Chiang Mai -- The Jewel of Northern Thailand

Last week I saw a Friday holiday on my Korean work calendar, which of course meant that I needed to find another place in Asia to explore! I chose Chiang Mai in northern Thailand and was not disappointed.

Thankfully, there is a well-placed evening Korean Air flight from Seoul to Chiang Mai, which put me in at about 11pm on Thursday evening. The immigration line at Chiang Mai airport was slow, due to a horde of Chinese tourists which arrived just before my flight, but thankfully at the end of the process my Vietnamese girlfriend Xuanhoa, who had flown in from Ho Chi Minh City via Bangkok, was waiting for me.

Wat Phra Singh

We took a taxi to the boutique hotel that I had booked on Agoda, tucked away on a quiet side street in the old city of Chiang Mai. The hotel was not easy for taxi or tuk-tuk drivers to find, but I liked the quiet location in a quaint residential neighborhood. And Xuanhoa had prepared balloons and cake for my (early) birthday! Though I was exhausted from a long workday and 5-hour flight, I felt very welcome.

Friday started slowly for us, and we eventually walked around the old city near our hotel to find a Thai food restaurant for lunch, operated by an old, thin expat and what seemed like his Thai wife. Such cafe/restaurants are common in Chiang Mai. Actually, the city appears to have a booming expat scene, boosted by Bohemian tourists who decide that life is better operated at a northern Thai pace. Given the friendly and calm nature of the city, I can't blame these expats for settling there.

Full from a tasty and healthy Thai curry lunch, we wandered to the Wat Phra Singh, an impressive Buddhist temple in the old city built in the northern Thai (Lanna) style. Most Thais are practicing Buddhists and I could see several Buddhists, including Xuanhoa, bowing their heads in front of the Buddha statues. Thai Buddhist temples are quite different from Korean Buddhist temples — a lot more color, spires, and gold-painted thin Buddha statues with the deities wearing pointy hats — rather than the fat, bald, happy Buddhas which one would see in Korea or Hong Kong.

Doi Suthep

From here, I decided we should go see the most fascinating temple in Chiang Mai — Wat Phrathat Doi Suthep — situated in the mountains overlooking the valley that Chiang Mai sits in. One cannot leave Chiang Mai without ascending up the mountain to see the gold-plated pagoda, and the view of Chiang Mai below. Reaching Doi Suthep was a bit challenging. We convinced a tuk-tuk driver to take us to the nearby Chiang Mai zoo for 80 baht, then found a songthaew (red pickup truck with covered bench seating in the back) to take us up and down the mountain for 200 baht, stopping along the way for 45-60 minute stops at a hill tribe village and the Bhuping Palace Gardens. Nothing photoworthy in the hill tribe village — just little shops and the pathetic Doi Pui "waterfall". The palace gardens, a royal retreat in the winter for the Thai monarchy, were pretty and green though the palace buildings themselves were quite dull. We also got caught in a brief afternoon rain shower, but considering we were visiting Chiang Mai during summer rainy season we got rather lucky with the weather during our 3-day trip.

Doi Suthep made the trip up the hill totally worth the effort. It has a spectacular pointed gold pagoda surrounded by elegant buildings and statues nearby. Though mobbed by tourists in the late afternoon, you can still feel the holiness of the place as you walk around in your bare feet, see the Buddhist imagery and the Buddhist believers praying nearby.

Back in town, Xuanhoa and I changed for a Friday evening dinner date with my Samsung colleague Reg, who had booked a reservation at the Dhara Dhevi hotel, a 20-minute drive outside the city. When we arrived I felt we had arrived at a royal palace... the architecture is spectacular! The restaurant did not disappoint — delicious curries and stir fry dishes delighted our palates. And we were treated to an entertaining traditional dance and music performance as well. We certainly paid tourist prices (3600 baht for 3 people with cocktails), but totally worth the journey.

Traditional dance and music at the Dhara Dhevi hotel

On Saturday, Xuanhoa had booked us for an elephant tour at a rural camp about an hour away from the city. Interestingly, our tour group consisted almost entirely of Middle Eastern tourists, and we were led by a very smiley Thai lady nicknamed "Gift". The camp we visited, Chok Chai, was mobbed by Chinese tourists and offered its fair share of kitschy time-fillers: a ride down an ugly muddy river on a bamboo raft (without life jackets!) and a ride on a ox-drawn carriage along a dull highway. We did get a photo op on the back of an adorable baby elephant, then watched a rather silly elephant show. We all had the opportunity to pay to feed bananas and sugarcane to the grown elephants, then we watched a 30-minute show of elephants standing on their hind legs, elephants kicking soccer balls, elephants painting, elephants dancing to "Gangnam Style". It was certainly cheesy.

The tour guide then herded us onto a 2-person seat on the back of a very large elephant, who was guided down a steep, muddy river valley into the raging river below. The whole time I was fearing falling off the elephant or being thrown off in an elephant act of rage, but thankfully our elephant was well-behaved. Though the elephants were huge creatures and probably could carry far more than the weight of 2 people on their backs, with all the tourists churning through this tourist factory the Chok Chai camp felt a bit exploitative. I didn't see any signs of elephant abuse, but I couldn't help wondering how these elephants were treated when the tourists weren't around.

