Chiang Mai

(A Buddha statue in Ayuthaya)...

I'm now in Chiang Mai, in northern Thailand. I arrived early this morning after an overnight bus ride from Ayuthaya, where I stayed for two nights, after leaving Trat. Getting from Trat to Ayuthaya was a bit of a trip, because I had two very different bus rides. There wasn't a direct Trat-Ayuthaya bus, so I had to take a bus to Bangkok's northern bus terminal (in which I avoided having to actually go into the heart of Bangkok) and then catch another bus from there just 30 miles north to Ayuthaya. The bus ride from Trat to Bangkok was a government bus and it was very clean, only about half full, with a bathroom on board (they're not in the back but in the center of the bus where you go down some stairs, which also leads to a second exit door). At the start of the trip they handed out these snack boxes to everyone, that had water, a yogurt drink and cookies. It was a pretty nice and fairly new bus, where the driver and his assistant are separated by a barrier with a door at the front of the bus. So you only see the assistant guy come around every once in a while to check tickets or whatever. Also the bus made very few stops along the way, so we covered 200 miles in about 4 1/2 hours. Most of the highways here in Thailand are divided highways or freeways so you move along pretty good. Basically, it beat Greyhound and was about 8 bucks.

The next bus ride was a little different. It took 2 1/2 hours to go 30 miles, not because of traffic out of Bangkok or anything, but because the bus stopped every chance it got to drum up more passengers in order to cram it full. It was more like the typical India bus, sort of falling apart, with lots of colorful religious decorations (Buddhist in this case) all over the interior. There were four guys including the driver manning the bus, and I ended up sitting in the first seat right near the driver and the other guys, who were all rather boisterous. We got out of the bus station pretty much right on time, but then we stopped at a snack shop right away so that they could all buy cigarettes. Then we stopped at another snack shop so they could buy a bunch of shish-ke-bobs (which they gave me one). The bus was only maybe a third full, so when we got to another market area where there were a lot of people standing around, they pulled over and started drumming up the passengers. We stayed there for at least ten minutes while all the assistants went around through the crowd yelling all the places they were stopping along the way. Basically it was sort of a city bus that was taking people to various points outside of Bangkok on the way to Ayuthaya, but it was clearly a private bus, which is a bad combination if you're actually ready to get to your destination in reasonable time. So then we stopped at several other points to let people off, and then hang out for a while to get more passangers. Then we pulled alongside a canal and the three assistants got out with white plastic buckets, filled them up with water from the canal and then washed out the luggage area, for some reason, which I presume didn't have any luggage in it (at least not mine) because they just sloshed water all over the place. Then we continued on, stopping along the way all the way up to Ayuthaya. The way it was going I was thinking it was going to take even longer, so I was pretty stoked when we finally pulled up there.

Ayuthaya is essentially a rectangular island about 3 by 4 miles created by three different rivers coming together. It was the capital of Thailand (or at least that part of Thailand, the borders have shifted around a lot) from somewhere around the 14th to 17th centuries. There's now a modern town on part of the island, with tons of ancient temples (more than a hundred) scattered all around the island and then a few places across the rivers. Basically, it was the ideal place to just rent a bicycle and bike all over the place checking out these temples, which was what I did, managing to get thoroughly lost at one point just because road signs aren't entirely reliable (although they almost always are in English as well as Thai, dang convenient).

The next day I had an overnight "VIP" bus (which basically means they have a TV up front and play a lot of dubbed action movies) reserved leaving at 9pm, so I checked out of my hotel room and then just walked around and went over some of the ground I'd went over the previous day. The bus that night was entirely foreign tourists because it was coming directly from a popular backpacker's area in Bangkok. Other than stopping at Ayuthaya it stopped only once for a snack stop in the middle of the night. Basically it was a long, boring overnight trip in which I got no sleep and was thinking maybe it was worth it to take the day bus (the advantage to going overnight is you skip paying for a hotel room for that night). The one good thing about it was I ended up sitting next to a French Canadian woman who was also traveling alone and so we were glad to have someone to catch up on our travels with. Fortunately they turned the action movie off around 10pm and then it was dark and fairly quiet after that, and we got into Chiang Mai around 7 am.

After a rather exhaustive search for guest houses this morning I found something good, a little more than I wanted to pay, but I just wasn't finding anything super cheap that I wanted to put up with. So I got a pretty nice room on the second floor of sort of a mini-hotel, with tons of windows, private bathroom with hot water and two twin beds with a great mattress (the mattress is what makes or breaks a lot of rooms) for 200 baht, or 6 bucks. Not bad, this same room in a touristy place in the U.S. would probably be 80-100 bucks or something. Also I have a nice view looking down on the quiet lane that it's on. I'd found one other room that I really liked, it was all teak hardwood for the same price, but then the lady warned me that the bar next door played loud live music at night, so that pretty much ruined it.

So after that bus ride and then hiking all over the place I was beat, and just took a shower, slept for the afternoon, then found a nice restaurant for dinner and then found super cheap internet here at 15 baht an hour, or 50 cents. Other than the room being a little more than I wanted to pay, it looks like I'll be able to keep the budget a little more reasonable here with lots of cheap restaurant options, especially since I plan to stick around for a while, at least a week or so. There's tons to do here, lots of temples, museums, a zoo, bookshops, bars, and it's a really cool town to just walk around, super mellow with lots of small little lanes with various shops and characterful restaurants. It's also crazy touristy, in some areas you see as many westerners as Thais, but there's plenty of exploring you can do outside of this area (where all the affordable guest houses are), where I'm sure it will feel a little more authentically Thai. Also there's hiking and overnight trekking in the hills nearby, where you hike from one village to another and then spend the night in village guest houses, so I'll look into maybe doing one of those for a couple of days.