wash over you. I’m an ardent amateur, so It was great to spend time talking to someone who does that professionally.

Doris shared with me a link to her most recently completed piece, about Icelandic politics. Which sounds dry but was anything but, encompassing as it did both women’s political empowerment and dealing with climate change. It was trenchant in its observations, but more than that it was visually stunning. Her eye for framing and composition is superb, and I was regularly brought up short by the raw beauty of an image.

Doris has generously let me share the link to her documentary. So everyone, please say Thank You to Doris.

My thanks go to Doris, as well, for giving me an experience, both in her company and her work, that went well beyond what Thailand had to offer. This is why we travel.

Khon Ramakien

The first performance was of the Khon Ramakien, the Thai version of the Ramayana. Which we’ve seen so many times at this point that I feel like I can shout out the lines, like I’m at a Rocky Horror Picture Show screening. “Girl, don’t step outside the circle!” I knew Thailand had its own version, but I honestly hadn’t planned on attending. Ramayana fatigue is real.

I was out walking a new neighborhood in Bangkok of a brutal midday and saw that I was directly across the street from the theater. Noted for future reference, until I noticed the crowd on the steps. I crossed over to check it out, and sure enough, a performance was about to tee off. An air conditioned performance. Sold.

The performance was notable for two things. First, its duration. It came in at a sprightly forty minutes, the thinnest slice of Ramayana we’ve yet been served. Maybe it’s because I’m so familiar with the story, but I wasn’t actually craving more. There’s something to be said for guerrilla Ramayana.

The second notable thing about the performance was the professionalism of the production. Of all the many versions we’ve seen, this one stood out for the quality of the costumes, stage design, lighting, special effects, the whole ball of wax. Everything about it was exceptional. Including the air conditioning. What’s not to love?

I haven’t called out the performance and the music, not because they weren’t good, but because they’ve been uniformly good at all of the various Ramayana performances we’ve seen. It was the production design that really stood head and shoulders above the competition in this performance.

My favorite lines from the supertitles: “Look, monkey. Know that my words are as strong as the mountain. I cannot take them back.” I’m going to start all my sentences from now on with “Look, monkey.” The other was “Only when Rama strokes him from head to tail three times will he be free from the curse.” Which was enacted, but modesty forbids video of such an intimate scene. You’ll just have to trust me that everyone left satisfied.

We’ve never seen the underwater kingdom in any of the other versions we’ve seen, but these folk had the budget and chops to pull it off.

And the Battle Royale.

Look, monkey! That turned out to be, after all the variations we’ve witnessed, the very best version of the Ramayana we’ve seen. Can the cabaret possibly measure up?

Siam Dragon Cabaret

A five-minute walk from my condo brought me to Chiang Mai’s premier, if perhaps only, ladyboy cabaret. Well, why the fuck not? It was obviously that convenient to me for a reason. Who am I to try to outfox kismet?

Of course, had I known that photography was verboten I might have skipped it. I don’t think my experiences are even real unless I can properly share them with you. But I was able to scrape promotional photos from their web site, so you can get a flavor of what went on. Beyond that, words will have to suffice where a picture would be otherwise worth a thousand of them.

Let’s start out with the ladyboy part before we tackle the cabaret part. I’ll confess that I’d had too narrow a definition of ladyboy, or kathoey in Thai. Based on the ladyboy gogo bars in Bangkok, I’d assumed that a Thai ladyboy was, by definition, someone who’d enjoyed some level of medical intervention, from hormone therapy at one end to aftermarket breasts and vaginas at the other.

While those are certainly ladyboys, kathoey embraces the full spectrum, including those who maintain their biological roots but simply prefer to present as women. I was pleasantly surprised to discover that Siam Dragon Cabaret represented kathoey culture with performers at every point on that spectrum. Once I got over the confusion, it read as a lovely form of inclusivity. “I’m not better because I have tits and you don’t. We are all kathoey.”

I would hope that it’s uncontroversial to point out that the Thai are a small folk. That’s not othering, that’s observation. I would likewise hope that it’s uncontroversial to point out that Thai boys tend to start out pretty. The truth is, it doesn’t take a lot of sorcery to turn a pretty Thai boy into a pretty Thai lady. Especially since the Thai, not to overgeneralize, are not an extravagantly busted people. What isn’t achieved through the surgeon’s arts is plausibly attainable the old fashioned way, through padding and bust tape. It’s not a big gap to close.

The range of expression within the culture of kathoey was brought home to me the day after the cabaret. Our guide for a trip to Doi Inthanon National Park was a kathoey who called herself, for our Western ears, Lucy.

Lucy’s presentation as a woman was restrained: lipstick, lilac nail polish, and small silver hoop earrings. That was her entire kit. But she used the term ladyboy to describe herself, and the most obvious manifestation of her identity was actually linguistic.

Thai appends a gendered particle at the end of sentences to indicate respect. If you are a woman you would end your sentence with kha, and if you’re a man you’d use khrap. So a woman would say thank you as kwop kuhn kha, and a man would say kwop kuhn khrap.

Lucy ended her sentences with kha, making it abundantly clear that she identified as female and you were to treat her as such. It was a refreshingly unambiguous way to share that information, tied directly to the structure of Thai speech.

As to the cabaret, this was my first, so I have no point of comparison. I don’t believe I’ve been to either a drag show or a Vegas-style cabaret. I am, or was, a cabaret virgin. That said, I strongly suspect that this followed a well trod path. It was all lip-syncing to power ballads or overblown diva anthems and outlandish costumes whose headdresses fell a mere pineapple short of ridiculous.

I’m sharing my seat because it was actually central to the experience. Who knew that they’d be doing crowd work, and that my aisle seat put me in the splash zone? Dorothy must have had an inkling, because when I told her I’d gotten a VIP seat she said that she hoped I didn’t get accidental bottle service. I assured her that they still use the expression Happy Ending here. Although, to be fair, maybe I’d have better luck if I asked for bottle service.

The crowd work involved… shaking hands, a curiously polite and gentle interaction. At the expense, if I’m being honest, of the whole lip-syncing act. Apparently lip-syncing and shaking hands at the same time wasn’t in the union contract. One of the performers, as she reached to shake my hand, endearingly clutched her costume as if her nonexistent breasts might spill out when she leaned over. That’s some charming commitment to the bit.

They had one Divine-scaled performer, who lip-synced to one of the only songs I recognized, When You’re Good To Mama from Chicago. She totally deked me, though, when she came in for the handshake. She reached for my hand, then grabbed my head and smothered me, in a modestly non-consensual way (I think, like an airport, my presence represented implied consent), in whatever she was using to create her substantial bosom. When I broke the surface she presented her cheek for a kiss and turned her head at the last minute to plant one right on my lips. I didn’t realize until I wiped my mouth at dinner afterwards that I’d been sporting a substantial dollop of bright red lipstick on my lips. I’m sure everyone else at the restaurant was amused.

As mentioned, the songs were almost completely unknown to me, largely because many were clearly local bangers. Then I realized that while photography might be forbidden, no one said I couldn’t use Shazam. Songs included: The Show Isn’t Over, by La Voix, This Is Me, from The Greatest Showman, Get Sexy by The Sugababes, It’s A Beautiful Day by Sarah Brightman, Butterflies by Kamaliya, and Bole Chudiyan from Kabhi Khushi Kabhie Gham (a Bollywood musical). Who even are these people? I didn’t even bother Shazaming the songs in Thai.

The performance differed from a Ru Paul jam largely because of the song choices, although there were definitely more apsara hands than I think is normal in Western drag shows. The show ran an hour and ten minutes, and I have no idea if that’s generous or mingy compared to the norm. Sadly, it seemed modestly attended, on a random Thursday night. In a theater with 104 seats there were about thirty, maybe forty tops, in attendance.

But that didn’t stop our plucky crew from lip-syncing their little hearts out. Afterwards, they lined up in a gauntlet to pose for tips. I didn’t pose with them (I think I was still recovering from my near-drowning) but I snapped a few shots of the lovelies on my way out. Proof, because I know how you are, that I was really there.

You can walk outside without your decorative belongings in hand, but you leave cloaked in the signifiers of your culture. Every time you dress you tell the world who you are. Pottery doesn’t do that.

Although this is true of all of the crafts, the constraints of primitive, manual methods leads not to a narrowing of the design space but to a Cambrian explosion of creativity within it. As we’ve chased weaving around the world, it feels like we should have seen every recombinant possibility that a backstrap or treadle loom can be strong-armed into producing. And then we see something, some amalgam of materials and techniques previously unimagined, that blows our minds all over again.

Even without Dorothy to provide a more nuanced understanding of the intersection of design and technique, I am consistently thrilled and delighted to explore textiles as a sharply focused lens into a new culture.

Silk

At least when I play word association, the appropriate response to Thai is… Silk. That’s a great jumping off point, but there’s plenty going on here besides the silk. There’s Teen Jok, mudmee, and plenty of beautiful cotton. In almost three months in Thailand, I’ve been able to see much of the range here.

I mentioned in the post on Thai crafts that there’s cheap and expensive for crafts here, but not much in the middle. That’s 100% true for the silk. There’s the kind of manufactured goods we used for corsets at one end, and then silk made from worms fed mulberry leaves to make their cocoons a golden color, massaged in the morning and evening, and read bedtime stories before being tucked in with a glass of warm milk. That shit’s expensive.

I found one shop in Bangkok close to where I was staying, Queen Thai Silk.

It turns out, the biggest marketplace for quality silk in Bangkok is… in a mall. Specifically, Old Siam Plaza.

Malls are a central component of Bangkok’s retail profile, and they all have their own flavor. ICONSIAM features more European fashion houses than any other Bangkok mall. Terminal 21 plays host to a cornucopia of small makers offering unique products. And Old Siam is the locus of Bangkok’s silk trade.

An entire floor is given over to silk shops, almost all of which, large or small, feature someone operating a sewing machine. I saw measurements being taken and fittings occurring in dozens of shops the afternoon I was there. You can pick your fabric and have it turned into the schmatte of your dreams all in one go.

The selection was phenomenal, as were the prices. I don’t have notes, so I can’t say exactly, but I know there wasn’t a single piece that we considered affordable.

Which is a shame, because the range and quality were incredibly impressive.