After a buffet lunch, we left the elephant camp in the afternoon for a couple other kitschy tourist traps outside of the city. First, we stopped at a Karen long neck tribe village. The women in this village wear heavy copper rings around their necks to elongate them. These women eat, sleep ... basically spend their whole lives wearing these rings. Painful to see! The handicrafts that the Karen women made looked nice but I was not in the mood to purchase, and it is clear that the Karen moved to near Chiang Mai to be closer to tourist dollars. We then stopped at Tiger Kingdom, full of tigers in cages who look sedated, particularly the larger tigers. People pay to get pictures with these zombie tigers, but I did not want to support this zoo. Granted, the tigers in captivity may have better lives than tigers in the wild, but still I did not find the Tiger Kingdom to be super pleasant.

Look how adorable the baby elephant is! I hope he is treated well at the camp...

When we finally returned to town we had the elephant van drop us off in front of the Wat Chedi Luang temple in the center of the Chiang Mai old city. Another very impressive temple, adorned with ferocious-looking dragons on the outside. In the evening, we reunited with Reg and ate at a delicious vegetarian restaurant named Anchan in the trendy Nimmanhamin Road area just outside of the old city. The restaurant's slogan, "You Won't Miss The Meat," proved accurate! We finished the evening at the North Gate Jazz Co-Op, watching expats jamming out tunes in front of a mixed tourist/local audience. Not your typical Thai tourist night out, but the music was decent and Xuanhoa had never heard live jazz before, so was worth the trip. Xuanhoa and I finished our night by taxiing to Reg's hotel, Le Meridien, and walking around the night bazaar nearby.

On Sunday, having already checked off the major tourist attractions, Xuanhoa and I decided to rent a motorbike to drive ourselves around a bit. Super cheap: 150 baht for the rental (with 1000 baht deposit) and 100 baht to fill the tank with gas. Definitely the cheapest self-mobility vehicle I have come across in my travels! We were able to wander a bit outside of the old city with the bike, with the highlight of our afternoon definitely being the Wat Suan Dok on the western part of town. Another grand temple, this one was decorated with much pointier tops than the other temples. Actually, the design sort of reminded me of the Mormon temple in the Maryland suburbs of Washington DC. But, all in all it was a lazy Sunday. We drank coffee and treated ourselves to Thai massages, which are always painful for me!

At least this elephant seemed happy...

3 days was enough to take in Chiang Mai, but not enough to have a restful vacation. I slept about 3 hours on the overnight flight back to Seoul and reported dutifully into work on Monday morning, exhausted and wishing I had more time to explore the jewels of Southeast Asia.

Siem Reap -- Angkor's Ancient Treasure

Having also made two trips to Vietnam already in 2014, I am starting to tick more and more items from my Southeast Asia bucket list. For a 3-day weekend in July, I visited the ruins of Angkor Archaeological Park around Siem Reap, Cambodia. The park showcases the remains of what had been a mighty Khmer Empire from the 8th to the 13th century.

Outside of Angkor Wat

I arrived at tiny Siem Reap airport off a direct evening flight from Seoul on Friday evening, meeting my friend Xuanhoa from Vietnam. We went straight to sleep and the next morning woke up with one single goal in mind – to reach Angkor Wat temple as quickly as possible. Thankfully there was a brigade of tuk-tuk drivers waiting outside of our hotel and we were easily able to negotiate a driver to take us around for the entire day for $15. Gotta love Southeast Asia prices. One of the interesting and somewhat strange things that I noticed already was the dollarization of the Cambodian economy – almost every price was quoted to us in US dollars, and upon paying with dollars one also tends to receive most change in dollars, unless you get into sub-dollar units where the rare Cambodian currency makes an appearance rather than American coins. This makes understanding what products are worth much easier, though change was not always readily available for bigger bills ($20 and above).

The tuk-tuk driver spoke very little English, but seemed to be experienced in driving people around all of the various sights. First stop was the famous Angkor Wat, the world's largest religious monument. The temple is quite large, as advertised, and takes a few hours to cover, though if you are a Hindu religious scholar you could spend days analyzing all of the elaborate carvings in the stone. I, on the other hand, am not familiar at all with the Hindu religion, so though the carvings were artistically interesting they lacked meaning for me. I bought the book "Ancient Angkor" from one of the many hawkers around the temple (they all seemed to have the same book), but the detailed explanations in the book did not make sense to me and, frankly, the book took away from the experience of just taking in the temple with my five senses.

Look at the huge tree growing out of the stone!  (at Ta Prohm)

Unlike many of the famous churches of Europe, Angkor Wat temple no longer seems to get great use besides the masses of tourists wandering about, though I did see the occasional monk in orange gown walking through. As you're walking around, you're simply admiring the scale of the construction and wondering how difficult it must have been for a pre-industrial culture to haul all that stone through the jungle to this place. The surrounding temple grounds are very grassy and green, perhaps because we visited during Cambodian rainy season. Once upon a time a large city surrounded the temple on those grounds, but the city and its inhabitants have long since disappeared.

