Driving the Highway the Thai Way
Another train journey. It wasn’t until on the train to Chiang Mai that I realised what a train at night should sound like. Clickety-clack, clickety-clack. For some reason our last train to Bangkok made none of those noises but rather a bang rattle grind rattle. Our car was the last on the train so not only did we have the standard view out each side of trees whizzing past but also the added benefit of being able to look out the back of the train and see where we have been. The further we progressed north two things Mel and I noticed above everything else to be different to the rest of Thailand. First the landscape. Hills mountains and jungle. second was the buildings. Cleanliness and substantiality. Up north the buildings look like they have been built for good. Southern Thailand gives you the impression that half the buildings or shacks were slapped up last week and would promptly fall over the week next. Each building was as clean and white as the next. Perhaps they don’t get as weathered up north as they do near the coast or Bangkok. Perhaps up north there is more ready access to white paint.
On the train Mel and I chatted with a guy by the name of Nate. From North America and extremely well endowed with dreadlocks he was heading north for the trekking. One of the most popular reasons for visiting Chiang Mai is for the Hill Tribe trekking. Three day hikes into the mountains to visit the hill tribes, ride elephants and smoke opium which grows on the hills. I figured the opium was the draw card for Nate as it is for so many other people. When we left the train and started to explore Chiang Mai it seemed every guest house and travel agent were offering “Non-Touristic Treks” into the mountains. I couldn’t find a damn touristic trek amongst the 96 odd different treks offered. Screw walking into the mountains visiting villages that ‘hadn’t seen foreigners’ before. I want coke machines and glossy itineraries. When you have hundreds verging on thousands of tourists rocking up to Chiang Mai each week how can you possibly have non-touristic trips into the hill tribes. I think some people find it disappointing to walk for a day to arrive at a village where the kids are wearing Nike and Adidas tee shirts.
Chiang Mai city is built around the original city which came under Thai rule in the 11th century. Since then it has changed hands a few times but for now the old city is a major stop for Thailand’s tourists. The old city is relatively intact and the local government intends on protecting what remains. The old city wall still surrounds the middle of town and there is a fully functional moat around the walls too, well as fully functional as a moat can be these days. They have even added fountains to it which I am sure the early 11th century kings would have killed for. In Chiang Mai there are as many temples as there are in the whole of Bangkok, 120 or so. You get the feeling that the whole centre of Chiang Mai is temple after temple with film shops and internet cafes in between as buffers. It is quite beautiful. Unlike a lot of other places in Thailand the tourists are very much integrated into the city instead of being shunted off to one side where there is a nice beach. Thus the whole city has a vibrant but quaint feel to it. Mel and I checked into a guest house called the Chiang Mai Souvenir Guest House. Located between the river and the east city wall it was a prime location to explore from. The guest house, although being in the middle of Chiang Mai, was set around a beautiful garden setting. The staff were great and the food delicious. However our nights there were hell. Our bed felt like the springs were about to hatch free and bound into the world. The only way to get comfortable was to lie in between the springs on your side. We also had the neighborhood hell hounds to keep us company all night. For some reason they didn’t like the sound of my voice. On our first night there I popped my head out the window and gave a friendly woof woof to the dogs. A sort of hello how are you sort of thing. Well, the shock waves are still being felt in Chiang Mai today. A wave of barking dominoed from property to property off into the distance. Thirty minutes later we could still hear the distant barks of dogs on the other side of the city.
We decided against doing a trek into the hills and instead decided on the most touristy thing we could come up with. A Khantoke dinner. Fifty or so years ago a Thai professor invented the Khantoke dinner to honor two foreign guests visiting. He was criticized by the Thai Government, specifically the tourism department, for cheapening the Thai culture and encouraging backwards and non westernized behavior. The Khantoke dinner consisted of everyone sitting on the floor eating dinner off of small tables while a performance of Thai dance was given. Fifty years later and the Khantoke dinner has taken off like a house on fire. Bus load by bus load of tourists pile into these Khantoke halls to sit on the floor, eat dinner off of small tables and watch traditional Thai dance. They all rush home to tell their friends they saw a genuine Khantoke dinner not realising the whole tradition was made up in the first place. The food was good, a sort of westernized Thai, and the dance was grand. I got a little restless as the dance was all Thai girls performing dainty moves with unnaturally long fingernails. But as soon as the guy with the 16 swords came out and flung them about the stage I was much happier. They even had a guy with flaming torches. Great!!