Mudmee

Mudmee is just the Thai word for ikat. There’s no special flavor, it’s the same way ikat is made all over the world, by dying the weft fibers. I didn’t find a mudmee weaving village, but I found two shops in Chiang Mai that carried high quality mudmee. One shop, Shinawatra, was literally five minutes from my condo.

They also carried a high quality selection of silks and wovens, although the mudmee was the standout.

The other shop, Studio Naenna, was an hour’s walk from my condo. So, should have been a Grab. That midday hour was intense. But so was the shop, and well worth the visit. Even if I needed a minute to recover once I got there. They don’t weave onsite, but they were the exclusive reps for some truly gifted artisans. All of the pieces were created with exclusively natural dyes.

Of course, the biggest challenge was shopping for Dorothy without a Dorothy there to render judgement. My plan was to take photos, send them to her so she could shop, and come back to pick up her selection. It’s so cute when I make plans.

What actually happened was I found this, a seven color mudmee created by their master weaver. Yes, Dorothy, it has seven colors, but it’s also a subtle and beautiful weave. And you own it now, so no carping.

By the way, it took three months each for dying the thread and weaving, so six months total effort to create that piece.

Teen Jok

Given our relative indifference to the silk, due to its cost, it looked like the mountain village of Mae Chaem was going to be the payoff. Mae Chaem specializes in an ornate, embroidery-like weaving called Teen Jok. Maggie, my guide for the trip to Wat Doi Suthep, had suggested that a friend of hers, whose nom de touriste was Cartoon, could drive me there for the day. Because absent a car and driver, there was no way to get to Mae Chaem.

Mae Chaem is like the Benjarong Pottery Village outside Bangkok: a completely inaccessible locus of Thai cultural heritage. It’s baffling to me that no one goes there. It’s not far from the famous and well-traveled Doi Inthanon national park, but not one of the dozens of tour operators goes there. When I visited the Erawan National Park outside Bangkok they tacked on a visit to a WWII-era POW concentration camp. That made sense to someone. But adding a cultural treasure like Mae Chaem to a national park tour, that would be madness. Grr.

Because it’s not on anyone’s route, there’s a shocking dearth of detailed information about Mae Chaem, even from those who blog about it. When Cartoon picked me up her first question was “Where are we going?” As in, the name and address of one of the weaving studios, but I had nothing. We were going to drive about three hours to Mae Chaem on the assumption that we’d find the studios once we were there. No wonder no one goes.

We arrive and we’re driving down what seems like the main drag, until we finally see a shop with a sign that says Textile Café. Odd, but promising, except that the shop’s doors are closed and drapes are drawn. But we pull over, and sure enough, it’s an actual studio that’s actually open and has actual Teen Jok.

So what exactly is Teen Jok? The technical definition is that it’s a discontinuous supplementary weft technique. What that means is that the weaver hand ties additional weft threads around specific vertical warp threads (that’s the discontinuous part, as the supplementary weft threads don’t go selvedge to selvedge) to create an embroidery-like pattern directly on the loom.

In the clip below, the weaver is using a porcupine quill to pull apart the warp threads.

That technique is ridiculously labor intensive, with a skilled weaver able to produce about two inches of Teen Jok in a day. That’s why you see it woven as a six inch border finish on sarong lengths instead of as entire fabric.

We saw a similar technique in Bali, called songket. The primary difference is that Balinese songket is woven on a backstrap loom and the supplementary weft threads tend to run towards the metallics. Thai Teen Jok pulls from a library of sixteen traditional patterns that all the weavers use, although any meaning those patterns might have is lost to history. There’s no jig or template for those patterns, by the way. Teen Jok is created entirely by eye and hand. Colors are dealer’s choice, and weaving is done on a traditional frame loom.

The Textile Cafe had the real deal. As beautiful as it was, I needed to see more. I don’t like running the meter with artisans, making them spread out their wares so I can take pictures and go on my way, but I needed to see more of the range before picking a piece to bring back to Dorothy. And if this place was the bomb, I’d be happy to come back.

When I told Dorothy I was going to Mae Chaem, I got a reminder: “If you buy a piece, it’s ok not to have allllllll the colors in it.” Right. I’m a clown. Noted. But the color palette on the Textile Cafe pieces seemed on the bright side, trending lurid, and I needed to know if that was just what Teen Jok looked like or if it was this particular weaver’s eye.

Now that Cartoon and I knew what to look for, finding more Teen Jok weavers was easy. Our second stop was just a little further up the road, and answered the color palette question. The weaver in this shop also had brightly colored pieces, but quite a few with a richer, more restrained palette. I suspect that the first weaver exclusively used commercial rather than natural dyes. The second shop also had a pretty wide range of clothes with Teen Jok details.

But two pieces really stood out, and I was pretty sure, although I was going to keep looking, that I’d come back for at least one of them. The first was a traditional Teen Jok sarong, but in truly beautiful colors.

The second was a solid piece of Teen Jok. I suspected I wouldn’t see another piece like it, and I didn’t. It was a startling 12,000฿, about $360 USD, but it was the very definition of the kind of signature pieces we’ve been seeking out on our travels. Less than a rug and just as significant.

The third studio we visited was probably the largest, with not only the Teen Jok sarongs, but a really nice selection of clothes with Teen Jok decorative elements. The sarongs were beautifully crafted, but I didn’t see anything I preferred to the two pieces from the previous studio.

I did love the clothes, though.

I felt like I’d seen the range, and I didn’t know how much more there was to see in terms of variation. I told Cartoon we’d do one more store and then go back to the second shop where I was prepared to comically overspend for a piece of magic.

This weaver had the expected range of Teen Jok, but nothing that was more impressive than what I’d seen at the second studio.

But then I saw something I hadn’t seen elsewhere: Teen Jok runners, over six feet long. She had four pieces of nothing but the Teen Jok.

Thinking back to the Balinese songket, Dorothy had picked a runner as the easiest format to find a home for in our crowded home. You’d never cut up the all-over Teen Jok. It would have to be a wall hanging, and empty walls don’t exist in our home. Arguably I should have gone back to the second studio to get the beautiful sarong piece, as Dorothy would have turned that into a lovely skirt. But I settled for the runner, which was hardly settling.

I asked, by the way, and that 6 ½ foot long runner took six weeks to complete.

I feel obligated to share that Cartoon was a great companion. She didn’t know anything about textiles when we set out, and it was a delight seeing comprehension blossom as she realized just how unlikely and magical the weaving is.

She also taught me two new Thai words: beautiful and delicious. Beautiful (suay) was for the weaving and delicious (aroy) was for lunch. Aroy was easy, but I still haven’t mastered suay. First, that’s a very slippery diphthong in the middle which I still don’t quite have. Second, it’s said with a rising tone at the end. That would be ok, but if you muff that and use a falling tone it means ugly.

That’s not OK. If the rising tone means beautiful, the falling tone should mean bathtub. No way should it be an antonym. Also, when I flub the diphthong, it feels like I’m being intentionally misunderstood, like how the French pretend not to understand when you say kroi-sant instead of kwa-sahnt. They know what you mean, they’re just being French.

I feel like suay, even with a slurry diphthong, should be intelligible from context. I clearly don’t mean bathtub. But I suppose if someone foreign, say French, for example, told us that something was betty-fail, it might take a minute to catch up.

A quick lunch stop and three hours driving to get home. On our way back the way we’d come into town we passed another half dozen studios we’d missed on the way in, when we didn’t know what we were looking for.

Wovens & Embroidery

The wovens were one of the few places in the panoply of Thai textiles that landed in between cheap crap and debt financing. Lokna Naono hit that middle nicely.

On the other hand, Srisanpanmai, in the upscale Nimman neighborhood, was at the trust fund end of the spectrum. They carried two things, primarily. Some excellent Teen Jok, for everyone who couldn’t make it to Mae Chaem (which was everyone but me), and antique (is 50 years old antique, or just used?) wovens from Burma/Myanmar. The Teen Joks started at about 15,000฿ ($460 USD). For comparison’s sake, the Teen Jok in Mae Chaem was 2,500฿ to 5,000฿. The Burmese wovens were priced from 15,000฿ to 30,000฿. Spectacular goods, but not even at my craziest…

While Mae Chaem’s Teen Jok weaving was almost exclusively the six inch border, the specimens at Srisanpanmai mostly featured more generous expanses of the weaving. Not enough to cover the cost differential, but enough to narrow the gap.

The Burmese wovens were all cut and sewn into wrap skirts. You could pick the stitches out and return them to fabric, but that just made the pricing even harder to swallow.

And some beautiful embroidery, too spendy for us.

Ban Don Luang Weaving Village or Bust…

As it happened, bust.

After our success finding the Teen Jok in Mae Chaem, Cartoon and I got the band back together and headed out to track down the weavers of fine cottons clustered in Ban Don Luang.

But first, please join me at the sidebar. Bloggers. Hey! Over here. I beg of you, date your blog posts. Is that asking too much? Whatever platform you’re using keeps track of publication dates. It’s a data element you can choose to display or not, and for some reason so many of you choose not to display it. All of my blog posts have publication dates, because their absence doesn’t make your posts timeless. It makes them garbage.

OK, thanks.

My point being that whatever I read about Ban Don Luang Weaving Village must have been pretty old, because it simply wasn’t true any longer. The town still had the profusion of inexpensive clothing shops I’d read about, but the actual weavers were almost completely gone.

Through much discussion with locals we managed to find two studios still engaged in weaving, but they were both doing contract work for Chinese jobbers. Neither of them had so much as a showroom featuring their creations.

The proximate cause of the decline in weaving, as we were told, was the younger generation’s disinterest in long apprenticeships whose payoff was a lifetime of manual labor (the same reason the Burmese wovens from Srisanpanmai were all fifty years old). To be fair, neither of the workrooms we visited was producing the kind of artisanal products that deliver the pride in craft and culture that offsets the grueling work, so it’s tough to argue with the young’uns.

Still, weaving by hand is always a delight to witness first hand.

This was an interesting technique, using the stick to create the dimensional weft pattern.

For some reason, this charming creature asked my age. With Cartoon translating, I told her that I was 69 and she replied that she was 67. “So, if I was looking for a younger wife…” There was much merriment, while the other women assured me that they were all much younger. One of those unlikely contexts in which I look like a catch.