Thankfully upon leaving the temple our tuk-tuk driver spotted us from the sea of tuk-tuk drivers waiting outside. One could get around Angkor park with a bicycle but walking only would simply not be possible – such is the scale of the place.

We continued on our circuit of the park into the large adjacent city Angkor Thom, and proceeded to The Bayon in the center, a complex of face towers. Over 200 faces are carved into the stone towers, and there is still debate regarding who is depicted. At the nearby Baphuon, we climbed up the steep steps to the summit for a view, then my friend pointed up to the sky. "Black cloud," she said, and we scampered down just in time to take cover inside a stone passageway as the heavens opened and rain started pouring down. It was rainy season, after all. Our journey disrupted for an hour or so, we waited for a lighter moment to hike out and try to find our tuk-tuk driver, though my long trousers still became extraordinarily damp on the walk.

The Bayon

After taking some time to dry off while eating a late lunch, the rain let up and we wandered back to the tuk-tuk to see the Ta Prohm temple, made famous by the movie "Tomb Raider". This temple was really cool. This temple was quieter and offered many opportunities to explore around the many hidden corners. Also there were massive trees that had grown up around the stone structure. Unfortunately this temple is in a bit of a shambles and looks like it is undergoing substantial restoration work, though we did not see any workers on this rainy afternoon. After making our way through the temple and stopping on the opposite end of the city for a fresh coconut milk, the heavens once again opened up, raining even more heavily than before, and this time my friend and I were stuck under a small tent with a couple Cambodians and their scarf shop. After an hour as the torrential downpour subsided slightly, and my friend and I needed to hike through the Ta Prohm to get back to our tuk-tuk before dark. On the way back the temple was completely empty, and we were surprised when the first person we saw in the temple was our tuk-tuk driver, who seemed to have become a little worried about whether he would see us again.

On Saturday evening we explored the night market of Siem Reap a little and walked along the cleverly named "Pub Street".

On Sunday my friend wanted to go further afield, so we wandered into a travel agency in Siem Reap town to book a car driver for the day. This time the price was $50 and we traveled in an old Toyota Camry from the 20th century, but at least it had strong air conditioning.

One of the outer temples...I lost track of all of the names!

My friend wanted to ride out to Kbal Spean, a small village about an hour's drive from Siem Reap. From there we did the roughly 1 mile trek up a hill in the jungle to the River of A Thousand Lingas. Here we could see Hindu sculptures that has been carved into the river banks. After our hike, and a picnic in the jungle by a waterfall, my friend and I headed back towards Siem Reap to visit the Banteay Srei, a more isolated temple with exquisite carvings cut into sandstone. Our driver continued taking us to other outer temples, including Pre Rup, with imposing brick towers that dominated the surrounding plain. The outer temples, though not quite as grand as those closer to Siem Reap, were still definitely worth visiting. It was nice to experience these areas which are less crowded but still very impressive. I lost track of the names of all the sights which we visited.

On Sunday evening we watched a traditional Aspara dance show, but I did not find it all that exciting. The dancers were very slow and there was little which was sexy about their movements!

On Monday, my friend Xuanhoa's birthday, we slept in and checked out late morning from our hotel. We ate delicious Japanese sashimi in Siem Reap, mailed some postcards, then rented bicycles and drove to the Tonle Sap, the largest lake in Southeast Asia. The day was warm and my friend became quite tired, but thankfully there was no rain. We were there to check out life on the lake and see the floating houses for the working fishermen. Though there were tons of tourists there when we arrived, including several busloads of Koreans, I could not understand the attraction of this lake. Tonle Sap is a dirty lake, the inhabitants are very poor and the point of taking a boat onto the lake seems to be to wrestle money from the wallets of unsuspecting, innocent tourists. Our boat driver seemed angry when we did not agree to make a $50 donation to "buy rice for the local school". I assume that those bags of rice are unopened and sold again day after day. The whole tour felt like a racket.

Floating Village, Tonle Sap Lake, Siem Reap

We returned to town late afternoon, ate a cheap Cambodian dinner, then I showered and headed to the airport for an overnight flight back to Seoul. Alas, short vacations! Also, Cambodian food is not all that delicious – there is a reason you don't see Cambodian restaurants overseas.

Cambodia is certainly one of the poorest countries I have ever visited. At all the sights around Siem Reap you see men, women, and children trying to sell your books, magnets, postcards, scarves, and other souvenirs. The kids know enough English to say "$1...I need to go to school"..."You are so handsome"...etc. etc. In Vietnam, my friend tells me that Cambodians are regarded as lazy people who just sit around waiting for handouts from donor countries. Vietnamese people even taunt that Cambodians are too lazy to have sex!  (though given the number of children around Siem Reap this clearly isn't true)  However, Siem Reap felt very safe, and I never felt threatened while there, even by the off-duty police officers who tried to sell me Cambodian police medallions!

I came away from this trip wondering how an ancient civilization that could have built such a mighty empire and magnificent temples had decayed into the poor state that it is today. It felt in Siem Reap, besides the airport and the hotels nearby, that since Angkor Wat the Cambodians have built little.