Chiang Mai is definitely the place to come to for crafts and textiles. The night markets were overflowing with jewelery, pots, carvings, clothes, daggers, frogs, watches (genuine Thai imitations) and bags. You name it and it was probably there. I can’t really say much more about the market as a market is a market is a market. Only the location, the goods for sale and the people selling them changes. Well thats pretty much it to a market really.
When it came time to leave Chiang Mai Mel and I scoured the whole of the city for the best deal in rental car we could get. There is a strange phenomenom in Chiang Mai called the “Not till Friday” phenomenom. Every place we went to did the same thing. We ask about the availability of a car, they look at a blank calendar for several minutes and then come back with “Not till Friday”. The next day we came up with a cunning plan. We would go around all the rental agencies and ask to look at one of their cars (to see if we wanted to rent it) and see how many of them took us around back to see a car that didn’t exist until Friday. One place not only had the exact car we wanted to rent parked outside but a whole fleet of cars. In the end we gave up and decided to play ball. We went back to Avis (who don’t really try harder) and settled with the tried and true Kia Sportage. We went to the airport to pick up our car because it was too hard for Avis to try and drive the car to us. As we were filling in the paperwork I looked up to notice a poster stating that Avis is James Bond, 007’s choice in rental car. I was going to ask if our car came with built-in rocket launchers and ejector seats but decided against it as they probably would have cost extra. We loaded up the beast and hit the roads once more.
I was a bit apprehensive at first to be back on the road along with several million Thai drivers but after running two red lights I felt right back into the swing of things again. We were heading for Doi Inthanon National Park, some 150km out of Chiang Mai. We had map book in hand and after studying our route very carefully set off. 170km later we decided we had missed our turn-off. Again after consulting our map we decided it wasn’t too much further to go around the block, so to speak, and thus began our first real lesson on how to navigate Thai roads (with lousy maps) when you’re not a Thai. We came across towns that didn’t exist. Couldn’t find turn offs that our map told us did exist. The scale of our map was 30km off per 100km. In the end after driving for two more hours we decided to pick the highest mountain we could see and head for it. You see Doi Inthanon is Thailands highest peak at 2600 meters. Unfortunately for us we could see two mountains that both looked equally as tall but luckily they were right next to one another. As we got closer to one of the two mountains we grew more and more convinced that the other one was infact taller. The signage on Thai highways is a bit confusing to say the least. For starters most of the signs are in Thai script, which kinda makes sense being in Thailand and all. So we were left with either examining each sign we went past for 20 minutes trying to find a match for the squiggles in our guide book or rely on the road numbers. Route 101 to route 1008 to route 90210. You cant go wrong with numbers surely? Wrong! At one point we came to a crossroads intersection to find that every direction was route 105. Go figure that one out. We even took one of the 105 possibilities to find the next intersection was the same. All 105. We figured it was some practical joke the Thai Transport Authority was playing on hapless tourists like us. Also it pays to keep an eye on your rear vision mirror when passing through intersections as the directions given to you solely depends on what direction you are coming from. We became very good at performing u-turns. Eventually we were climbing a tall steep hill that seemed to go on forever and just as we were about to give up all hope of ever finding out where the hell we were we pulled onto route 1095, the original turn-off we had intended to take before we got horribly lost. To our benefit we turned onto the highway 100 meters behind the park admission gates so we didn’t have to pay to enter the park. Ha ha we thought. There was a reason for driving 200km out of our way! It was to save $10 admission fees. Boy aren’t we clever.
