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Previous: January
In mid February I had the pleasant surprise of a visit by my nephew Igor Ustinov with his Saudi wife Jehan on their way back to Geneva after a diving cruise in the Andaman Islands.
In spite of our better judgment, we opted for a special dinner outing at the highly touted Chiang Mai Cultural Center. A minibus picked us up at our hotels and dropped us off in a big parking lot at the entrance where, I must admit, was a nice fountain.
We managed to get a ringside spot and a chair for me because my knees are not as supple as Igor's or Jehan's.
The food and the show were standard tourist grade. Not bad but not outstanding either. There must have been hundreds of tourists in two or three large open air areas like this one.
Three groups of six girls went through graceful steps in various costumes while we ate...
... and invited the public to join them. That's always good for a laugh at the end.
Then, the tourist crowd was efficiently herded back to their busses for the drive back to their respective hotels.
We chose to be dropped off at the night market to get a glimpse of that other highly touted tourist attraction. After half an hour of pushing through crowds of curious tourists we quietly went home with the feeling of having done our tourist duty.
The following day we were picked up by a minibus at eight in the morning and brought to the Mae Sa elephant camp, some 20 km north of the city, just in time to catch the elephant's morning bath session.
Elephants love splashing in the river and being scrubbed by their personal mahout. This fellow on the left was having great fun spraying the onlooking tourists and they loved it. The last bather was visibly reluctant to quit playing and start working to earn his keep.
Some forty elephants paraded in front of more than 200 well behaved tourists. Elephants are smart animals, I wonder what they think of the tourists who visit them everyday.
The big logs in front of the tourist enclosures are there to make their experience more exciting by letting them imagine they need protection from these extremely tame animals.
The elephants were very well trained and appeared to take pleasure in showing us what they could do.
I stood at the entrance between a tourist enclosure on my left and another one on my right so I could follow the antics of both shows going on simultaneously.
The highlights in my opinion of the hour long show were to see them score kicking soccer balls in the goal, their painting exhibition and their log handling demonstration.
I am generally not too impressed in this kind of tourist show but this one was really excellent from the beginning to the closing parade.
After the show, we had a two km ox cart ride through the beautiful Mae Sa valley to a Lisu village where we had to wait in line and run a gauntlet of souvenir stands to reach the structure where we could board the elephants.
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Here are Igor and Jehan on their magnificent beast.
A stroll on elephant back is quite leisurely on flat terrain but one has to hold on as these powerful animals will negotiate steep slopes as if they had nothing on their backs.
Bridges are made of the local bamboo and so are rafts as you will soon see.
These mounts are the ideal all terrain vehicle.
I am sure that I had one all to myself because I happened to be the only unpaired person when I boarded and not because of my weight.
Can you imagine 200 tourists waiting their turn for a ride on some 40 elephants?
After forty minutes or so we let our mounts go back to fetch more tourists and got on bamboo rafts for another 40 minute ride.
One can also do white water rafting in northern Thailand but not on this quiet river whose waters eventually reach the Ping river that flows by Chiang Mai.
The young couple in the front seat of our raft were Chinese tourists from Tientsin, a city I had visited in 1973, well before they were born.
China has undergone unbelievable change during that period. The young people in modern China are well educated, self confident, ambitious and hard working. I was happy to see that these two could afford vacations in northern Thailand.
These new houses are built in the local hill tribe style but I suspect that they are intended for tourists.
While these older ones probably belong to the local people.
The contrast between the old traditional split bamboo house and the modern pickup truck is a very common sight nowadays. Satellite TV antennas are also frequently seen in these hills.
This shot shows how bamboo is split and unrolled to form boards for the walls and floors of traditional houses. The corrugated iron roof of this house is undoubtedly more waterproof than the traditional thatch but it is also less handsome and will look terrible when rusted.
I was struck by the eyes of this Lisu woman who tried to sell me something as we were getting on mini busses to go back. When I complimented her on her face, she answered a simple "thank you" with the utmost natural grace.
All in all, we had a wonderful day. It was touristy but it was interesting and well done all the way. Try it the next time you are in Chiang Mai, I can recommend it.