Sadly, I had to leave the trail of broken hearts behind me. Ban Don Luang was a bust, for both textiles and romance, and it was time for Cartoon and I to return to Chiang Mai, bloodied but unbowed. But Thailand’s textiles were anything but a bust, as my mudmee and Teen Jok purchases attested. Although Dorothy’s presence would have elevated and enriched the entire experience, I feel like I can leave Thailand with my head held high. I did pretty good, for a boy.

One hill village, one hot spring, and three color-coded temples. Let’s make a day of it.

Our guide was an irrepressibly chirpy woman who went by the nom de touriste of MM. When MM wanted to signal that something was true, she’d say “I confirm.” “It is very hot out today, I confirm.” She would do elaborate skits where she’d act out asking herself a question so she could answer it. “But MM, why are there no photos in the temple?” “Well, my dear…” We were all My dears. 100% charming.

The group was small, only five others besides me. An American man; two 18 year-old girls, one from Mexico and one from Spain, who’d met at a Danish international school and become fast friends; a French woman; and a grown-up Mexican woman. Maybe it was the small group and maybe it was just a random collection of friendly folk, but we all chatted amiably in different groupings all day. It was the most social group I’ve had on a tour, and it was a pleasure to spend the day with them.

Mae Khachan Karen Village

Thailand’s north is home to a number of hill tribes: Hmong, Karen, Lisu, and Akha. None of them are native to Thailand, having migrated from the north, mostly originating in China, over varying timespans. The Karen migrated from Burma/Myanmar starting as far back as the 1800s, with a large influx fleeing persecution in Myanmar in the 1980s.

As a result, every Karen village in Thailand is a refugee camp. Citizenship for Karen refugees is being slowly doled out, but most of the Karen are stateless, having only the most limited of rights, if any. Many of the Karen tribes follow the traditional practice of the women wearing brass neck rings, which is why you’ll see references to Karen Long Neck tribes. Mae Khachan is a Long Neck village.

I’m sure you’ll agree that that’s all kinds of fraught, and there’s an active debate about the ethics of visiting the Long Neck villages. The Con argument is that the villages are human zoos, and what the fuck is wrong with you? You monster. The Pro argument is that they charge a fee to enter the village and sell handicrafts that they make or resell, and without the income that tourists bring they’d die out as a distinct culture.

I obviously came down on the Pro side of that argument. Mostly because I wanted to make sure I brought money and left it with them, but also because the Con argument, while morally compelling at first glance, seems wrong to me. You could make that argument about any native village, and we’ve been to lots of them. They provide insight into different, compelling cultures and allow us to take home beautiful representations of those cultures. In exchange, we leave money behind. That seems to me the very essence of tourism, the alternative apparently being staying home.

We visited the rug weaving workshops in Teotitlán del Valle, outside Oaxaca. We visited Tenganan, a thousand-year-old Balinese village, to see the weavers of rare Geringsing double ikat. I visited a village outside Bangkok specializing in Benjarong ceramics. No one has suggested about those locations that visiting them was an unethical act that treated the residents as zoo animals.

Which leads to the only possible explanation, which is the neck rings. Treating the Karen as so exotic that visiting them in their village is deemed a form of colonial-style aggression is to infantilize them and other them in ways I find problematic. They have agency here, and they have chosen to open their village to tourists and sell their handicrafts to support their way of life. It seems like they should have the last word on that subject, not some pearl-clutching philosophy major.

MM started us with an introduction to the village’s guardians, a male and female figure right by the entrance. “But MM, why is there a statue with a penis?” I wasn’t curious about that in the slightest, as lingams seem super common in Southeast Asian art. I did wonder why she was stroking it. That seemed odd. “But MM, why are you treating the lingam like your long-lost best friend?” Neither she nor I asked, so we were all just left to wonder.

She explained that starting as young girls, lingam carvings were worn as a kind of protection, and that her mother had gifted her first lingam charm when she was eight. Wha?! Since when have penises protected women? Women need protection from penises, not by them. No questions, though. I just wanted her to loosen her grip so we could move on.

When MM had gone over the itinerary in the van, I was concerned because only half an hour had been allocated to the Karen village. I was afraid we were going to one of the smaller villages, and was concerned that there would be no mercantile opportunities, which was kind of the whole point for me. If I couldn’t leave money behind, the Con argument carried more weight. MM assured me that there were handicrafts available, so I relaxed.

Half an hour turned out to be perfectly adequate for exploring the small village. Especially since no one spoke English. I’d have definitely sat down for a conversation, had one been on offer. The village boasted about twenty stalls with women selling their weaving, as well as manufactured goods they were reselling.

The weaving is done on an old-style backstrap loom, and features wide, exposed floats, where the horizontal weft threads are skipped. This creates a distinctive design, but it also requires less materials and less time spent weaving. That hardly seems a coincidence, and wouldn’t be the first time that practical constraints drove creative decisions.

This picture is too good to bury in a slideshow. I didn’t pay anything to take pictures of people’s wares, but I just wanted a picture of this beautiful family. The little girl is clutching the 20฿ note I tipped her. Children should totally get paid for being adorable. To be fair, she’s probably more than 20฿ of cute.

For accuracy’s sake, by the way, the Karen women don’t really have long necks. The rings push their collarbones down, which compresses their rib cages and makes their necks look unnaturally long. Is trick!

I left the Karen village feeling pretty good about the visit. The people were lovely and the weaving was excellent. I walked away with five scarves and a lighter wallet. Order had been restored.

Mae Khachan Hot Spring

This was more a roadside stop than an actual hot spring. MM admonished us that there was no swimming, but there were places where we could dunk our feet if we wanted to. I stuck a finger in that water, and there was nothing to worry about. No one who enjoyed having skin would even think of swimming in that water. Or even putting their feet in. Yowch!

Wat Rong Khun – The White Temple

The next batch of weird presented itself at the White Temple in Chiang Rai, and the Blue Temple that followed it on our tour. Both temples seemed at first blush to have been manufactured as tourist attractions. They seemed less like authentic Buddhist temples and more like temple-adjacent fever dreams. That feeling was reinforced when I learned that the White Temple was not a working monastery, like every other temple I’ve been to in Thailand. Not a monk to be found.

This fractal confection seemed to be cosplaying as a Buddhist temple, and the word that kept coming to mind was inauthentic. But that wasn’t quite right, as it was certainly an authentic artistic expression. It took a minute, but it finally clicked into place.

Our absolute sweet spot for crafts is when artisans take traditional techniques and rework them through a modern lens. That’s not a lack of authenticity, it’s the precise method by which cultural traditions thrive and grow, rather than being preserved in the amber of custom. It’s the Mahler quote I used to describe the weavers we met in Teotitlán del Valle: “Tradition is not the worship of ashes, but the preservation of fire.”

Looked at through that lens, the White Temple wasn’t the Disneyfication of a Buddhist temple for the entertainment of tourists, but a towering artistic achievement, the reimagining of an entire Buddhist temple as a work of modern art. That flipped my perspective completely.

When I got home, the interwebs taught me more about the White Temple than MM was able to share, confirming what I’d come to on site. First, Wat Rong Khun is not as sui generis as it seems. A temple of that name existed on the site, but had fallen into disrepair. With no funds available to renovate it, a local Chiang Rai artist, Chalermchai Kositpipat, decided to take on the work himself, and has poured more than $1.2M USD into his Buddhist money pit.

The White Temple was opened to the public in 1997. Kositpipat continues to work on it, with work scheduled to be completed by 2070. Presumably after his death. Rather than being a touristy gloss on a Buddhist temple, Kositpipat seems to mean it. He intends for there to be a real working monastery and meditation center, the whole complex sincerely meant as an offering to Buddha.

These are my favorite travel experiences, when the struggle to make sense of what I see leads to a broader, deeper understanding. In this case, it allowed me to fully sink into the White Temple’s ridiculous excess, without any niggling concerns about its authenticity.

While the Ubosot isn’t quite so sanctified that it bars women from entry, it is sacred enough that photos are not permitted. Which is a shame, because the interior makes the outside look sedate. Rather than the traditional Buddhist murals focused on karma and rebirth, Kositpipat has let himself go apeshit. It’s his money, after all.

Images from pop culture and recent history serve Kositpipat’s perspective about the perniciousness of overconsumption and Western cultural influences. This manifests as images that range from Michael Jackson to the World Trade Centers, from Angry Birds to mushroom clouds. But don’t be sad that I couldn’t take pictures. I’m happy to scrape the web for these photos from travelphotoreport.com. Not sure why they were permitted to take photos and I wasn’t (am I not a journalist?), but these exist and that’s a good thing.

The backside of the Ubosot is just as deliriously overwrought as the front.

The rest of the grounds may fail to live up to the insanely high standards of the primary temple, but there’s still another 44 years of work to be done. I believe in the vision. Which is not to say that there wasn’t plenty more weird on offer.

This looked like a sculpture, but on closer inspection it was a Buddhist Donation Station. For 30฿ you get a metallic lucky bodhi leaf that you inscribe with a wish and hang on the tree.

And fish feeding. I’m a sucker for feeding fish, I confirm. If you ever want to take advantage of me, take me to a koi pond and hand me fish pellets. I’ll be incapable of executive function and will sign whatever you put in front of me.

Sorry there are no 3d glasses for this.

And… There was merch.

“We few, we happy few, we band of brothers…”

Wat Rong Suea Ten – The Blue Temple

The Blue Temple is the White Temple writ small. Built by one of Kositpipat’s students, it opened to the public in 2016, and was likewise built on the site of a derelict temple. Unlike the White Temple, it’s not a Buddhist Winchester Mystery House. It’s more modest in scale, if just as outrageous in conception (OK, slightly less outrageous in conception), and is actually completed.

Thankfully, pictures were permitted inside the temple.

As spectacular as the entrance was, walking around the main temple offered up even more extravagant follies.

As elaborate as the design is, the site is basically the main temple and some modest, if ornately decorated, grounds.

And here we have the quintessence of the Thai temple experience: Monk’s bowls for a donation, and the source of that donation. No problem if you’re tapped out, step right up.

The reunion tour…

Wat Huay Pla Kang – The Red Temple

Our last stop in Chiang Rai was the Red Temple, another contemporary structure. It opened as a monastery in 2001 and was certified as a temple in 2009 by the National Buddhism Office. Which I did not make up. The National Buddhism Office is a real thing that exists.