We rushed up the mountain with failing sun light. We checked out the Wat’s and to my delight one was called a jedi wat. I made several Jedi night/monk jokes until I felt I had exhausted them all and Mels patience. We continued to the summit (marked by a ridiculously large sign saying “Thailand’s Highest Point”) and gazed across the Chiang Mai region. There were clouds above and clouds below. It was real beautiful. Not only did we have an amazing vista at the top but we also discovered a top secret spy lab also shared the summit with the visitors car park. Of course it make perfect sense to put a government monitoring lab at the top of the most visited mountain in Thailand. There were big signs on the fences saying “NO PHOTOGRAPHY”. What are they kidding? What do people go all the way up to the top of the stupid mountain for if they are not going to be able to take photos. How were they going to stop someone from inadvertently pointing their camera away from the view and towards the spy lab? How would they know? It reminded me of an episode of Thunderbirds I saw, many many moons ago when wooden puppets on strings were classed as quality TV viewing. In this episode I think it was Virgil in Thunderbird One, the big 1970’s NASA space rocket one, and he was rescuing someone as they always did. A reporter was on the scene and was trying to take a photo of the Thunderbird Rocket. For some reason the Thunderbirds didn’t like their rockets being filmed, presumably incase they had a zoom lens and could see the strings holding the rocket in the air. A red light behind a picture of a camera started blinking on Virgil’s dashboard as his camera detector had picked up the reporters intent to take a photo. Needless to say Virgil either whooshed away or shot the reporter (I can’t remember which one) and the secret of the Thunderbirds was preserved for another day. I figured the Thai government had a similar technology but I wasn’t game enough to test it out just incase a trap door opened up beneath my feet and I found myself plummeting to the bottom of the mountain.
Also one of the things we were looking forward to at the top of the mountain was the cold. All the way up we were giggling to each other about how we would walk around in shorts and tee shirts and it would be just like at home. At the base of the mountain the temperature was 30 degrees, at the top it was 10. After spending six weeks in Thailand 10 degrees feels like -10. We very quickly got back into the car and decided we liked Thailand’s version of Autumn better than New Zealand’s. On our way down the mountain we had a sun set to kill for but as we were three hours behind schedule we had to press on. The sun quickly set and we were quickly lost again. Just as we decided to point the car in the direction we thought Chiang Mai should be we came across a gem of a guest house called the Little Home Guest House. We had a great meal and slept like two very tired logs that night. The next day we hit the road early-ish and the destination today was Sukhothai Historical Park, some 200km further south. Sukhothai is the site of the original Thai capital some 900 years old. We managed to find the park without incident this time. We decided on a route that had the least amount of turn-offs that we could potentially miss. In fact we were so successful at finding the park that it caught us by surprise. We suddenly looked out the car windows to find ourselves cruising down a highway with 900 year old ruins on either side of the road. We found a guest house right across the road from the main park gates and dumped all our stuff before having an explore through the ruins. The ruins have to a large extent been restored. Paved footpaths lead you between touched up temples and landscaped gardens. It was really quite something. Each of the temples in the park have had their floors rebricked and had the big holes in the walls covered up with cement. At a glance you would never notice though. We had a good play on and around the temples and monuments before the sun left us again and we retired for the night. That night I discovered a new hatred for roosters. The place next door to our guest house bred chickens, thus had a few roosters around.
