Nimmanhaemin Road; Buak Hard; Wat Phuak Hong

This morning was lazy. I thought it only fair to follow it up with a not-quite-as-lazy, but still lazy afternoon in Chiang Mai. I visited a crafts-shopping district (Nimmanhaemin Road), a park (Buak Hard), and a temple (Wat Phuak Hong).

Because this is my last post from Chiang Mai and Thailand, I’ll end this entry with a Chiang Mai summary and a Thailand summary.

Nimmanhaemin Road

My guidebook had only a brief description of Nimmanhaemin Road, which is well out of Chiang Mai’s old town (see the “A Canal, a Moat, and a Wall” section below). But it recommended a restaurant in the area and provided a link to Google Maps to get me there. Figuring that I wanted to visit Nimmanhaemin Road based on what my walking tour app told me (see next paragraph), after I finished with Wat Suan Dok this morning, I went to that restaurant for lunch.

My walking tour app says that Nimmanhaemin Road offers an enchanting array of ceramics, antiques, and handmade treasures. I didn’t find it. Or rather, I don’t know if I did.

The app has a map function. I went to where it pointed me. I saw a street with mostly somewhat rundown stores offering none of those things. The street was punctuated at points with a Starbucks, a McDonald’s, and a 7-Eleven.

I checked Google Maps to make sure I was on Nimmanhaemin Road. I was. I walked for quite a way along it.

I was about to give up, turn around, and go to my next destination when I passed a closed-off street perpendicular to Nimmanhaemin Road. On it, there were stalls with people selling clothes and crafts, including a few ceramics.

The stalls were much more refined than the ones on the streets and in the markets in Chiang Mai’s old town and on the streets and in the markets close to the old town. The vendors sold more upscale goods than most of the market and street stalls in and around the old town. The wares still weren’t luxury goods, but they were certainly more classy than in those more central locations.

Perpendicular to that street, there was a lane that led to an open square with more stalls set up, including some food stalls. Off the square, there was a glass-covered mall with more vendors and a food court.

Surrounding the square was a multilevel (three, if I remember correctly) building with more stores on the second level. There were side-by-side up-and-down escalators leading from the square to the second level.

It was an enticing escalator bank. Above it, there were lit neon tubes of different colours crisscrossed artistically. I figured I’d go up, poke my head around, and come back down. I hate to shop.

I went up. At the top, there was a fence that made it impossible to go directly to the down-escalator. Instead, I was forced to walk through a series of interconnected stores selling cosmetics, clothes, souvenirs, and candies. Only by walking through all of those stores could I get to the down-escalator immediately beside the up-escalator. Clearly, they were hoping to induce impulse shopping. They failed in my case.

On the plus side, the stores were heavily air-conditioned, and it was hot and muggy out. I walked through the stores more slowly than my distaste for shopping usually leads me.

The whole complex, including the street with vendor stalls, was much more polished than anywhere else I’ve seen in Chiang Mai.

I still don’t know if this is what my walking tour app was referring to. It wasn’t on Nimmanhaemin Road, but off it. And the app just mentioned Nimmanhaemin Road, not the Nimmanhaemin Road district. Maybe there’s another stretch of Nimmanhaemin Road that I didn’t see. But I don’t think so.

Buak Hard

Buak Hard is a small public park just inside Chiang Mai’s old town. It’s lovely. It has trees, lawns, flowers, a series of ponds with fountains shooting up from them, a playground, some whimsical sculptures, including a cheerful purple elephant, some refreshment stands, and, most importantly, toilets.

Okay. Maybe that was most important to me at the moment I was there, not generally most important. But there you have it.

I found a shady bench and spent some time enjoying the park and typing some of the words of this morning’s journal entry on my phone.

Wat Phuak Hong

Wat Phuak Hong is a small temple almost hidden away in Chiang Mai’s old town. I found it in my walking tour app. What makes Wat Phuak Hong special is its chedi (stupa/tower). Most of the chedi (or is that “chedis?”) in the temples here are generally bell-shaped. This one isn’t. It’s a tiered, wedding cake shape, but if the wedding cake came to a point at the top.

The lower tiers are constructed of red brick. The upper tiers are of grey brick. The chedi is old enough and untended enough that vegetation is colonizing some of it.

The shrine at Wat Phuak Hong is a small, quaint wooden structure. Inside there’s … well, I don’t know what’s inside. The doors were closed, and it looked like the front door was chained and locked.

Two monks were sitting on the raised veranda in front of the shrine. As I approached and stared inquisitively at the front door, one asked, in reasonable good English, if he could help me.

I asked if I could go in.

He came down from the veranda and said no, but I could walk around. He also pointed to and told me about the chedi and suggested I take a look.

I thanked him and told him I had already been back there and admired it. And with that, I ended my activities in Chiang Mai and went back to my hotel.

A Canal, a Moat, and a Wall

Much of this section could have been written in one or more of my previous Chiang Mai posts, but it didn’t occur to me to write it then.

Chang Mai has at least one canal. I know this because it’s close to my hotel, and I walked along a street over it at least twice a day, once forth and once back.

I won’t call it a spectacular canal, but it is simple, attractive, and calming.

