Ping River Cruise; Wat Sri Suphan

You might remember from the post about my first morning in Chiang Mai that I failed to take a cruise on the Ping River for, well, reasons. If you’re new here or need to refresh your memory, you can use the link in the previous sentence to read or reread that entry.

I didn’t give up. I took a cruise on the river this afternoon. After that, I visited another wat, Wat Sri Suphan. Because a day in Chiang Mai without a wat is like a day without something or other. I’m not sure what. But there are a lot of wats to see here.

Booking a Ping River Cruise

After my failure yesterday, rather than using my guidebook to try to find a Ping River cruise today, I searched Google Maps yesterday evening for “river cruise.”

It showed me an outfit on the river quite a piece away from the boat my guidebook sent me to. The one Google found is closer to my hotel than the other one, only a little over a ten-minute walk away.

Google also provided a link to a functional website that looked fairly professional. I clicked the “buy” button, but it wouldn’t sell me a single ticket, only two or more.

I decided to walk over there before starting my morning activities today and see if they’d sell me a single.

I got to the place approximately where Google Maps told me I should be, and there was what looked like a reasonably high-end hotel there. On the same sign as the hotel name, in the same font, were the words “Ping River Cruise.”

Okay. This must be the place.

I went to the front desk and asked if I could buy a ticket for the cruise. Why, yes, I could. They had only two cruises: an afternoon tea cruise at 2:00 or a dinner cruise at, I forget what time. This confused me because, from the website, I thought they were just barebones cruises that they ran four or five times a day. But, fine.

The afternoon tea cruise, which lasts an hour and a half, was half the price of the dinner cruise. I bought a ticket for the former.

This is somewhat ironic because it was more than twice the price of the cruise I turned down yesterday because I ostensibly balked at the single supplement the guy wanted to charge me.

On the Ping River Cruise

They asked me to arrive ten or fifteen minutes before the cruise, and I complied.

When I approached the boat, an immaculately dressed hostess wearing a white linen shirt with tasteful gold-coloured embroidery and tailored tan pants with monotone embroidery around the waist greeted me. She had me sit on a bench near the dock, offered me a menu of more than a dozen teas, and asked me to select two. And did I want them hot or iced? I chose two and asked for them iced.

No one in the vicinity looked like another customer. The reason no one looked like that was that I was the only passenger.

The hostess and I boarded the boat. There were already two staff on board. One was a woman who served me my tea during the cruise. She was dressed in a blue polo shirt with the hotel logo and crisp black slacks. The other was the boat driver, a man who also wore a white linen shirt with gold embroidery. He was standing where I couldn’t see what type of pants he was wearing. (I bet you didn’t think this would turn into a fashion blog, did you? I’m just full of surprises.)

The point is that these were not people dressed like they were wasting away in Margaritaville. The hostess and the other two staff stayed on board.

The boat was narrow with padded benches along the two sides. A few pillows sat on the benches. It was not so much an elegant boat as a handsome one. Definitely handsome. The boat probably could have held at least a dozen people, six on each side. The crew stood.

Waiting for me on board was a tray holding a two-tiered, fancy serving dish with two finger sandwiches, two scones, clotted cream and jams for the scones, and five small desserts. Another tray held my plate and cutlery wrapped in a cloth napkin.

Try to picture this in your mind. Here’s this handsome boat with me in it, enjoying high tea, attended by three staff. I felt like royalty, which means that because of the lèse majesté law in Thailand, you’re not allowed to mock or criticize me.

It was a lovely cruise along the Ping River. We floated through the city and into a more suburban area. There were very few areas without at least a few scattered homes or hotels on at least one side of the river. However, there were a few patches of forested areas on one side of the river.

Most of the houses along the way were modest, but a couple were modern and very expensive-looking. There were a few hotels that looked, at the very least, mid-range and maybe upscale. At one point, we passed what looked like a small village of wooden buildings, with a boat with a red roof parked out front on the river.

The Ping River is quite calm. The occasional twig that floated on it was pretty much stationary. I couldn’t tell which way was upstream and which way was downstream because I couldn’t see any movement in anything unpowered on the surface.

