My tale through Thailand will begin on the other side of the world, because there’s something you need to understand first: I’m not a fan of heat but I’m also no stranger to it, since I’ve done my time living in the south[east]ern United States. Nine years of it, in fact, which was long enough to infuse my mostly-Midwestern accent with a stubborn drawl, and to this day I often still pronounce the words seven as “sye-vuhn” and higher as “hah-r.” Much of those nine years were spent outside, at first running around amid a sweaty hurricane of suburban 90s kids while growing up in North Carolina, and later running after wild shorebirds while doing field science in my early 20s around the Gulf states. Here’s the kicker: I assumed all this running around after wild animals in subtropical summers meant I understood the concept of “heat.”
And then I went to Thailand. Thailand, where I wore local fabrics barely thicker than tissue paper and still wanted to cry. Thailand, where I spent my tropical afternoons sucking down mango smoothies in the coldest shelter I could find. Thailand, where heat-related words honestly fail me, but hopefully the following story won’t.
It was just after 6 p.m. in the rainforest village of Khao Sok, which is about 9 degrees North of the Equator and 30 degrees (scale irrelevant) hotter than hell. In saner parts of the world, the clock striking 6 means the day’s heat had already begun to wane, and indeed the sun’s direct fiery gaze had finally just been blocked by the surrounding karst cliffs. Yet the air remained pregnant with sweltering heat. I could only walk a few hundred meters before my body screamed at me to sit down and have a drink, preferably one that was the temperature of a penguin’s ass. I was perusing Khao Sok’s main only drag when I found an open-air bar with a pool roughly the size of a car, with a big fake waterfall and some outdoor beanbag chairs scattered around the edge. Kitschy paradise! I tried to keep the desperation out of my voice as I ordered my hourly mango smoothie at the bar. I was knee-deep in the water before my bum even touched my beanbag, and although the water was tepid, it was infinitely more refreshing than the cloying air. The tiny pool was already inhabited by two others: a twenty-something tourist woman and a local toddler, who apparently belonged to one of the bar owners but was being carried around by the tourist. I’d been soaking for less than five minutes when it happened. The child abruptly decided to barf a little bit, both into the pool and onto the shoulder of the tourist babysitter. While the child screamed and the child’s mother rushed her out of the water, the other tourist just shrugged, rinsed the mess off her shoulder and into the water, and stayed where she was in the pool. My legs also stayed exactly where they were. For the next 45 minutes.
Such is the Thai heat.
Chiang Mai
I’d been absolutely T-boned by the heat 6 days before, when I’d flown from a pleasant South Korean spring directly into a Chiang Mai hot-dry season (there are only two seasons in Southeast Asia: hot-dry and hot-wet). Even though I landed around inky midnight, I began to sweat the second I left the airport’s air-conditioned bubble and knew I was in trouble. Given the choice between heat and early mornings, I will (begrudgingly) pick mornings, so the next day I rose with the sun. It was still too late. As I walked around Old Town, periodically unsticking my too-thick European clothing from my skin, I was surprised to find few people awake besides the orange-clad monks and I, mainly merchants prepping their shopfronts and street stalls for the coming day.
Taking the hint that only the temples were open for business at that ironically sacrilegious hour, I strayed into whichever ones met my path. I was absolutely spoiled for choice. The perfectly-square Old Town of Chiang Mai is a compact 1.5 miles on each side, yet the density of temples apparently rivals the concentration of churches in Rome. I was fresh off the plane from Japan and South Korea, where Buddhist traditions are also followed, and sure, their temples had been grand and gorgeous and clearly well-loved…but Thai temples? They could be used as a scale for measuring the concept of opulence. They literally shone in the baking tropical sun, gilded in whichever precious metals and bright paints were available, and their fertile gardens overflowed with strange life.
It was the temples that reeled me in but the gardens that kept me there, particularly the ones with blooming cannonball trees, whose flowers resemble unholy offspring between a sea anemone and a Stranger Things Demogorgon. Short-haired cats were the guardians of the gardens, snoozing with one eye open to watch me as I perused. At one point I knelt down to the water level of a tiny bird-bath-like pond that was filled with blooming lotus flowers to take some reflective photographs of the temples, then completely forgot my goal when I realized the clear pond water was filled with tiny jewel-colored fish darting back and forth. Not even a dark cool room entirely gilded with gold leaf could have competed with that. Breakfast could, though, so I followed my grumbling stomach in search of tropical fruits, the succulent likes of which I had never tasted before.
Cannonball tree flower (Buddha is said to have been born in the shade of a cannonball tree), fish-filled lotus pond, and a cat guardian.
