We have made two trips to Chiang Mai.  At the end of September, we took a two-week “vacation” to Chiang Mai and environs that included a trip to the Golden Triangle and long-tail boat trip on the Mekong.  We were just there again (October 28-31) for a “Neurosurgery Review Course”. 

The following comes from an e-mail to the family on 10/12/2003 regarding a two-week trip to Chiang Mai and north into the “golden triangle”:

“Well, another school.  It seems that Mom/Judy and I have been students since we arrived in Thailand: first to learn to teach English, then about 100 hours towards learning Thai, and last week in Chiang Mai it was cooking school.  What a day!  Were we ever glad to stop slaving in that hot kitchen and have a Mae Ping riverside restaurant cook dinner for us!  Joke, yuk, yuk.  It was great fun.  If the teacher would run three classes a day she could call her establishment “Wok around the clock”!  Ha.

We had already attended another school of sorts just north of Chiang Mai, though not as pupils.  It was a training camp for elephants.   It was located on the banks of a narrow river that ran muddy and fast from the rainy season.  Now that elephants aren’t logging much any more, they’re being trained in camps such as these for the tourist trade.  Elephants have a 200-kg/day eating habit to support.

The only thing between us and the trunk was the mahout, who sang to his elephant as we sloshed across the river and rocked up and down a jungle path.  We recognized two words of the mahout’s song—long and nose—and we tried to join in the song when those words came up.  Mom/Judy and I were on an elephant again, excited, with bunches of bananas in hand to feed our elephant along the path.  We enjoyed every minute of it. 

We swayed back into camp at a stately pace and settled down on some low bleachers.  The show was on!  A dozen elephants and their trainers bowed to us, and the elephants proceeded into amazing displays of brute strength (log rolling) and light touch (taking bills from our hands, picking up coins from the ground, and shooting baskets).  Our group left the elephant camp and snaked down the river in a long line of bamboo rafts, the drivers polling thru the current.

Along the way, we passed bamboo dwellings with corrugated iron roofs rusting away.  These could have been the homes of mahouts, as elephants stood nearby, snatching at greenery with their trunks.  One elephant stood alone, chained to a solitary tree on a low hill, silhouetted against a patch of sky above the dense green.  All our cameras seemed to fire in unison.

We docked and caught an ox-drawn cart that bumped us along a rocky road further in the direction of lunch.  We passed elevated wooden stalls selling tee-shirts and baseball-and-yarmulke-like caps embroidered with hill tribe patterns.  I wanted a baseball cap, but they were all too small and ridiculous looking perched up there on my head.  We arrived at a small resort for a lunch that was fallen upon by all, what with the morning’s exertions.

On the way back, we went by a monkey show which was a non-starter and then by an orchid farm which was enjoyable.  But after a big morning with the elephants, everything suffered in comparison.  What can you say?

The next day was also exciting.  If the Toyota diesel van is the workhorse of tourist group travel and elephants the most empathetic, imagine what mode of transport compares on the Mekong River?  Picture this: Judy and Ira in life vests skimming across the Mekong at the Golden Triangle, wind swept hair, teeth glinting alabaster in the sun, with Burma to the left, Laos to the right and Thailand behind us, riding the thunder of the straight pipes of a long tail boat on the muddy Mekong’s high tide.  Yeah!  A large, squared off boat heading to China passed, possibly moving opium (we thought adventurously) along this ancient route.  Long, shallow canoe-like boats were tied to the Laos shoreline while their owners, fishermen for the giant Mekong river catfish, swam during siesta time.  We docked in Laos at a hard-currency shopping island where five types of local liquor were recommended: Cobra whisky with a cobra in the bottle, another with another snake in the bottle, a ginseng whisky with a ginseng root floating in it, a cinnamon bottle, and finally one containing “tiger” genetalia, this one said to enhance the drinker’s potency.  We assumed the genetalia to be from another animal, as the numbers of bottles surely outnumbered the tiger population.  The booze was not a big seller, needless to say.  We stopped in Mae Sai for a visa run into Burma.

That day concluded with a visit to two hill tribe villages adjacent to each other deep in the jungle and down a long path on the side of a gorge.  The physical setting was wet-jungle slippery, as it had started to drizzle.  We visited a village of “long-neck” people who place ring after ring on their women’s necks as they age up.  Another tribe of obscure origin formed the other.  These groups were from the dwindling Akha and Karen tribes.  The long necks with their gold-colored neck rings won straight 10s on a scale of the picturesque and unique and the others for their delicate embroidery and silverwork on their head gear.  Imagine this as your everyday dress. 

But, night was approaching, so Mom/Judy and I shot off a few pictures and began the climb back up the misty path to the Toyota diesel while we could still see.  We all loaded and bumped on up the road onto the highway just as a lightening storm began.  It drenched the windshield for most of the way back to Chiang Mai, and we arrived in darkness.

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