The red temple of the Red Temple is actually a nine-tiered Chinese-style pagoda. But that’s OK. Buddhists are chill about that stuff, so it’s ok to let it go.

There was also a swell white stucco ordination hall.

But the payoff here isn’t the Red Temple at all. It’s the 80 meter tall statue of Guan Yin, the largest Guan Yin in all of Thailand. She sits on top of a hill and towers over the rest of the compound. And she is not a Buddha, a common misconception. She is the Goddess of Mercy in Chinese Buddhism, befitting the general Chinese flavor of the construction at this site.

It is very hard to judge scale, so let me help. You’ll notice that Guan Yin has two eye slits and a third eye in her forehead. Those are windows accessible from an observation deck. You take an elevator to get there, which lets you out on the 25th floor. That structure is over 250 feet tall.

You’ll be shocked to learn that the interior is overdecorated.

And there you have it. I had a wonderful tour. I’m using the same tour operator to visit the national park near Chiang Mai, Doi Inthanon, and I am gutted that MM won’t be the guide for that tour. I would follow her anywhere, I confirm.

The official story is that a monk named Sumanathera had a dream that led him to a location where he found a bone. Given that said bone exhibited magical powers (it glowed, it could vanish, it could move…) it was naturally deemed to be the shoulder bone of none other than Buddha himself.

A local king heard of it and demanded the monk bring it to him. On inspection, the magical bone played possum, and the king, seeing nothing but a random bone, passed. Another, presumably better king got a look, and the bone did its thing. Which thing involved breaking into two pieces. The king enshrined one in Wat Suan Dok, and placed the other, larger chunk of Buddha on the back of his prized white elephant which he set loose in the jungle.

The elephant wandered about, climbed Doi Suthep mountain, then called, appropriately, Doi Aoy Chang (Sugar Elephant Mountain). He looked around, trumpeted three times, and keeled over dead. Thus selecting Doi Suthep as the location to build the temple and the shrine to hold the Holy Shoulder Bone.

Still with me? Good. I knew you could do it. I believe in you.

Before we actually made it to Wat Phra That Doi Suthep, commonly referred to as simply Wat Doi Suthep (Phra That literally means Buddha relic), we had a stop for a pre-prayer. This was a roadside shrine to a famous monk who died in 1939. I offered a lotus flower whose petals I had folded myself into the appropriately respectful shape, a cluster of marigolds, incense, a candle, and a piece of gold leaf that I applied to the monk’s statue. It was quite the kit. Once our monk had been properly propitiated we were safe to move on to the temple itself.

I realize that I’ve failed to introduce our dramatis personae. My guide was Maggie and my driver was Mr. K. Thai names are typically ponderous aggregations, not unlike German portmanteaux, so everyone has chosen Anglicized nicknames. Maggie’s full name on WhatsApp is Margaret Maggie Rose. Sure it is. It’s not liked I asked to see her ID.

But the most salient feature of this tour, which I’d booked on GetYourGuide just the previous evening, is that Maggie and Mr. K were the only personae. I was the sole member of their group tour, and had them all to myself. Which was excellent, as the pacing and focus were 100% to my preference. It was, in all practical senses, a private tour.

The juicy temple bits are aloft, and there are two ways to get to the top of the mountain. A stairway of 309 steps, boasting the longest Naga balustrade in Thailand, or a funicular for an extra 50฿. Happy to walk down 309 steps, but it was the funicular to go up. Maggie was relieved.

Until about 30 years ago, the alternative to the 309 steps was a basket system that involved pulleys and ropes. The funicular was built after that arrangement failed, leading to multiple deaths. If you do make the ascent by steps, you’re rewarded with a statue of the famous white elephant. I saw him at the top of the stairs on the way down, but he’s your greeter if you’re coming up.

While Wat Soi Duthep has all of the expected accoutrements of a Buddhist temple, the highlight, and the reason it’s so famous and revered, is the massive stupa holding the Buddha Bone . It’s the OG stupa, dating all the way back to the construction of 1383, with a fresh coat of gold to keep it looking sharp.

The plaza surrounding the Golden Stupa (which sounds like a prize from a Buddhist Willy Wonka) is just as gilt and spectacular as the stupa itself, home as it is to so very many golden Buddhas. Maggie explained that the aspirationally holy are supposed to make three counterclockwise trips around the plaza, circling the stupa. After a single circuit my eyes were swirly, so we deemed it holy enough.

The plaza with the Golden Stupa was hardly the last word in Wat Doi Suthep’s splendors. This was probably the finest Thai temple I visited, and well worth the trip. Exemplary.

The back end of the day’s tour was a visit to San Kamphaeng, a town known for its high-end craft factories. You can read about that part of the tour here. But before we got there, we stopped for lunch at a restaurant with delightful grounds.

All About Me!

When I was consulting, an Indian colleague and I had a gig that lasted almost two years. So long that it was cheaper to pay for my hotel room by the month than four days every week around weekends at home. It was great. I had the hotel remove furniture I didn’t need. I went to Ikea to decorate. I set up a more robust liquor cabinet than could possibly be arranged for multiple short-term stays. I had my dry cleaning and laundry done there, so all I traveled with was a briefcase and my laptop.

But this idyllic arrangement had one notable downside. The hotel employed a greeter, a woman who patrolled the lobby in order to be helpful to guests. Because we were long-term regulars she knew us. And boy, did we know her. We knew the names and ages of her children, all their salient illnesses and achievements, her political beliefs, and what neighborhood she lived in. It got to the point that we dreaded crossing the lobby.

When we returned to the hotel from work we’d peer around the corner to see if she was occupied so we could cross to the elevator without getting buttonholed. One day we were scoping the lobby and saw her deep in conversation with a fresh victim. My colleague turned to me and said, “It is safe to walk near the tiger if it is already feeding.” So very true.

The thing about most tourists is that they love getting pictures of themselves at whatever monument or landmark they’re visiting. Proof, I suppose. And the thing about tour guides is they know this, so they’re constantly taking pictures of people with their phones. Often, if the spot is Gram-friendly, they’ll line up for their pictures. It’s easy to dance past without getting snared. The tiger is feeding.

In this circumstance, though, on what had become a solo tour, I was all there was for the tiger to feed on. There was no getting around it. Pictures would be taken. And so I offer you, who have so often scolded us for not taking pictures of ourselves, an entire gallery of Me. Under the general rubric of Be careful what you wish for. Especially considering that these are the highlights of almost 100 pictures she took. This is the cream. Sad.

Captain All-Thumbs

I’m Marc-Fucking-Bolan, y’all!

Hey, hey, it’s a monk!

Well, I love that holy water. [Oh Boston, you’re my home.]

My Life In The Ghost Of Bush

As some of you know, and most of you probably don’t, I was, briefly, a pornographer. I’d started a graphic design firm with DC Comics’ Director of Design after leaving DC, but after multiple years it clearly wasn’t going to turn the corner so I moved on. To… nothing? I didn’t really have a post-Brainstorm plan, except that I needed a job.

Back in them days, we found jobs through newspapers, and the Times classifieds offered up an editorial position. I’d been an editor. I could do that. I called and set up an appointment. The ad had mentioned Adult, but I didn’t honestly have a clear conception of what that meant. Editing the next Fanny Hill?

Not quite. It meant picking up the editorial reins at Hawk, the title in High Society‘s stable devoted to the dewiest of legally photographable models. Which was funny, because we had a weekly editorial meeting where the editors of all the different magazines got together to share submissions they’d received from photographers to determine which of the mags, if any, was a fitting home.

We’d pass around one set of photos at a time, and inevitably just as I said, “She’s kinda hot,” someone else chimed in with, “Too old.” The joke was that they should start an over-40 magazine for me, and how sad that I’d been stuck with Hawk.

But Hawk it was, and I’d picked up an issue that was only partially completed when I started, so I had to finish it up. I maintained the previous editor’s nom du porn, as I quickly intuited how much our readers valued continuity. Henceforth, I was professionally known as Alphonse Romano.

I lasted not quite three months, and thus had one issue that had been completely produced under my version of Alphonse. I was very proud of that issue. For those curious, which is asymptotically approaching none of you, my job consisted of picking photo sets, choosing the pictures that we’d use for publication, and writing the copy that went alongside those photos.

The copywriting was my specialty. I couldn’t manufacture erotic prose to save my life, but I was the king of tortured metaphor. Another magazine’s editor came to me once desperate for help. He was on deadline to close his book for press and he had nothing to publish in the Letters to the Editor section. He said he needed one on Topic A, one on Topic B, and another that he didn’t care about. He specified word count and begged me for help.

About fifteen minutes later I gave him three letters. He looked them over with a puzzled expression. “These are all good. I can use all of them. Did you just write these now?” “Is it supposed to take longer?” And that was that. I was unofficial ghostwriter for every magazine in the stable.

I know some of you will be shocked, shocked, to learn that the letters to the editor weren’t from actual readers. I want to assure you that Hawk had higher editorial standards than that. For my one and only issue I had three letters from actual readers, more or less copyedited, as circumstance dictated.

Was I concerned that 100% of Hawk‘s letters to the editor came in envelopes that featured stamps on the outside reading, “The Warden has reviewed the contents of this letter and approved it for release”? Maybe a little, but at least it gave me a clear picture of our market. It did make me wonder, given what I received, what didn’t make the Warden’s cut.

I proudly took the letters to the publisher, who, without reading them, pointed to the longest one and said, “Too long. Cut it in half.” Which I did, of course, albeit grudgingly. But I now had to manufacture a fourth letter from scratch to fill the void, as the three letters I’d chosen were the only ones I’d received that could be massaged into publishable form. It became a parlor game at our house. When we had new friends over I’d hand them my issue of Hawk and ask them to guess which of the letters I’d written. We never had prizes for correct answers, which seems wrong in retrospect.

The copywriting became a push-your-luck game for me. I wanted to find the line they wouldn’t cross, for sport, so I kept pushing the boundaries, writing more and more outlandish nonsense, praying for something to be rejected. Just so I’d know. As it happened, I only ever got one line of copy sent back. There was a feature in Hawk that I, of course, maintained. It was a double-page spread of a brownstone’s windows, alluringly titled Hawk’s Rear Window.