Chiang Mai is a city of fading glory up in the forested hills of northern Thailand. Once upon a time it was a square walled city, but it has long since overflowed its geometric boundaries and organically spread into the surrounding valleys. More recently, Chiang Mai was crowned as a haven for foreigners looking to escape the sweaty crowds of Bangkok and Phuket and have a more “authentic” Thai experience up in the relatively cooler mountains. Naturally, word about this authentic hidden gem got out, and the influx of tourists has diluted the local flavor so much that it’s since been dethroned by the nearby village of Pai (long may she reign). Thailand was arguably the first major modern destination for Western tourists in Southeast Asia, so I’d been prepared for its touristy side and accepted that I’d hardly have places like Chiang Mai to myself. Anyways, there are perks to traveling in well-known destinations. The locals and the infrastructure are much better prepared for the onslaught, with English skills and 5G connections and surprisingly comfy long-distance buses and sleeper trains (more on that soon). Chiang Mai was also a nice gentle step through the gateway of Southeast Asia, and boy, am I glad I didn’t stick with my original plan of flying straight into Bangkok (more on that soon too).
Impressions of Chiang Mai: Wat Chedi Luang (ruined), Wat Lok Moli (black and white), and me playing with statues, per usual.
Since I’d come to Thailand directly from the more orderly cultures of Western Europe and then Northeast Asia, I experienced quite a culture shock. Crossing the street in Thailand, for example, feels like gambling with your life. Those of you familiar with the old computer game Frogger might be able to picture it best: without the aid of crosswalks or stoplights, your objective is to find a brief gap in the ceaseless flow of traffic and then strategically dart between all the cars and mopeds and tuktuks until you reach the other side. Unlike Frogger, though, those vehicles are all moving at different speeds, and they absolutely do not stay within their lanes, and you just have to hope all the drivers notice you, because after all you are not a digital frog with multiple lives. In very few cases did the things on the other side of the road actually convince me that my death-gamble had been worth it (why did the chick cross the road? she also doesn’t know), least of all on that first morning when I successfully made it across to a pocket park that was home to a remaining chunk of Chiang Mai’s red-brick city wall. I was just standing there, admiring the old clay bricks and trying to slow my pulse after winning my first Frogger level, when a skull-shattering CRACK rent the air and did absolutely nothing for the amount of adrenaline reaching my heart. I felt, rather than saw, a cloud of pigeons take flight behind me, the air pulsating with their asynchronous wing beats. This is how I learned about the new profession in town, created by our confusing social media obsession that makes us want to be special by all going to the exact same places and taking the exact same photographs as everyone else. Tourists in Chiang Mai have been trained to pay local “pigeon scarers,” who have in turn been trained to feed pigeons and then run around with noise devices scaring the birds away from said free lunches, all so the tourists can take photos surrounded by a cloud of birds. I can only imagine what this is doing to local pigeon psychology. Or humans’, for that matter.
Not that I claim to be any smarter than any of these people or birds or digital frogs. One of my more misguided ideas in Chiang Mai was to go hiking, up a mountain, to a place I could have just reached by shared Songtaew taxi, in 100+ degree heat, during the crop-burning season when the dirty red air is constantly full of particulate that makes it kinda hard to breathe even when you’re sitting down. I did use enough smarts to give myself a head start by taking an air-conditioned taxi to the start of the Monk’s Trail, which is still used by local monks to reach the mountain’s temples. The bone-dry forest was full of weird plants and birdsong and colorful religious banners strung from the trees, and together with the gently sloped trail it tricked me into believing this had all been a great idea. Within half an hour I’d ducked through a naturally woven tunnel of live bamboo and crossed into a new forest ecotone before suddenly arriving at a tiny bridge that marked the beginning of the Wat Pha Lat temple complex. A thick wall of banana trees abruptly yawned open to my right and revealed a golden valley tumbling down the mountain. The wild forest had been trimmed but not tamed by the endeavorous monks, and the jungle firmly hugged the scattered buildings and pagodas. Sunlight filtering through the smoke particulate turned the world a sunsetty red-gold color, which was either apocalyptic or magical depending on how hard I thought about it. At mid-morning only a handful of monks, hikers, and mangy wild dogs roamed the complex, most of the latter two napping on boulders strewn around a lazy river rapid. I joined them for a spell, dipping my hands and face into the syrupy water and staring out at the gently swaying forest.
The jungle-hugged Wat Pha Lat, which can be reached by either car/taxi or the Monk’s Trail.
