Chiang Mai is a large city in north thailand surrounded by mountainous jungle and fertile farmland. After so many weeks in modest towns and villages in Laos, we found the wide busy streets and cluttered pavments slightly intimidating. The city is awash with travellers, so guesthouses and hotels are everywhere. I'd like to be able to say that we found a place to call home here, but it's difficult to draw any comparisons between the spotless, comfortable english homes in our minds and the underlit, cramped rooms we have here with disfunctional toilets and matressess that might as well be made of granite.
Anyway, it seems that rather than the city itself, most people come here to indulge in the hundreds of treks, cooking courses, elephant reserves, tiger kingdoms and hill tribe homestays offered by the tourist offices. We were happy to find that the headquarters of an organic farm cooking course was directly over the road from our hostel/dungeon, so we booked on to the course the next day.
We were entered into a group of 10 other budding culinarians, and the first stop was a local market. Here, our thai guide Tommy provided us with his encyclopeadic knowledge of different rice varieties, and then let us amble through the stalls to see what else was on offer. Some of the group were a little horrified by the pigs heads and chicken guts available, but we had been happily desensitised to these strange food preparations back in Hanoi, where we watched a freshly decapitated frog hop from a startled woman's stall and attempt to cross the road in front.
Next we made it to the farm; a quiet, lushous piece of land surrounded by lotus ponds and forests. Tommy showed us some of the produce they were growing. We were shown papayas, thai ginger, mangoes, thai basil, limes, lemongrass, corriander, chillies and many more. Tommy gave us some information about each, and sometimes some jokes as well. A notable example was the thai aubergine, which is the size of a marble and has a much stronger flavour than it's european cousin. Tommy explained that everything in Thailand is smaller, and gave a cheeky self deprecating grin, much to our amusement.
We had booked into a full day of cooking, and each of us had chosen five dishes from a list of options. Personally, I had chosen a chicken massaman curry, tom yam kung, papaya salad, spring rolls, and sweet sticky rice with mango. The curry was easily the most challenging, and also the most delicious. We began with a mortar and pestle, and were instucted to vigourously smash our raw spices into a paste. Tommy explained that the required movement was a short upwards and downwards motion with the wrist, and if performed properly, it should create a loud and frantic banging on the bottom of the mortar. He added that when a thai man is trying to choose a bride, he waits in the living room and listens to the sound of curry paste being made in the kitchen. Satisfactory banging noise means "Good wife because she has good hand". He chuckled and repeated the motion with his wrist, flashing a grin my way. I wasn't particularly disturbed at the time, but i found it a little disconcerting later on when he sidled up to me while i smashed the spices and whispered "good wife" in my ear.
All in all, the banquet was a success, and we gluttonously feasted on our creations in a open air dining room in the middle of the lilly ponds. There were a few slip ups with the chillies, which we perhaps hadn't used as sparingly as we should have done, given that they were the hottest variety in thailand. My papaya salad, for example was a blazing inferno so hot that it nearly warped the air above it.
A fantastic day, nonetheless.
The other trip we went on was a packed day of elephant riding, jungle trekking, waterfall swimming, white water rafting, and bamboo punting. The elephant were good fun. We sat on the back of the huge beasts in twos, with the thai driver placed on the head. At one point, our driver was distracted by a stray chicken in the jungle, and he jumped off the head with a slingshot presumable attempting to hunt it. Ed and I found ourselves in sole control of the behemoth, who was far more interested in spraying herself (and us) with cool mud and drinking from the river than going the direction we asked.
Even more worrying was the fact that we were being pursued by a notably well-endowed bull elephant who was ignoring the minute chinese ladies on his back and seemed to be threatening penetration at any moment. Fortunately, nothing came of his advances.
The jungle "trek" really turned out to be more of a jungle stroll. We walked for forty minutes towards the waterfall, crossing streams and inspecting the exotic insect life along the way. The waterfall was lovely and cooling after our "trek", but as soon as we felt suitably cooled for the return journey, it began to rain.
It's impossible to truly understand the word "rainforest" if you havent been slipping and sliding down muddy streams that were once paths with all of heaven thundering down overhead. There was thunder and lightening. Gigantic bolts which lit up the dark sky to a blinding white, and deafening crashes of thunder that sounded like a skyscraper being demolished with you on the bottom floor.
The guide was dubious about taking us rafting after a storm so terrifying, but we decided to do so anyway. The rapids were perilous. Four of us sat staggered in the inflatable boat with a thai skipper on the back barking out hurried commands as if we were in a warzone. "FO'WARD!" "BACK!" "RIGH'!" "LEF'!" "STOP!" "DOWN!".
Down was the worrying one. Usually this meant we were seconds away from sliding down a not unimpressive waterfall, and we had to crouch down in the middle of the boat with feet jammed beneath the seats for support, one hand firmly gripping the rope at the side of the boat. During these times, the boat would topple down the rapids, crashing into the angry water and basically putting the boat (and us) fully underwater for a split second. Besides a minor fall when the french girl opposite me lost her grip and slammed into my side of the boat nearly sending me over the edge, our team managed to pull through. There were comparably calm stretches of river between the worst rapids, and we use the time to catch our breath and let the adrenaline settle. We floated past a boat containing a crying girl being comforted by her friend; apparently a member of their team had tumbled into the rapids and it had scared her. The man-ovrboard was unharmed.
Once the rapids had been defeated, we left the boat and climbed precariously onto a long, unstable bamboo raft. With the weight of us all on it, the actual raft was drifting invisibly a foot beneath the murky water. Nathan used a long bamboo pole and punted down the river to the finish line, and although we did get there quite fast, he had some trouble breaking in the fast flowing current. In his defense, he had recieved absolutely no formal instruction, and our well meaning skipper's limited english vocabulary did nothing to help matters. A swiss man and I bailed as we crossed the line and strenuously swam to the bank, moving about an inch a second against the strong current. Nathan dissapeared along the river struggling with the raft. We waited at the camp for five minutes and I presumed Nathan was lost to the river, but he appeared shortly after, half drowned and wheezing with his five foot thai rescuer.
I'm leaving Chiang Mai today to visit the town of Pai in the north, while the other three go to "Tiger Kingdom" to pet and wrestle with a tame half-ton tiger and it's cubs. I don't know how tame such a beast can be, and we were assured that the tigers are not sedated. Given the mane-like shape of Ed's beard and hair, I wouldn't be suprised if he was mistaken for a lion and attacked by the monstrous feline.
I hope my goodbye was not the final one.
No comments:
Post a Comment