I took promotional stills from porn videos that had been sent to us and dropped them into the window frames, like we were peeking into the windows and watching people have sex. Good times. Nothing mixes better than poor taste and copyright infringement. We rationalized that we were promoting their films, even though there were never credits, and that the photos had been sent to us and we were using them. Wasn’t that the point? No one ever complained, so I guess that was the point.

But the feature wasn’t complete without captions. Funny captions, according to this Alphonse. And that’s what finally got sent back. I used a photo of seven girls kneeling in a row with their butts to the camera. The caption? “This episode of Sesame Street is brought to you by the number Seven.” Curiously, they didn’t care about the highjacking of someone else’s corporate IP for salacious purposes. I had made reference to a children’s show, and any allusion to children, no matter how vague or abstract, was off limits. Which appeared to be their only line. Nothing else ever got sent back, so, question answered.

My reason for this lengthy digression, and if you’ve made it this far you must be boiling with curiosity, is that I can’t write photo captions for the blog slideshows without thinking of Hawk’s Rear Window. It transports me back to those halcyon days spent with a light box and a loupe.

As a coda, as if necessary, when I finally got a real job Dorothy and I discussed the best I’m-outta-here message. I favored “I have to leave while I can still masturbate,” but calmer heads prevailed. “I know my son is only two, but all I can think about is career day at grade school.” Message delivered, message accepted, next chapter commenced.

Defying any sense of narrative structure, as my career did, that next chapter was as the Technology & Operations Director at a Manhattan advertising agency. Because why the hell not.

Spoiler: it ended weird.

Not unlike this blog post.

P.S. I apologize that this section is nothing but text. But trust me. You don’t want pictures from Hawk.

Fine, you pervert. Here’s the cover of the issue that’s mine, all mine. Well, technically it’s Alphonse’s. You are hereby warned.

I think it’s mostly ③ with a side order of ②, but I must soldier on, even with my paltry resources.

One of the biggest challenges is that quality and price don’t seem to be on a spectrum here. They’re a binary, with cheap tourist crap at one end, heirloom artisanal hoohah on the other, and precious little in between. On the one hand, that meant I wouldn’t be coming back with crappy merch, and on the other it meant I’d have to make sure I didn’t overspend for a signature piece of questionable (i.e. my) taste. As Dorothy will attest, threading needles is not my specialty.

There were definitely winners in the Thai handicrafts mix, but plenty of losers, too.

Chatuchak Weekend Market

One of my first stops in Bangkok was the Chatuchak Weekend Market, which purported to be the major crafts and textile market. As you can see, it’s a beast.

Also, less than intuitive to navigate. I had read that the textiles were to be found in Stall 25. I found Stall 24 and Stall 26, but no 25. I asked a security guard to help, and he took me to 25, which I couldn’t find by myself because they were in the following order: 24/26/25… Of course. Silly me.

Also, very little fabric in Stall 25, or elsewhere. I took what I believed were two full, exhausting turns around the market and never saw any concentration of textile shops. The odd one, randomly dropped, but no sector. And most of what was there fell on the Cheap Tourist Merch end of the spectrum.

Even merch can be, comparatively, quality, and Chatuchak definitely offered quality merch.

One shop had every flavor of Ganesha imaginable. Merch, for sure, but I honestly wanted every one. I’m easily beguiled. On the other hand, these are objectively adorable.

And there was even a little bit of fabric.

Warorot Market

Chiang Mai also has a primary textile market, or so the legend goes, the Warorot. Turns out that’s trueish. Warorot is a large market with a lot of crafts and manufactured goods, as well as a produce market, and a few textile shops. The real textile shops are on the streets surrounding the market. The closest I could come to identifying them was the vague advice to “Walk around outside the market. You’ll find them.” Which I did, but not until my second visit.

These are not quality goods, however. These shops carry commercially produced bolt goods, not artisanal wovens. No Thai silk, and none of the mudmee, the Thai ikat, produced in the north, which is what I was really hunting for. I’d seen a little mudmee in Bangkok, but Chiang Mai felt like it should be the source. Yes, of course, but not at Warorot, as I’d been led to believe.

There were quite a few shops in the streets around Warorot featuring Hill Tribe-styled clothing. There are a number of ethnic hill tribes in the north of Thailand: Hmong, Karen, Lisu, and Akha.

Starting in the 1980s, the brightly colored embroidered fabrics made by the Hill Tribes caught on as fashion, and demand, as it does, began to outstrip supply. The traditional Hill Tribe embroidery is time consuming to make, and that simply won’t do when the market demands volume.

You’ll be shocked to hear that it’s very difficult to find authentic Hill Tribe textiles or clothes today. What’s on the market now are manufactured goods made in the Hill Tribe style, including, even, printed knockoffs of embroidered patterns. That’s almost exclusively what’s to be found around Warorot.

Chinatown’s Sampeng Lane

Bangkok’s Chinatown was another place that was supposed to feature fabric, but I never really found it. It’s a dense warren of narrow lanes that’s pretty confusing to navigate. I did see a few fabric shops, but they were selling cheap cottons and rayons, not quality goods. Dense and interesting, but the hunt continues.

Song Wat Road

Hard by Chinatown, right by the river, Song Wat Road is an up and coming neighborhood with some pioneer boutiques opening up. In a couple of years I’m sure it will be much less commercial, much more gentrified.

This was probably the closest I came to the missing middle part of the spectrum: affordable craft goods made by real people, not stamped out of factories.

Pak Khlong Talat Flower Market

You may certainly argue that a flower market hardly qualifies as crafts. You may also get your own blog and taxonomize the world however you like. But this is my blog, buster, and I say that Bangkok’s Pak Khlong Talat Flower Market is displaying crafts.

One of the most notable things about this market is that it smelled good to me. That may not sound like much to you, but I pretty much lost my sense of smell some years back. I went to an ENT recently, whose qualified medical response was, “Huh.” I hope he’s still paying off his student loans.

My nose isn’t completely dead, just mostly. If you dropped me off blindfolded in a wet market, and please don’t, I’d know. I might even be able to tell if I’d been left in livestock or fish. But an odor has to be pretty strong to register, so the flower market was a pleasant surprise.

Shocking no one, the area around the flower market was also given over to flowers.

Jing Jai Market

Another Bangkok market that offered craft goods in the rare middle of the price/quality spectrum. Jing Jai sprawled across a large, non-linear space, so it was hard to make sure you’d seen it all. It even had its own dedicated farmer’s market.

Srinagarindra Train Night Market

Bangkok’s most massive night market. This one boasts over 2,000 vendors and an unknown amount of acreage. It big. It also has a weird specialty: antique furniture and vintage clothes. Crafts per se, not so much. But excellent food and a very entertaining evening. Also a ton of nail salons and tattoo parlors had stalls, but not a single massage spa. If there’s a Guinness record for Fewest Massage Spas Per Square Mile in Thailand, Srinagarindra is the obvious record holder.

It was also a profoundly local experience. It took the fingers of both hands to count the other farangs I saw, but that’s all it took.

ICONSIAM

ICONSIAM is one of Bangkok’s newest megamall experiences, having opened in 2020. Sitting directly on the Chao Phraya river (I arrived by ferry from the other side), ICONSIAM boasts >5.5M sqft of retail space, a 3000 seat auditorium, two residential towers (52 & 70 stories) with 446 units, a >110,000 sqft waterfront park. And a Hil-ton ♫in a pear tree♬.

It has a fuller complement of luxury brands than even the other Bangkok malls: Prada, Armani, Hermés, Cartier, Louis Vuitton, Dior, Tiffany, Gucci, Balenciaga… None of which are the reasons I went. It also has a couple of floors devoted to ICONCRAFT, showcasing handmade goods from local artisans. That was the draw.

At the end of the day, it was long on spectacle and short on crafts. They had a few pretty things, but the selection seemed much ado about not much.

Nothing says luxury like calling out the Singapore airport.

Chamchaa Market

How many ways is it possible to fuck up a simple shopping excursion? I am so glad you asked that question. Spoiler: all of them. You can fuck up a simple shopping excursion all of the ways.

Dorothy had found a site aggregating dozens of specialty craft makers in Chiang Mai. One of them had their shop in Chamchaa Market, about 25 minutes from my apartment by Grab, so I thought that would be a worthwhile excursion. I pulled them up on Google Maps, and then opened Grab to see how much it would cost to get there. All the deets seemed perfectly reasonable, and I added Chamchaa to my To Do list.

Next thing I hear is my phone chirping. It’s the Grab app telling me that my driver is on their way. I must have inadvertently hit the Book button when I set my phone down. And the driver wasn’t the typical 8-10 Grab minutes away. They were two minutes away.

I apologize for the image, but it’s important to note that I spend almost all of my time in the apartment in my panties. I don’t like to run the A/C, so I keep a table fan turned on me and bask in the comparative coolth. That meant that when the app chimed, I had two minutes to throw on clothes, grab my bag, and make it down by elevator from the ninth floor.

Which I did, with only a modest helping of agita. First hurdle cleared. Then my driver pulls up and tells me that Chamchaa is outside of Grab’s Chiang Mai zone, so while she can take me there, I won’t be able to get a Grab back, and she won’t be able to pick up a fare to return to town. I ask if she’d wait for me while I shopped and take me back, for which I’d pay her cash outside of Grab. We agreed on a price and took off. Second hurdle cleared.

When we arrived, it was to a suspiciously deserted market.

Further inspection revealed this:

It was a fucking weekend market. Which I’d arrived at on a Monday. Final hurdle: tripped over and faceplanted. Whaddaya gonna do? The whole escapade was so ridiculous, the only appropriate response was to laugh at the absurdity.

Chiang Mai Old City Elephants

My mother, Jackie, collected elephant figurines. She had quite an impressive collection. I asked her once what that was all about, and she told me that someone had given her an elephant once as a gift, and then someone else had come over and seen the elephant and brought her another, and it just kept snowballing and that if I ever brought her an elephant figurine as a gift she’d be delighted to kill me.

You can imagine how hard it was not to bring her elephants after learning that, but I was a good son and controlled my urges. Still, I’m grateful she died before I visited Thailand, because I’d have broken down and brought her multiple elephant figurines. They’re hard to escape here, and they made me think very fondly of the crusty old broad.