I should have quit while I was ahead because it was only after I left this rainforest oasis and headed for the bigger temple even higher up the mountain, Wat Phra That Doi Suthep, that the trouble began. The trail changed from a wide gentle path to a network of narrow orange desire-paths that wound upwards through the forest, each as steep as a ladder, and I had to use nearby vegetation as rungs to help pull myself upwards. My only saving grace was that it was the dry season and the clay-heavy substrate, though dusty, was hard beneath my boots. Once every 100 meters I had to stop and rest while panting and guzzling my increasingly tepid water. On my tenth stop, it occurred to me that my heart’s pounding could be felt in my fingers and eardrums and toes, and it was probably due just as much to heat-related physiological and psychological stress, including fear that maybe I’d finally gotten myself in too deep, as it was to the actual exertion of hiking up a mountain. Mercifully I made this realization just a few hundred meters below the end of the path and the jungle soon spat out onto a freshly paved asphalt road like a sticky wad of over-chewed gum. A tiny market-village appeared around the first road bend and I happily dove into the first stall, clearly startling the other relatively-dry travelers who had sensibly taken a taxi up to the temple. There was just one more jeweled-dragon Naga staircase standing between me and the mountain-top temple, but first I bought a cold Gatorade from a calm child and a cup of tiny strawberries from a smiling woman and collapsed on a shaded bench to recover from my harebrained hike.
The panoramic view from the temple that I eventually reached was obscured by the eerie particulate, so instead I set up camp on the other side of the mountain at a nearly-abandoned and charming cafe. I put a hyper-sugared iced Thai tea in my hand, my bum onto a carved-log chair, and my eyes on the wild tropical forest. On the way back down the mountain I sensibly herded myself into the back of a shared taxi, which serpentined down the mountain road for nearly half an hour before dumping me somewhere on the side of the road near Old Town.
The Naga staircase, forest, and temple complex of Wat Phra That Doi Suthep. The smoke is visible in the bottom right forest photo.
I let that experience be a lesson to myself and spent the rest of my time in Chiang Mai in a lazy hazy daze while I tried to acclimate both my body and my usually-nonstop travel style to the heat. In the mornings I hung out with geckos and loud-ass birds in tropical gardens that masqueraded as cafes. All manner of odd foods ended up in my mouth, from tiny UFO-shaped rice pancakes filled with an unidentified savoury cream to tasty Michelin-starred “fish balls” that swam in a bowl of rice noodles and cost about a Euro. In the afternoons I took cool quiet breaks in temples that glittered with gold and silver, except for the ones where women aren’t allowed inside because the biologically necessary functions of our reproductive organs are considered “dirty” and “humiliating” (Yes, really…so much for my belief that all Buddhists respect every life).
The ornate silver temple, Wat Sri Suphan, which is completely covered in hand-tooled silver (including some curious 21st-century male film characters) …but inaccessible to women.
After dark, I finally learned why I’d seen no one out and about in the mornings: Thai people live for the night. As soon as darkness fell, night markets would spring up on every bare patch of pavement, where two or three generations of the same family cooked amazing food on a grill somehow rigged to the back of a functional motorbike. Too leery of food poisoning to try much street food, instead I perused with my eyes and nose, which was just as overstimulated as a dog’s at the park. On my third and final night I was thrilled when the entire city transformed into an artisan’s market, since that’s exactly my cup of tea. I shopped so hard while stocking up on handmade wooden elephant coasters and painted earrings that I got mildly lost. Fortunately Chiang Mai’s massage parlors are even more plentiful than its temples so rather than trying to find myself, I just plopped into the nearest air-conditioned five-star massage chair. I wasn’t yet brave enough to submit to a full-body Thai massage – that courage would come later – but I did offer up my weary feet to the terrifyingly strong and smooth hands of a masseuse who forcibly erased all the tension from the previous two weeks of travel, all for about 8 Euro plus tip, and she didn’t even make me cry.
Saving the best piece of news for last, it was also in Chiang Mai where I discovered mango sticky rice. It’s a simple and straightforward dish – just a chopped mango served with white rice that is made stickier by adding condensed milk – but let me tell you about the mangoes. The mangoes. Each one had the texture of fresh warm butter all the way through, with no stringy bits looking to colonize my tooth gaps. Each golden mango was as perfectly and fragrantly ripe as anything I have ever eaten. I was smitten from the first bite and also furious about all the years I’d wasted eating inferior imported mangoes in the West. Between all the mango sticky rice and smoothies, I’m pretty sure my body composition was 10% mango by the time I left Thailand – perhaps compensating for the 10% water I lost every day to the tropical heat.
Coming soon: Khao Lak, Khao Sok, and Bangkok…
Window Seat Odyssey 
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