The old story about roosters waking you up at the crack of dawn didn’t bother me. I was in fact looking forward to being woken early with a gentle “Cook-a-doodle-doo”. But that didn’t happen. There was nothing gentle about it and these roosters obviously don’t know what time dawn was. 12am — “Cock-a-doodle-doo”. 1am — “Cock-a-doodle-doo”. 2am, 3am, 3:45am, 4am, 5am — “Cock-a-doodle-doo”. At 6am Mel rolled over to me. “What’s the quickest way to kill a rooster with a pocket knife?” she asked. These roosters were insane. The next morning we rose early and grumpy and swore if we saw a rooster on the side of the road we would run over the bastard! We continued our exploration of the ruins and later drove 50km up the road to two more sites of ruins. This is one thing I like about the Thai Government’s attitude to their cultural history. They are not anal retentive like most other countries. If these ruins were back at home they would have rope fences, security guards, and big signs saying “NO FLASH PHOTOGRAPHY”. Here we could climb, walk around, in and over the temples. I liked being able to feel a part of the history instead of observing it at a distance. However, having said that if these ruins were back at home they would probably be covered with graffiti and every square inch would be covered with inscriptions such as “Gazza 4 Sheila 4 eva”. Mel and I just sat on the monuments and tried to picture how they looked with ceilings and walls with monks bustling through them. The second park of ruins we went to was not as restored as Sukhothai and the temple sat amongst long wild grass. I like this much more than the pretty lakes and moats of Sukhothai. Nature had reclaimed the land and that’s the way I liked it. Unfortunately we noticed on our way out bulldozers and diggers were busy digging a new moat around the city and workers were busy piling bricks back onto the crumbling city walls. It was nice to see it how nature wanted it to look. Once we had our full of ruins we headed off to Phitsanulok, East.
Phitsanulok is built in the middle of these extremely flat plains. The city looked hazy and ugly and the 6 lane highway passing right through it didn’t add much to the visual appeal of it. We didn’t stop. We continued on towards the next national park we were intending to visit, Phu Hin Rong Kla National Park. 50 or so k’s out of Phitsanulok we found a bungalow operation off the main road and down a dirt road for about 1km. Unfortunately for me there was no mud and I didn’t even get the chance to kick the beast into 4WD. We pulled up to the bungalows to find them totally deserted bar a friend of the owner who was looking after them. He most obligingly put us up for the night and showed us to our cottage by the river. The setting was amazing. A bubbling river flowing past our front door and lovely gardens around us. Once again we unloaded and went to the restaurant for dinner. The menu was totally in Thai Script and this made ordering our meal very interesting. Luckily we had our trusty Phrase book in hand. After 20 minutes of going through every possible combination of food we felt like eating to be told “No not have” we finally realised that the only food they had was a couple of fish. So we settled for the fish. We felt that the dinner was well deserved and enjoyed it thoroughly. Then next morning we decided to brave breakfast fearing we would be stuck with more fish. We went to the restaurant but could not find our wonderful host from last night. But there was nothing to worry about because his wife was to the rescue. A lovely lady she was but could not speak a word of English. Also it seemed she was oblivious to the fact that we spoke no Thai. She would merrily have conversations with us and we would smile, laugh when we though appropriate and nod approvingly when she walked up to our table with bacon and eggs in hand. After being fed we hit the road once more to Phu Hin Rong Kla National Park, the once home to the Communist Party of Thailand (CPT).
Not 20 years ago the mountain was swarming with the PLAT, the communist army. Now the old camps are all that remains of both the CPT and the PLAT and they have become the center piece of this national park. At the top of the mountain we explored the cliffs where the army used to hide during the Thai Army’s air raids, the peak they rose the hammer and sickle on after each victory and the old HQ where all the decisions were made. There was a jail for all the very naughty communists and a grave yard for all the very dead communists. From my understanding the CPT came about after student protests in Bangkok where several students were killed by the guns of the Thai Army. So it was no surprise to learn that the CPT was made up of mostly Thai students who had forsaken their university degrees to go fight for the cause. This was a war and several lives were lost on both sides. Also nothing was really achieved. In 1985 the Thai government offered an amnesty to all the students who had joined the CPT and thus the war was effectively over. All the students went home and the CPT were a push over for the Thai forces. I am not a big fan of wars, who is? I think they are a total waste of time and lives and are usually started by people who ride a power wave for so long that they forget what it was exactly they were fighting for in the first place. But I wasn’t there so I can’t really comment. However I felt the sorrow for one family as I walked past the grave of someone who was loved very much. The grave was covered with flowers, snacks and a bottle of their favorite beer. It made me wonder if I would or could ever pick up arms to fight for something I believed in that much to die for. I hoped for the sake of this family that this soldier died fighting for something they believed in to the very core.