Nimman

The Nimman district, where I’m staying in Chiang Mai, is full of shops that fall squarely in the otherwise empty middle of the price/quality binary.

Now we come to the winners. Textiles, obviously, clothes, no surprise, but also some unexpected ceramics and lacquerware.

Benjarong Porcelain Village

First up, Benjarong. The word is a mashup of Balinese and Sanskrit that means “five colors,” but modern Benjarong can be anywhere from three to eight colors, or more.

Benjarong dates back to Ming Dynasty China, circa 13th century, and was exclusive, in the beginning, to the royal court. It migrated to Thailand about 600 years ago when a Chinese princess married into Siamese royalty. The technique is notable because it gets kiln-fired after every color, an incredibly labor intensive approach that pops the colors and gives the surface depth. It’s a rich, sumptuous effect. And if you sense more than a whiff of chinoiserie in the designs, that’s its geographic origins leaking through.

The Benjarong Porcelain Village, Don Kai Dee, is about 1:15 west of Bangkok by car. Except that there’s no way for tourists to get there, which is baffling. It’s not on any tours, and while you can take public transit part of the way, you’re finding a tuktuk for the last bit, making it about 3 hours each way. You could rent a car, but how many tourists are doing either of those things? Way too much friction.

There are shops in Bangkok that have some Benjarong, but there’s a whole fucking village producing it well within tour range. Why isn’t it promoted and easy to get to? The place was deserted while I was there. There were three other people: a farang with a Thai wife and her mother. They’d driven there in their car. I had to suborn a Grab driver to work off app in order to get there. It’s just crazy. This is serious Thai cultural heritage, and it’s treated like a state secret.

But I am brave and intrepid, so I got to go. And you get to ride along.

Benjarong comes in three design patterns: geometric/floral, figurative, and portraiture. I’ll sorta apologize for how many pictures there are of this stuff, but the breadth of the designs was wild. Maybe it was confirmation bias because my rent-a-driver cost $65, but I thought this stuff was the bomb.

I was most attracted to the florals and geometrics. The figurative stuff, although undeniably awesome, had too strong a chinoiserie flavor for my taste.

There were even a handful of practical items. Not that bowls aren’t practical.

I saw exactly two paintings done in Benjarong, and man was I tempted. The only thing holding me back was my uncertainty about how to manage transit home without it getting broken. I would 100% have bought one if I could have imagined that solution.

What actually made it home? It was so hard to choose. I felt Dorothy’s absence keenly. I left with a footed dish, a covered bowl, and *shhh* earrings. Don’t tell her, OK?

San Kamphaeng

The quaint hamlet of San Kamphaeng sits about 25km and 40 minutes west of Chiang Mai. It is known specifically for its cluster of high-end craft shops. And I do mean high-end. These shops epitomized the expensive end of the Thai craft binary. In fact, only a few of them had anything affordable at all. Absolutely beautiful work, but most of it pitched to trust fund babies. Fine. Bring on the hunt.

San Kamphaeng was the tail on a day trip to Wat Doi Suthep, but right outside the temple, even before we left, there was a high-end jade outlet, the Orchid Jade Factory.

In San Kamphaeng itself we stopped at a gemstone jeweler, a lacquerware maker, a silk weaver, and a celadon ceramics shop. All of which were outlandishly expensive. But I was able to find a pretty piece of affordable lacquerware and a nice celadon bowl. I am brave, intrepid hunter.

This is the hall of ridiculous gemstones. I asked about a pair of earrings with the smallest possible jadeite stones I saw: $460.

Next up, the lacquerware. During the demonstration she kept taking a lighter to the finished lacquerware, to prove… that you could take a lighter to the finished lacquerware? Sadly, they wouldn’t let me take pictures in the shop.

My purchase.

Then we went to a Thai silk maker. They raised their own silkworms and fed them mulberry leaves, which is where the classic Thai golden silk comes from. I’d never actually seen the silk thread being extracted from the cocoons, so that was pretty cool.

The final stop in San Kamphaeng was Baan Celadon, another fully vertical enterprise.

Thankfully, no restrictions on photography in the shop.

Clothing

I think I’ve been comfortable buying clothing for myself because I haven’t had to triangulate with Dorothy’s exceptional taste. I kept looking at stuff saying, “Well, I think that’s swell, but what would someone with taste and discretion be attracted to?” That’s a sucker’s game, but I didn’t have to play it shopping for my own clothes. Dorothy already knows I’m immune to the eyebrow, and she’s resigned to being seen in public with me no matter what I’m wearing. Bless her soul.

The Terminal 21 mall, just a few minutes walk from my Bangkok condo, was a treasure box. Each floor was themed to a location, and for some random reason the London floor was all independent menswear shops. It was easy for me stop in after dinner and find another shop I’d somehow missed on previous visits. Then it wasn’t, which was OK, because Chiang Mai.

Here’s a few things I picked up on the Chiang Mai portion of the itinerary.

Textiles

Not a one of you will be surprised that the big win in Thai crafts is textiles. Every country we’ve visited in Southeast Asia has specialized in some kind of hyperlocal weaving technique that, on close inspection, boggles the mind, and Thailand is no exception.

I’d intended to cover textiles in this post, but I think this has gone on long enough. You can find the textiles post here. After you’ve had a chance to recover from this post.

Thailand is blessed, in the south, with beautiful beaches and islands. Chiang Mai, in the landlocked North, not so much. Thus, we have the Grand Canyon Water Park, an abandoned limestone quarry about 30 km southwest of Chiang Mai. There were several pickup windows, but I opted for the 9:30 shuttle, which picked up at my condo, in order to beat the worst of the afternoon heat.

There were two British gals in the van, and when we arrived we discovered that we were the only attendees. The place was empty, which was weird. Then they held back, to see if it picked up, I assume, leaving me to navigate the place all by myself. Which was weird.

I’d looked at pictures before going, so I realized that most of it was like a floating bouncy castle crossed with American Gladiator. Not my jam, but I figured I could bat at that a little bit and then relax in whatever they had set aside for lolling. Except there wasn’t anything set aside for lolling. It was all obstacle course.

What’s a 69 year-old man to do except press on as if he couldn’t imagine how he’d feel the day after? I mean, what were my options? Well, the water was actually quite a bit warmer than it looked, and life jackets were a requirement, so one of my options could easily have been just relaxing and bobbing in the water. Of which I did some. But mostly I climbed and clambered and crawled and fell into the water and pulled myself back up. With, as it happens, no regard at all for how I’d feel the day after. Spoiler: really, really sore. And for more than just the day after.

But it was curiously fun, and made much more sense as the morning wore on and more people showed up. It’s a place that operates best when full. Which also gave me ample opportunity to take pictures of activities I had no interest in participating in myself. Which was quite a few of them.

Several items were verboten in the water: glasses, hats, phones. You were going to tumble into the water, so that made sense. But I had a dry pouch for my phone and found a few vantage points that seemed stable enough to keep me from falling in while holding my unsheathed phone.

One challenge was the giant sprinkler heads which shot water all over the park. While they obviously used quarry water, aerosolizing it and spraying it made it noticeably colder than the lake water. I tried to find a dry spot where the streams from multiple sprinklers didn’t intersect, but no such luck. Which meant that while I was braced to keep from falling off a floating, inflated platform while I took pictures and video, I often forgot that I was never more than a few moments away from being completely doused in cold water, phone and all.

Which is my way of apologizing in advance for the shakier-than-usual camera work. I was standing on something that was moving underneath me, and which could jump violently if some mook came running down the same section I was on.

While there was plenty of solo climbing and scrambling, there were tons of group activities, many of which fostered displays of performative masculinity that, interestingly, weren’t confined to men. There were squads of womenfolk willing to push the boundaries of common sense if it meant they could show off. It was a very egalitarian demonstration of stupidity. The dream is alive.

There was a floating soccer pitch.

Here it is with pratfalls. Always an improvement.

There was also a floating badminton/volleyball court.

There were slides, one of which released close enough to the water that even I was willing to try it.

The others? Nope. Check that close one, which has a wicked scoop at the end, to help get that last little bit of stomach churning loft.

Here it is in nausea-inducing action.

A closer look? Sure.

There was quite a bit of equipment available.

There was also whatever this is:

I love everyone’s confidence in this clip that they are the one who’ll maintain their balance.

But the absolute acme, the pinnacle, was the Pillow Bounce. It was like a trust fall for profoundly untrustworthy people. I have multiple clips, because I was transfixed. Here’s the lifeguard showing how its done.

Here’s civilians, not entirely in sync.

You don’t have to watch all of these. Although this one’s pretty good.

I saved the best for last. I apologize for losing the end of that spectacular finish, but someone came running down the inflatable lane and I was lucky to not go completely ass over teacups. Still, plenty awesome.

There was even a performance, right before I left. It answered this question: Why is there someone down there wearing a lamé dragon costume?

I should have known. A dragon in the first act…

Those little white skimmers the performers were riding were available for patrons to try before the show. No one got farther than about two leg pumps before slow motion sinking. Is it schadenfreude if it’s funny?

I love that the superhero didn’t make it to the end of the zip line and had to be rescued. By a blue-suited monkey? My admission came with a zip line ticket, which I gifted to the British gals so one of them could go twice. I could close my eyes and visualize the firehose of vomit that I’d rain down like one of the sprinkler heads if I were foolish enough to zip line.

And finally, no water park would, apparently, be complete without cheesy, inexplicable décor.

And thus I drag my weary body back up to meet the van that will return me to my condo. Where, once I’ve relaxed, I’ll realize that I’m not weary so much as very, very sore. Every time I fell into the water I had to haul myself back up hand over hand on the grips. I am still sore, several days later, in places I didn’t know could hurt.

Hopefully, this thing that’s keeping me young won’t kill me.

There isn’t actually a ton of difference between inside the Old City and outside. There are old buildings and new buildings on both sides of the moat. The biggest distinction is that the Old City holds Chiang Mai’s densest concentration of temples, all within a single day’s walking tour. I took more than one day. Because hot.

But that doesn’t mean there aren’t excellent buildings in the Old City.

Wat Lok Moli

I found Wat Lok Moli just a couple of days into my stay. It’s right across the street from the moat, so it’s not technically in the Old City. It appeared to have some serious years under its belt, warranting crossing the street. That’s a commitment here.