Probably as many times, I crossed over what I thought, when I first saw a part of it, was a wider canal. It’s not. It’s a moat.

At one time, Chiang Mai was a walled city. Just beyond that wall was a moat. The moat is still there. Little of the wall is, but there are a couple of small sections at points where there were gates to the city.

Serendipitously, today I came across a sign by the moat and close to one of the remaining pieces of the wall on either side of what was the city gate. The sign told me (among other information), “The city walls and moats of Chiang Mai were built by King Mangrai in 1296.”

The Chiang Mai old town is, I’m only guessing here, likely the equivalent of about a dozen blocks by a dozen blocks. It’s hard to tell because, except for some of the major streets, the streets don’t follow a grid pattern.

The most encircles the old town. Or, I guess it would be ensquares it if that were a word, as the old town is not a circle but roughly a square.

By the way, if the moat weren’t there, I wouldn’t know the boundaries of the old town. The character of the streets and buildings for a stretch outside of the old town doesn’t look that much different than inside it, except there are far fewer temples outside of it.

Chiang Mai Summary

If you’re looking for a glitzy, polished city, Chiang Mai is not for you. It’s gritty. The sidewalks along smaller streets are often very narrow or non-existent and sometimes the paving material is broken up a bit. And, if you use a mobility device, I have no idea how you would get around Chiang Mai. There are almost no sloped sidewalk cutouts to ramp down to the street. And some of the curbs are relatively high.

In addition, sometimes there are obstructions on those smaller streets’ narrow sidewalks, such as trees, vendor tables, parked motorcycles, or utility boxes for, I think, either the power or communications systems. They make the sidewalk impassable for pedestrians. At those points, you have to walk out onto the street. That’s okay for the smaller streets (for people who don’t require a mobility device). They don’t tend to be heavily trafficked. However, the sidewalks on major streets are often not much wider and occasionally have impassable sidewalk obstructions too. That didn’t happen often, but I found it scary walking on the street when it did.

All that being said, I’m glad I came to Chiang Mai. It has some beautiful wats, I enjoyed having dinner at the night markets, and it’s a slower pace than frenetic Bangkok, which I was in before coming to Chiang Mai.

In terms of time, I think the four nights, translating into three full days, I had here, was about the right time for me. I saw all the listed “must-see” sights in the city along with some of the “also see” sights. If I could have arranged a half-day less, that wouldn’t have been a tragedy, but a full day more probably would have been too much for me.

I emphasized “for me” twice in the preceding paragraph for a couple of reasons. For one, the only person I can speak for confidently is me. Different strokes for different folks, as they say. But also, I think there’s a large segment, maybe a very large segment of the population, who would enjoy being here longer.

That segment of the population is defined as people who are less neurotic than I am or who don’t bother checking where there are malaria risks, or both. As I’ve mentioned a few times in my entries on Chiang Mai, before I planned this trip, I looked at the Canadian Blood Services pages on travel eligibility. They have a page listing malaria risk areas. Chiang Mai province is one of them, except for Chiang Mai city. So I was afraid to leave the city.

But there are several full-day and half-day tours that you can book from Chiang Mai out of the city. They look interesting and they’re available from several operators. For example, the most popular seems to be a trip to an elephant sanctuary, but there’s also a national park with hiking trails, and the city of Chiang Rai, which used to be a capital city and is supposed to have some beautiful temples, among other trips. The problem is going there involves leaving the city of Chiang Mai and, well, like I said, malaria. But if you’re someone who doesn’t worry about that sort of thing, then you might want at least another day or two with Chiang Mai as your base.

Thailand Summary

I feel silly titling this section “Thailand Summary.” I visited only Bangkok and Chiang Mai on this trip. And there are so many other parts of Thailand that I didn’t get to. I only saw a very, very, very small fraction of the country. So this is just a summary of my time in Thailand on this trip, not of Thailand in general.

One of the limiting factors in my planning my time in Thailand is that there are wide swaths of Thailand, primarily but not exclusively near the borders of other countries, that have a malaria risk. That frightened me away.

I don’t think Phuket is in the malaria zone. It’s very popular with tourists, but my impression of it from what I’ve read or seen about it is that it’s primarily a beach resort party town. That’s not my thing, so I considered it but decided against going there.

And there are probably other places outside of the malaria risk zones that are worth a visit. I should have done more research on the rest of Thailand before this trip since I was coming all this way.

Of the two cities I did visit, as I said above, I think I booked the right amount of time for me in Chiang Mai. And as I said in my summary for Bangkok, I might have appreciated another day or two there.

I shouldn’t close this off without saying that the people here have all been super nice. An exception was attendants at the ferries in Bangkok. Most of them were quite brusque. But mostly everyone else I had to deal with here could not have been more polite and usually greeted me with the traditional Thai greeting of hands in front of them, palms together and fingers up with a little bow of the head (just the head, not a full bow). There was also the word of greeting, which I never could quite make out.

From what I saw of it, Thailand is quite a culture shock for a lifelong Toronto boy (alright, Toronto old curmudgeon) who was only in Asia once before this trip (Japan), but very much worth visiting. I’m very pleased that I came here.