As we cruised along, I saw that the lower branches of trees close to or overhanging the river had what looked to me like garbage entwined in them. There was a lot of it. I asked the hostess about it. She said that the water rose quite high a while ago and that, indeed, was garbage washed by the flood.

I had heard about the flood. The guide on the Chiang Mai food tour I took yesterday mentioned that five weeks ago the Ping River greatly flooded its banks and a lot of where we were had been considerably under water. I guess the river picked up garbage from flooded garbage cans, streets, and backyards and carried it off to be entangled in the trees.

I’m glad I wasn’t here five weeks ago.

Oh, I should have mentioned this right at the beginning. As we pulled away from the dock, I looked along the river in the direction away from the way we were going. The equivalent of about a block away, if that, was a dock with a bunch of boats a little bigger than the one I was on and with several customers on them heading out for cruises.

It turns out, I’m pretty sure that the cruise I was on was not the one that Google told me about and that I saw on the web. I should have realized that because the website didn’t mention anything about tea service, and their cruises are supposed to last two and a half hours. The other one is probably a lot cheaper.

Had I walked a block farther this morning when I looked for the Ping River cruise place, I probably could have gotten a cheaper, longer cruise. Let that be a lesson to you. I don’t know what that lesson is. If you do, please let me know.

Then again, what an enjoyable way to cruise the river! Afternoon tea on a boat with a three-to-one staff-to-passenger ratio. Not bad.

The other boats cruised faster than the one I was on, and a couple passed us. The passengers on them looked over at me in my near-regal state and gave me what I thought was a look. Plebs.

My cruise went past the city boundaries a bit. That worried me a little because, as I mentioned in my post from yesterday morning, I read that there is a risk of malaria in Chiang Mai province, but not within the city. Then again, I doubt malaria-carrying mosquitoes know where the city limits are or know about and respect the rules about staying out of the city.

Be that as it may, a thought occurred to me as I watched the other boats travelling in the same direction we were going. Those boats travelled faster than the one I was on. And theirs is supposed to be a two-and-a-half-hour cruise versus my hour and a half. How far out of the city did they go? Their passengers are probably all violently ill with malaria by now.

Wat Sri Suphan

After leaving the Ping River cruise, I took a long walk to Wat Sri Suphan. Were it not for the heat and humidity, I wouldn’t have considered it a long walk, only about half an hour, but it was for the heat and humidity.

Wat Sri Suphan is a small temple—just one small prayer shrine and a couple of other small buildings. Its nickname explains why it’s special: the Silver Temple.

The temple was built circa 1500. There was a silversmith village there at the time, and the temple was built as a place for them to pray. Being silversmiths, whenever the temple needed repairs, they repaired it with silver.

Today, the entire temple—floors, ceilings and walls—is silver in colour. But it’s not all silver. There are also aluminum and nickel plates.

The outer walls have aluminum plates with relief sculptures. The interior walls also have relief decorations.

The floor has images and words etched into it. The images are, I believe, signs of the zodiac.

The words included the names of the oceans and continents. You’re probably thinking, ‘You’re in Thailand. You don’t speak or read Thai. How do you know they were the names of the oceans and continents?”

I would like to be able to say that I pick up languages quickly. But I’ve always been useless at them—sometimes even English.

I knew that’s what it said because it was written in English. Oh, and scattered here and there on the floor, the same three initials were engraved several times: “GPS.” Go figure.

One more thing.

I’ve been putting this off in this section about Wat Sri Suphan because I know it will rightfully upset some people. It upset me despite it not directly affecting me.

The Silver Temple is not at all a thoroughly modern place. For the second time this trip, I happened upon a religious building women were not allowed to enter. (The first was the Làk Meuang shrine at Wat Chedi Luang.) Here, the sign barring women was much more curt than there.

The only English on it said simply, “MAN ONLY.” Plus, there was a woman icon with a slash through it. Harrumph.

Offended on behalf of women, I called it a day and walked back to my hotel.