It turns out I wasn’t wrong. No one knows its actual construction date, but it’s mentioned in official documents as early as 1367, making it one of Chiang Mai’s oldest temples. They’ve also left the historical brick intact, as opposed to the common practice here of applying a fresh coat of stucco. Which I get, but which also makes brand new construction and historical sites indistinguishable from one another.

But that’s not what truly makes Wat Lok Moli special. It’s the golden rooster you fill with holy water, haul up to the Buddha by pulley, and tip over to water the plant at Buddha’s feet with said holy water. But I’m sure that was going to be your guess.

Wat Dab Pai

This wasn’t even on the walking tour itinerary I found of the Old City. Too minor to warrant mention. Which I kind of get, but still. That’s a pretty steep curve they’re grading on.

Wat Chiang Man

The Temple Of The Fortified City is also considered minor, but is notable because of its age and history. Built shortly after Chiang Mai’s founding in 1296, it’s of roughly the same vintage as Wat Lok Moli. It’s old buildings are in shockingly good shape, a hallmark of Thailand’s temples.

But what it really has going on is the Sacred Elephant Encircled Stupa. Which entirely lives up to its billing.

Wat Phan Tao

You’ll be shocked to learn that Wat Phan Tao features a golden Buddha.

But what it really has that makes it special, to me, is the monk’s bowls. For 10฿ you got to pick up a cup of what I can only assume are toy coins, for depositing one-by-one into the monk’s bowls as an offering. The offering is obviously the 10฿, but there’s something soothing about walking around the monk’s bowls and dropping in one coin at a time. They may have been fake coins, but it felt like real mindfulness. Monks, amIright?

Wat Chedi Luang

The Temple of the Great Stupa is more than just a great stupa. It has all of the expected trappings, golden Buddhas and ornate architecture, but some unexpected ones, as well.

The first odd thing you see on entry is a No Girls Allowed clubhouse. It’s hard to piece the story together, but buried inside the temple is Chiang Mai’s City Pillar. Whatever that is. And as a sign helpfully points out, women aren’t allowed inside because they menstruate, and apparently men are creeped out by that and don’t like to be reminded? Even though women are permitted inside other temples?

To quote the sign: “Women are prohibited to enter because they menstruate. It is believed that it humiliates and ruins the sanctity of the city pillar. Besides, men who dress inappropriately are not allowed to walk in. It is believed that any disobeying of the rules will cause social instability.”

OK, that makes sense. It’s not the men who are creeped out by menstruation. It’s the city pillar, which can apparently sense ovaries from its underground crypt and translate its humiliation into aboveground riots. Got it.

Well, you’re in luck, because I went in and took pictures that I am now happy to share with my Friends with Ovaries (you know who you are). Hopefully, that doesn’t trigger the City Pillar from afar. If you read this and then discover that Chiang Mai has fallen to the hordes, you know which organ to blame.

We were promised a Great Stupa, and one was delivered, as advertised.

But Great as it was, the Great Stupa wasn’t Wat Chedi Luang’s highlight. To me, it was the main temple, which was basically a Dave & Buster’s for Buddhists.

That thin veneer of normalcy hid an interior chockablock with Buddhist enrichment stations, promising a shortcut to the divine for the price of just a few baht. Step right up!

Truthfully? That wasn’t the real highlight. That would be the Monk Chat, which I’d read about and was actually my primary reason for visiting Wat Chedi Luang. They have monk or monks sitting at tree-shaded tables all day, from about 9:00 – 6:00. They’re just sitting there waiting for a chat.

The ostensible reason is that it gives the monks an opportunity to practice their English, but it seems primarily a cultural exchange. Especially since our monk’s English scarcely needed any additional practice. He was good.

I sat with three Norwegian elementary school teachers-in-training, who were on a multi-week tour to prepare them to teach Nordic youngsters comparative religion. And, as promised, we chatted. We asked our monk how he spent his days and where he was headed post-monk training, and he asked about where we were from and what the ladies were learning on their junket. It was fabulous, and may be my favorite half hour in Thailand so far.

Wat Muen Tum

I stumbled on Wat Muen Tum, home to Thao Wessuwan, The God Of Fortune, on my way home from Wat Chedi Luang. Another minor site scarcely worth a mention in the guides.

The site was also distinguished by the crazy sculptures lining the outer wall.

King Mengrai Temple

This was the end of my first day’s tour, and was an appropriate bookend to the first temple I visited, Wat Dab Pai. Likewise, this was considered unremarkable and wasn’t on any of the walking tours I checked.

Wat Rajamontean

My second day’s temple tour: seven temples, eight miles, five hours. You’re so lucky I’m doing this for you. Seriously, you are not up to this. You should exercise more. And you’re definitely not drinking enough water.

Wat Rajamontean is known as The Dragon Temple. For, you know, dragons. It’s billed as the Old City temple with the greatest curb appeal, and that seems right.

Wat Khuan Khama

Wat Khuan Khama, for reasons that are unclear, is known as the Golden Horse Temple. It dates from 1492, and legend (or history, so hard to say) has it that the temple had been the garden for the royal horse groom. When his horse died the groom was sad, and donated his garden to be a temple in memoriam for his loyal steed.

Wat Hua Kuang

Also known as Wat Saen Mueang Ma Luang, Wat Hua Kuang’s trick is that it’s much larger than it appears. Its street face suggests a modest footprint, but it just keeps going back.

While there I heard a low hum and found the gong that had made the sound. It didn’t sound like a gong, though. It sounded like the sound the universe made while being born. This is actually from another temple and isn’t quite as resonant, but gets the idea across.

Wat Phra Sing

This is one of Chiang Mai’s big daddies, as evidenced by the 50฿ entrance fee, which only a few temples charge. Also known as the Temple of the Lion Buddha, Wat Phra Sing has much to offer. For one thing, it houses over 600 monks. It also sports a stone stupa from 1345 that is now completely encased in gold. Also, golden elephants! And a Hall of Lifelike Monks!!

Here’s an ancient stupa, lovingly berobed in gold like a Buddhist Jill Masterson.

Then there was the Hall of Lifelike Wax Monks.

There was also chanting in one of the temples. It was interesting because there were song books everywhere and civilians joining in on the chanting, which I’d thought was a monk-specific practice. I was also expecting something more Om-like than the actual chanting of words. Or lyrics, I suppose. But that’s the great thing about being ignorant. There’s so much to learn.

Wat Tung Yu

A smaller temple, but still with some choice bits.

Wat Phantao

Also known as the Monastery of a Thousand Kilns, Wat Phantao is another oldie, dating back to the 1300s. It gets its nickname from the fact that it was used as something of a factory, producing Buddha statues for other monasteries. I was hoping for something a shade more Dickensian workhouse, but there’s no trace of those kilns any longer.

Wat Sri Suphan

My final stop was farthest afield, and outside the Old City, about a ten-minute walk south of the moat. Wat Sri Suphan is situated in a neighborhood historically, and still, known for its silversmiths. As a result, the complex, including the Silver Pavilion, is all done up in silver metallic, made from aluminum, nickel, and a pinch of silver.

So much silver.

There was even a temple that wasn’t silver!

There was a Monk Chat here, as well, although I didn’t want to tarnish the memory of my earlier Monk Chat. The reason for all the monks is that just about every one of the temples I visited is a working monkery. I don’t know for a fact that they were all sleepaway; maybe some of them were monk day camps. But all of them provided monk training in exchange for monk labor.

Whew! That was, I think we can all agree, a lot of temples. Take your shoes off, put your feet up, and if you’re in Thailand, indulge yourself with a foot massage. You’ve earned it, soldier.

Although I still don’t think you’re hydrating properly.

My luck continues to hold on neighborhoods, as I’m once again in a great spot. I wanted to stay right in the Old City, but I also insisted on a pool. So, close to the Old City also works.

I’m on the edge of the Nimmanhaemin neighborhood, or Nimman for short. It’s the artsy, boutiquey part of town, so there’s plenty to see strolling of a sultry evening. Which is all of them. I have the best of both worlds.

It’s certainly nice to have access to culture and some of the big city amenities that weren’t available in Krabi. Of course, the trade is that there’s no ocean here. But there is a water feature! The perimeter of the Old City is delineated by a perfectly rectilinear moat, making it very easy to tell if you’re in the Old City’s one square mile or not.

The moat and fortifications date all the way back to 1296, so they truly mean Old City. Although I’m sure that name made no sense in 1296, when Chiang Mai was founded. “Don’t worry, someday…”

The Apartment

I’ve definitely noticed that Airbnbs seem less quaint since we’ve set up a home base in Chicago. It was one thing when we were unhomed, but now that we have a sanctuary I’m acutely aware of its absence. Our apartment is comfortable and delightful, and Chicago, on the last leg back, started to feel like home.

So my Airbnb is fine. I’ve just had to accept that Southeast Asian residences only have hot water in the shower. At least in this apartment there’s a faucet. My last couple of apartments have only had hot water out of the shower head, which is awkward. I’m pretty sure this is not an Airbnb trick for farangs, but how Southeast Asians live. I don’t let dishes sit and I’ve mastered the art of the cold water shave. We adapt.

Here’s another Southeast Asian oddity. What’s up with duvets instead of top sheets? Who fucking sleeps under a duvet in this heat? I’ve shopped for sheet sets in every country we’ve been to here and top sheets just don’t exist. I stooped to buying an empty duvet cover at the Ikea in Bangkok and pretending it’s a top sheet.

This would be easy to solve by cranking the AC up to ten, except for this notice left sitting on a bureau:

I reached out to the host to help me decode this cryptic message. 600 units per… what interval? Day, week, month? Month. OK, where can I monitor usage? Not possible. She has to come to the unit and read the meter after I’ve left and tell me if I’ve gone over. So, you want me to manage consumption of a resource without giving me any information as to how much of it I’m using? Well, as long as you don’t run the AC 24/7 you should be fine.

So I’m living like a monk, running the AC about ten minutes a day. Which should be fine? I’m certainly not going to run it while I sleep so I can warm up under their fucking duvet. That’s crazy.

