Chiang Rai and Chiang Mai, Thailand

Overview

Chiang Rai is a provincial capital northeast of Chiang Mai, near the Burmese border.   We flew to Chiang Rai from Bangkok, about an hour flight. Chiang Rai is at one corner of the "Golden Triangle", named for the riches that came from its poppy cultivation for opium (far less widespread now, but not gone completely)  There we met up with the local office of Plan International, who took us out to see a hilltribe child that Kathy sponsors (He's seven years old and named Japhue). Kathy was especially looking forward to this. She even went out and bought a soccer ball (fun carrying it from Bangkok) for the village.

After a few days in Chiang Rai, we headed to Chiang Mai, the cultural and artistic center of Thailand. Like the Vietnamese north, it is also host to many minority hilltribes. We first visited here in 1992, and were eager to return to this lovely city. In Chiang Mai itself, we visited the Night Market, to buy some local handicrafts.  But the primary thing we plan to do was to meet up with representatives from Heifer Project Thailand, a US-based charity that works with impoverished families to improve their standard of living by providing/upgrading livestock.  

Updates - Chiang Rai

Visit: "Kathy meets her sponsored child" page
Visit: Pages journalling our fascinating journey with Heifer Project/Thailand

11/26/01 8am — after a number of hours wandering Bangkok yesterday, we headed off to Chiang Rai, and both slept great at the none-too-luxurious but cheap and clean Golden Triangle Inn. The weather is vaguely Autumn-in-New-England'y, with highs in the 70s and lows in the 50s. The locals are wearing heaving coats, and probably think we're mad, running around in t-shirts.

Even the guide books describe Chiang Rai as "not having much to offer", but it's our gateway to visiting Kathy's foster child, who lives in a hill tribe village in this area. As you may know, there are several hill tribes, and we're speculating that Kathy's kid belongs to the Lahu. We'll know tomorrow!

After a leisurely breakfast, we spent the morning wandering around (cheap, good exercise, entertaining), and doing errands like finding a replacement flashlight and buying mosquito coils to burn in our room. Yes, our vacation lives are always at least this exciting. We found the Hill Tribes Museum which was more interesting than I (Scott) thought. It's operated by a non-profit organization which supports family planning and general quality of life improvement for these hill tribes.

While Chiang Rai not real exciting, there's little harassment in the form of "Tourist Touts" we encountered on practically every street corner in Hanoi and Sapa. The closest we came to being bothered here was a Tuk Tuk driver who advertised his taxi service to us from across a broad street by whistling: a friendly head shake "no" and he continued on his way. This kind of aggressive harassment we were subject to in Vietnam, exemplifies our point questioning whether tourism is good or bad for developing countries. Aggressive behavior is not characteristic of Thai people (if you see one visibly agitated, run!); and the value of your Tourist dollar/baht/dong/peso/whatever probably isn't going to offset the added pollution, impact on tribal customs and exploitation of indigenous people, and so forth to the culture at large. It even changes us: when somebody in Bangkok asks where we're going, we instinctively assume they want to sell us something or "take us for a ride" in the figurative sense — when in fact sometimes they just want to help a stranger. We must seem awfully rude when we react viscerally to Samaritans.

We don't have an answer to this problem, but at least we're pondering the question.

After visiting the Hilltribe museum, we had lunch at the adjoining "Cabbages and Condoms" restaurant (a chain of restaurants in Thailand — where else!). C&C is also nonprofit, and instead of an after-meal mint, you're offered a condom.

The idea behind the name is that condoms should be "as easy to find as cabbages". Especially the glow in the dark ones.

Meanwhile...

Scott continues to entertain us both by clobbering the top of his head (he says the scabs itch) with various things are are above the average Thai's height, but just high enough for Scott not to see before he walks into them. This embarrasses the Thais more than it hurts Scott, who has grown accustomed to it, unfortunately.

Scott's up to three four wounds now, and is pondering the purchase of a padded hat.

And spotted at a local temple ("Wat"):

We can live with this.

11/27/01 — 5:30pm What an excellent day! And a long one it was: we were picked up promptly at 8:30 to visit Kathy's foster child Japhue ("jah-pweh") and headed off to the PLAN office. The sights, sounds, terrain were quite like what we'd experienced nearly a decade before, except with for the personal aspect — we were visiting a village that Kathy helped build in effect.

See the whole story (about Kathy & Japhue's visit) here.

Updates - Chiang Mai

11/28/01 — Spent the day getting reacquainted with the city, then got an unexpected dinner invitation from the Heifer staff - they were holding a multi-day offsite planning meeting, and invited us to join them for dinner that evening.  The adventure had begun!

11/29/01 - 11/30/01 —Back from two days of visiting projects with one of the Heifer staff.  It's been a long, fascinating, rich, rewarding, sad, depressing, conflicted, long, dusty, dirty, sunburn on receding hair line, long (did we mention long?) couple of days. Neither of us has quite figured out how to explain it fully.  We've covered about 500km with Heifer International, again in the northern hills of Thailand. It might not qualify as "life changing" — but it's certainly outlook-changing. Read all about it. 

Below — this is pretty typical of the living space for a family of 4 or five.

12/1/01 & 12/2/01 — Back at the Galare Guest House. A small enough place that they remember our room number when we go for our key; we're always greeted with a smile and "sawasee di, ka'" ("greetings", more or less). The room's basic but has a phone, TV, dorm-size frig, and hot shower. For about $15/night. Kathy came down with a light cold (only real sickness of the trip), so we didn't do much over the weekend - Scott took a death march of epic proportions around Chiang Mai while Kathy napped.

12/3/01 & 12/4/01 — Hoping to pay back a fraction of the kindness Heifer staff had shown us, (not to mention wanting to contribute to such a worthy cause), we offered to help out at the Heifer office for a couple days.  By fortuitous coincidence, they were working on their annual strategic plan, Kathy's forte'. She helped streamline the structure, and clarify the meaning as expressed in English.

Scott helped with with an database application (gotta keep track of those pigs and chickens!), and created a prototype website for the local organization (mostly structure, leaving the content to be added by the people who understand it best). They'd been wanting to do a web site for some time, but were thwarted by lack of appropriate software tool and background — so they were thrilled. (But not half as thrilled as we were, being able to help). 

A big side benefit of our working together, was that they showed us the great "locals" restaurants - excellent food, regional specialties, Thai (not tourist) prices.

Photos 

Interesting links

http://www.visit-mekong.com/thailand/thingstodo/thenorth.htm
http://www.visit-mekong.com/thailand/jewels/chiang_rai.htm
http://www.activethailand.com/contact/raft_info.htm
http://www.heifer.org