The flight north from Bangkok was unremarkable, taking less than two hours over a landscape bruised by Thailand’s relatively recent industrial transformation. There was little certainty around this visit other than two hotels booked several months ago by Mary in a moment of enthusiasm driven by a romantic ideal of the East. For a while she had been talking about the reclaimed old buildings that were the center piece of our hotel in Chiang Mai, not a new phenomena in Asia, we had stayed some years ago in Langkawi in Malaysia in a group of buildings that had been saved when developers came to bull dose down most of KL, but a desirable alternative to some of the new sterile hotels we saw online. Each brick, each beam had been numbered, categorized and placed in container ships to be rebuild as a boutique hotel and for me at least the joy is in the joinery; the precise cuts of wood, the excellence in construction and skill of the craftsmen. It is also in the warm feeling of domesticity such structures provide, they demand something of its occupants, to step over raised floor boards, to glimpse daylight through them and have a brief sense of what the past was like without any of the risks.
We found a driver would was happy to answer our WhatsApp calls and he stuck with us loyally the entire time we had in Thailand. On one occasion we walked through the streets to find a highly recommended local resturant that did not accept reservations and so like everyone else we wrote our name in a book and waited for a muffled (and imaginative interpretation of our western names) microphoned call to a free table. I had to accept my own lack of connersership with the food, which was delicious but hard to understand the accolades and that is because I think of Thai food as being fiery and not this more subtle and comforting Northern variant. But this city is not about food, rather it is a center of culture and religion and to discover that I found requires boundless energy. The temples are built as close to God as they can be, both physically and metaphorically, which frequently demanded steep walks up mountains. And at the summit my lack of comprehension at religion is complete as we are faced with garish gold monuments and people praying towards figurines of buddhas and other holy symbols that held little meaning to me as well as real monks who were deeply engaged with their worshippers.
From Chiang Mai we travelled to a smaller town, Lampong, about an hour away, again because the hotel booking had been made several months ago which needed to be fulfilled. As with our previous accommodation, it was made up of locally sourced materials and traditional architectural techniques, and again made because of aesthetic rather than practical goals, it was far from the center of the small city leaving us dependent upon taxi’s and therefore at the mercy of a ride share application that we eventually and reluctantly downloaded onto my phone. The town itself had some charm and much fewer tourists giving itself a pleasing air of self sufficiency. There is an older quarter of elegant and traditional houses which was pleasant to walk around and occasionally a horse drawn carriage would speed past us in the empty streets. Each evening there was a night market that began at around 6.00 pm and provided some theatre at the end of the day, a place where we picked up Pork Satay and ate a stick each before getting some deliciousy delicate Pho from a sidewalk vendor and watched the world pass by before settling the bill which came to about four dollars.
The next day our driver from Chiang Mai was waiting for us at 8.00pm to take us to the airport, where we flew the two and a half hours into Singapore, where we had our first delay in the trip circulating around the airport where I hoped to look down on Chinese junks that I witnessed all those years ago, but instead saw the slug like forms of shipping vessels full of containers. I was still searching for my youth after that night when I took Mary to the Long Bar in Raffles and later to the Tiffin Room for an Indian Meal where we sat near a lovely couple who must have been in their eighties, he in a traditional pale linen suit, and she wearing a diamond neckless – one might assume a meaningful possession – a rare sighting of old Singapore, but then to bring us back to 2025, an eye watering bill that reflected the modern one. We used this stop over to do practical tasks, to wash clothes, to return our warm weather clothes back to the USA, to find new sneakers for Mary and to explore some lesser known pockets and in truth we were both happy to leave the next day to Bali.
jnmanson 