Beach Bound (Chiang Mai, TH)

Tomorrow I fly to the beach! I'm ecstatic. Diving, swimming, cocktail drinking... horray!

My classic Thai experiences keep going very unThai. I think Laos spoiled me. First, I went trekking. In an attempt to bypass the heavily touristed Chiang Mai trekking world, I departed from Mae Hong Son instead. The group was just me and a rather boring couple from Montreal, a porter carrying food who spoke no English, and a guide who spoke about 25 words of nearly unintelligble English and laughed hysterically after every phrase out of his own mouth. He kind of sounded like a donkey. The hiking was a bit brutal as trail maintenance, or lack thereof, goes, but very pretty. Mostly jungle with occasional clearings and fantastic views of green hills rolling all the way to Burma. Eventually we arrived at a beautifully-situated Karen village in the mountains. We went exploring and crawled through a cave filled with water where our Thai companion collected grasshoppers to fry up for dinner. I only managed to get down one leg. If I'd wanted to eat some rat roasted on a stick that would have been an option as well, but I passed. Call me picky. The rest of the afternoon was spent observing as our guide and the men of the village drank 2 entire enormous bottles of home-distilled rice whiskey, but the real highlight came when our guide pulled out an acoustic guitar (kindly purchased for the village, along with soccer balls, by the governmental anti-drug department to encourage activities besides opium use) and began to play Police songs. Somewhere in the mix there was a Nirvana cover also. His musical ability was exceedingly poor, matching only by his inability to pronounce the lyrics. It was completely surreal and it went on for hours. Sadly, because the Canadian couple was boring there was nobody to laugh with me at the absurdity of the night. We slept on the floor of a local home and tried our hardest to fight the hypothermia before hiking out in the morning, a steep rough downhill with more great views and lots of old village ladies weaving and collecting plants to sell at the market.

From Mae Hong Son, I came back to Chiang Mai. The bus only stopped once to replace a screeching wheel that was about to fly off. Chiang Mai is a busy cultural hub where everyone takes massage, yoga, and meditation classes. So I went to yoga, attempting to have another classic Thai experience. Perhaps my expecations were too high. Instead of interesting teachers and Thais, yoga was a packed class of middle aged American ex-hippy ex-pats who all thought they were oh so very spiritual. I wanted to hit them.

Giving up on classic Thai experiences, yesterday I went to the mall. I needed running shorts, which after much searching, I found. It was tough because apparently women don't run in Thailand, unless they do it in tennis skirts or sweat pants. The mall actually turned out to be a very Thai experience - lots of Hello Kitty and Mickey Mouse decorated clothes and accessories and an entire floor of electronic stores. Because the timing just happened to be right and because I ended up with an extra day in Chiang Mai and didn't have too much else to do, I went to see King Kong. It was the only thing playing in English. The best part was before the movie started, in between the commercials and previews, the entire theatre rose for the national anthem and a horribly sensationalistic video montage of the King being hailed throughout Thailand. Set to swelling orchestral music, every other shot was some ridiculously poor toothless farmer or dirty child smiling and hailing the power of the throne. It was approximately ten times funnier than Jack Black and an interesting cultural Thai experience. But since I've had enough of those lately, I'm ready for some unadaulterated sun and sand tourism. Are there phosphoresence in Ko Phi Phi?