We left the national park after a quick snack and suffering from mild heat exhaustion we had no idea of where to go next. We had 1/2 a tank of gas and 700 baht in our pockets. Not much. We had to find a bank within the next 200 km or so. We figured that if we continued west we were bound to hit a large town with an ATM. So west we went. None of the towns on the map were mentioned in our Lonely Planet so it appeared that we were heading for land that no tourist had ever visited before. Well rather there is no reason for any tourist to visit. At 1/4 of a tank I pulled into a gas station and decided to blow the 700 baht on gas. Food we could go without and we could always sleep in the car. But as the happy singing gas station attendant stopped filling our tank after five liters because they had run out of gas I decided to turn the car around and we would head for Phitsanulok, the horrid ugly Phitsanulok. Just as soon as I leapt into the drivers seat I leaped back out again as it was Mel’s turn to drive. It is only when in the passengers seat and you have disengaged your road tactical defense system that you realise how insane it is driving on Thai roads. I have mentioned Thai drivers before and I will mention them again. THEY ARE F*^%N CRAZY! Mel and I had a theory that came to enlightenment in Bangkok while we were navigating a busy mall by foot. Somehow we were the only people tripping over everyone else. Thai people walk like they drive. We were constantly walking into the back of people when they stopped suddenly and into the side of them as they cut us off. It was only once we stopped and observed we discovered that they either have a built in radar or have tapped into the greater consciousness. It was like everyone knew what direction everyone else was going and their intention to change trajectory at any given moment. As we were not part of this greater consciousness we were constantly colliding with very small Thai people. They would glare at us as if saying” What the hell you up to bub? I clearly stated my intention to spin left aimlessly at a 90 degree angle to look at those shoes. What are you stupid or something”? Once we applied this to driving it all came frighteningly clear to us. They are all insane. However since those days in Bangkok I have discovered that Mel has somehow tapped into the greater consciousness and can quite naturally drive like a Thai. I am not saying Mel is a bad driver, quite the opposite in fact. But Mel has the ability to navigate streets and intersections that I would probably be still sitting at to this very day waiting for someone to give way to me. Mel went around roundabouts in a new lane she invented called the outside outside lane, ran red lights because green must mean stop in Thailand. Mel even stopped at a crossing to let a Thai girl cross. The girl gave Mel a nervous glance as we waited for her to cross and stepped off the curb to be buzzed by a long procession of motorbikes and other vehicles pulling around us. Pedestrian crossings only indicate that this would be a good place to cross if there were no cars on the road. As a pedestrian you get no more privilege at a crossing than you would walking across a busy motorway. Put a New Zealander on the roads and they stop at every pedestrian crossing. I admire Mel’s natural skill at driving and when she wasn’t rushing intersections or bullying across lanes she was hanging out the window reprimanding all the other drivers who didn’t have their headlights on. However I joke about the Thai drivers and their compulsive behavior to pass on blind corners but coming into Phitsanulok we drove past a reminder that insanity doesn’t make up for stupidity. A late model Nissan was on the side of the road behind the blinking lights of a tow truck. The front of the car was missing and the engine had been relocated to on the drivers seat. We hoped there was no fatality but somehow we figured that it doesn’t matter if you have a Buddha on your dashboard that Thai people die on Thai roads.
We have since checked into a wonderful youth hostel called the Phitsanulok Youth Hostel surprisingly enough. It has an amazing garden setting and the rooms are paneled with old teak walls salvaged from several houses in nearby Tak being demolished. The whole place has a nice enviro-friendly feel to it. It is very restful. Mel and I decided to stay here for a couple of days for some R&R and will be hitting the roads again tomorrow. Next stop is the wild west towns on the border of Myanmar (Burma) and right back up to Chiang Mai. Thanks for the two replies, you both know who you are and I thank you very much. If someone could also tell us who the President of the United States of America is we would be very very grateful to find out. Last we heard it was in the hands of the squabbling lawyers going from one court to the other. Have they run out of courts yet?
Best regards, V