Chiang Mai,Thailand

We were able to book into the Baan Keaw guest house in Chiang Mai,
based on our neighbor's recommendation. Wonderful place. Quiet, off the street, they have a small kitchen for breakfast, their own tour service and, get this, NO ensuite TV. Their are however, a dozen flea-bitten cats to chase around, and some mosquitos to contend with.

One day we took a guided tour from the guest house of the "featured" shopping places: the worlds biggest jewelery store, a silk store, a huge wood working establishment (my favorite), and an umbrella manufacturing factory. All very staged and tourist trappy, but even so the prices were quite low.

At the silk place they had a demonstraton of how silk is made. Pretty interesting. These are the cocoons the worms spin, floating in hot water. The material is pulled off the cocoon in fine filements and spun into thread.

The wood place is more like a craft center, with lots of people doing different things with wood. They really like children, and seemed glad to let our kids have a go at whatever they were doing. We (illicitly) bought some chisels from this guy.

The next day we took a tour out of town to "traditional" Hmong and ?? villages. Had to hike in a mile or so to one of them, including crossing a pretty rickety cable bridge. Unfortunately, (or perhaps fortunately, given the Hmongs reputation as fierce warriors) these villages are really just tourist outlets staged in the bush. It seems the King (whom everybody totally adores) has decided the traditional Hmong industry of opium harvesting is bad for relations with the G8. So he told them to stop doing that, and set up some of the villages as tourist centers to replace the lost revenue. The plan may be working, to a certain extent. Chiang Mai is right in the middle of the old opium trading region, and we didn't see anything along that line.

Back to not being typical tourists, we walked around the old city, explored some very old temples (thirteen century mostly). Also found a whole mall devoted to ripped off software, movies and electronic toys, and had our first of many tuk-tuk rides.




I read somewhere that some large percentage of the worlds goods are transported by bicycle. In Asia the rest is transported on motorbikes.