Other than that, it’s well appointed and clean, with enough hangers (!) and a full complement of cookware and dishes. There’s plenty of cabinets and drawers, so I’m moved in nicely for my month in Chiang Mai. And there’s that pool…

The Hood

The area around my apartment is chock full. There’s shopping, dining, entertainment. I’m a fifteen minute walk from a mall with a hypermarché in the basement. It’s not like the Bangkok malls, which all seem to feature a host of small vendors doing interesting things. This mall, the Maya, is strictly chain stores, like American malls. But mighty convenient to have the hypermarché walking distance. It makes everything easy.

One lovely thing about the neighborhood is that the closest laundry service only charges 30฿/kg, which is about 94¢. Bangkok was 100฿/kg and even the hinterlands in Krabi was 50฿. It’s good to be king.

I’ve also been able to get back into my weekly massage protocol. My bout of food poisoning in Krabi left me unwilling to be operated like a bellows, the hallmark of traditional Thai massage, so I stepped away. Under the best of circumstances I struggle to avoid farting during a Thai massage, and those were hardly the best of circumstances.

Among other wonders, Chiang Mai offered my first massage by a ladyboy masseuse. She was unusually tall for a Thai woman, and was also in possession of unusually large hands and an unusually deep, gravelly voice. To top it off, she was the only one on staff at the spa wearing a mask, which conveniently hid her Adam’s apple.

All signs point to, but short of dispositive. The actual tell was hysterical, though. At one point she was manipulating my legs and told me to relax the muscle, that she didn’t want me to help. A little later this admonition was apparently necessary again, when she lightly slapped my thigh and said, “Don’t help! I don’t need your help.” No further questions, your honor.

As to whether the large, strong hands were a net benefit, I’d say yes in a regular massage and no for a Thai massage. Thai massage is like someone using you as a Yoga prop. “Hold still and I’ll put you in Downward Dog.” It’s about leverage more than pressure. In this case, I think she leaned on her strong hands too much, as there was more kneading and less stretching than I associate with Thai massage. What with me being an expert and all.

Night Markets

I think Chiang Mai might be Thai for Night Market. You can’t throw a lemur in this town without hitting a night market. Don’t ask how I know that.

For just one example, the Weekend Night Market butts right up against the Every-Day-Of-The-Week Night Market in an Ouroboros of trinkets and street food. Ubiquitous doesn’t begin to cover it.

And no visit to a new locale is complete without enjoying local packaging and design.

The problem with waterfalls is that their romance is undercut by their terrible cost: crisp mountain waters that deliver a cold shower more life-threatening than bracing. As much as I long to stand in the pool directly under the falls and let my soul be cleansed by the healing waters, ouch. I don’t think my soul has ever been properly cleansed while shivering. Thus, my dirty, dirty soul.

Would I be able to live the dream, letting the warm waterfall flow over me in a rhapsody of jungle bliss? Yeah, mostly.

But first, never let it be said that I am unwilling to humiliate myself for your entertainment. Because this tour was my second attempt at the hot springs waterfall, not my first.

One of the big questions many of you had as I embarked on solo travel was, “Is he smart enough to keep himself alive without his Jiminy Cricket?” We now have the answer to that question. Barely. Just barely.

The day before my scheduled tour I went swimming and had lunch at my usual beachside café. I’d been eating pretty native, but decided to treat myself to a comfort burger. I’d barely swallowed the first bite when I felt my stomach churn. “Well, that’s an odd coincidence,” I thought. “It can’t be the burger. That’s way too fast a response for food poisoning. Weird.”

So I finished the burger. Which ended precisely where you’d expect.

The next morning I’m waiting for the van in front of my hotel thinking, “Ooh, I don’t know.” Retching in the bushes was, thankfully, dispositive, and I called it off.

I rescheduled for a couple days later, figuring that should give me enough time to recover, and also because it was the last practical opportunity for me to take a day trip before I left Krabi for Chiang Mai. Once again, I’m waiting for the van downstairs, thinking, “Maybe I shouldn’t.” Which is confusing, because “Maybe I shouldn’t” occurs to me so rarely.

Maybe I shouldn’t, but I did. And it was fine. A little fraught, but fine. Still, you don’t miss your water ’til your well runs dry. I’m certain I’m safer with Jiminy along.

Namtok Ron

Namtok Ron starts with a lovely jungle walk before you reach the hot springs.

There are three distinct areas: the hot spring falls themselves and then two spa pools. The spa pools are filled from the same source, they’re just constructed pools instead of the natural falls.

Each of the three areas is also a completely different temperature. I’m not entirely sure how that works, but the waterfall pool is just a degree below body temperature, and the two spa pools are 104° and 113° (!) respectively. Or simmer, parboil, and rolling boil.

I started with the mildest, the waterfall pool, and discovered that it wasn’t quite what the word “waterfall” evoked. It was more spillway than falls, but it was delightful to cozy up in a stone nook and let the warm waters rush over and around me. Even though it wasn’t what I’d imagined, my inner curmudgeon was wet, warm, and pacified.

My intention had been to do them in ascending intensity, but I got the two spa pools mixed up and went in the 113° first. I was terrified of the last one, thinking that it was going to be even hotter, so I was relieved to find out that it was actually the middle pool.

This was not our first hot springs/hot air adventure, having dipped in Cleopatra’s Pool in Pammukale in Turkey. In that case the air temperature was a near-death 107°, as opposed to Krabi’s ~ 90°. Still, all three pools performed the neat trick of making the air seem cool on exit.

Emerald Pool

Like Namtok Ron, the Emerald Pool is part of the Khao Nor Chu Chi national park, so it was a short drive to our next stop. It started with a buffet lunch of flavorless hot-table food, for which I was profoundly grateful. The last thing I wanted was activity down there.

There were two additional pools besides Emerald: Crystal Pool and Blue Pool. Emerald was the only one of the three that was swimmable, and it was already a full kilometer walk from the entrance. I decided that the additional photo ops weren’t worth the risk. I bobbed in the Emerald Pool, held pretty still, and stayed close to a toilet.

The bobbing was excellent. Emerald Pool was only cool compared to our previous stop. The water temperature was like the beach at Ao Nang, where you could just walk in without that moment when you’re waist deep and you hold your breath and dunk yourself to get it over with quickly. I stayed in for pretty much the full hour we had there, without regrets. Warm water an impossible green. What’s to regret?

Wat Tham Suea

Our last stop was Wat Tham Suea, a temple complex that includes the temple and grounds, a Buddha on the Hill, and Tiger Cave. This didn’t sound as bad as the concentration camp that was added to the Bangkok waterfall tour as enrichment, but it also seemed a little off the mark. Like that Bangkok tour, the bulk of our day was spent swimming and hiking, so sure, toss in a temple. Knock yourself out.

Imagine my surprise (I’ll wait a moment while you do) when it turned out that Wat Tham Suea is one of my favorite temples that we’ve visited. I am going to have to retire the phrase, “The Liberace of churches,” but there’s a reason I keep using it. I’ve used it to describe the Guzman in Oaxaca and the San Cayetano in Guanajuato, and in both cases I was describing a kind of overwrought turducken of architectural ornamentation.

That’s less the case at Wat Tham Suea, which seems almost subtle in comparison, but is still utterly ridiculous in a way that warrants the Liberace callout. I’m prone to clown clothes, so it should be no surprise that architecture of the If-Some-Is-Good-More-Is-Better school would sing to me.

The first and most obvious attraction is the ground level temple. There’s also one up at the top of the mountain that everyone is happy to remind you is 1,260 steps and you’re probably not up to it. That temple is fairly new at about fifty years old, but the one at ground level is so new it’s still being worked on. Unlike Bangkok’s 300 year-old temples, which are just maintained so they look freshly built, Wat Tham Suea legit just opened to the public.

The interior lived up to the exterior’s promise.

I don’t know whether there had been a complex at ground level that had been razed or whether this was all sui generis new construction, but practically the entire site seemed like hard hats should be required. But they weren’t. No tort lawyers!

Where not under construction, the grounds offered ample eye candy.

Stairway to Heaven

I obviously wasn’t going to assay the 1,260 steps to the summit. Had I been tempted, the signs to that route were labeled Mountaineer, so yeah, no.

This warning was at the very foot of the steps.

While I didn’t see any monkeys (I think they’re mostly on the path to the summit) I kept a weather eye out for the little bandits. No one wants their stuff snalched. Least of all by thrieving monkeys.

And before you’re all, “It’s insensitive to mock people for making typos in a foreign language,” I will submit to you that if I made a sign in Thai and it contained errors, Thai speakers would be fully within their rights to mock me. I would even say that they were obliged to do so. And I would join them heartily.

Our guide, by the way, offered a long list of things we weren’t supposed to do with the monkeys. “Do not feed them, fight them, eat them, or Thai box them.” Among others. Those are the admonitions that stuck with me, at least, probably because they seemed the most important to remember.

Tiger Cave

Tiger Cave is several distinct features. The first is this antechamber, before you reach Tiger Cave itself. I’m not sure about the vintage of these pieces. I suspect they’re closer to the fifty years of the summit Buddha than the just-unwrapped temple, as the site itself doesn’t have any significant history prior to Big Buddha.

Then there’s Tiger Cave itself. There are conflicting stories about why it’s called Tiger Cave. One has the monk who founded the temple in 1975 entering the caves to meditate only to find tigers roaming about. Which I would find an impediment to meditation, but that’s why I’m not a monk. That and the vows of chastity and poverty. Please comment below: Top ten reasons Mark isn’t a monk.

Another explanation is that there are tiger paw prints on the cave walls. Another is that tigers roamed those caves long before a monk found them in the 70s. However it got it’s name, Tiger Cave presents as the world’s weirdest gift shop.

The cave system is all throughout the mountain that holds the Buddha, but only parts of it are accessible. Getting to the backside of the caves requires walking around the base of the mountain and taking some steps. Quite a few less than 1,260. 137 steps up, 89 down, 25 up, and 12 down. I counted, because I hadn’t spilled any matches, so there was nothing else to do.

It’s not clear exactly what’s on the other side. This did not clarify matters.

I think it was referring to this?

I sat on a bench and waited for this photo. I think this is the best picture I’ve ever taken. It’s certainly my favorite.

There truly wasn’t much else behind Tiger Cave. Caves and Buddhas. Go figure.

137 steps down wasn’t so bad.

And that was the end of an epic day. I hiked, I swam, I sight saw, I took several long bus rides, and I did not shit myself! You define victory however you like. I’m taking the W.