Adventures of a Wandering Thirtysomething

Leaving Chiang Mai wraps up the city portion of our trip. The southern Thailand beaches of Railay and Ko Phi Phi are all that remains. Yours truly has been excited for the beach since we arrived, but just as with weekends, the more you anticipate them the sooner they’ll be over. Realizing our trip to Thailand is winding down is tough, but I think I can manage by drowning my sorrows in sunshine and smoothies.

The first half of our trip, and Chiang Mai itself, has left us with many mixed emotions. It was the site of perhaps our most memorable travel experience at the Elephant Nature Park, while at the same time the site of a tourist industry rooted in the exploitation of animals. It’s an unavoidable reality that as tourism continues to grow in this part of Thailand it will be at the expense of the Asian elephants, the water buffalo, the tigers, and the monkeys. Every hotel, every guide book, and every tuk tuk is plastered with advertisements for trekking with the elephants or the tiger kingdom. Christina has already mentioned the harm being done to the elephants through this practice, and through fellow travelers we learned the tiger kingdom was nothing more than a petting zoo with tigers drugged and sedated allowing tourists to approach.

It’s encouraging to see, however slowly it may be, that change is coming. Americans of our generation continue to travel the world and seek out opportunities for eco-tourism. The Elephant Nature Park is hoping to drum up support among these travelers, like ourselves, who hope that their tourist dollars will ultimately improve the destinations they visit. The park has a current operating budget of $250,000 a year that includes a staff of over 70 people and even more volunteers. A staff including guys like our guide Sunshine who is 30 years old, unmarried and college educated. He believes that while the pay is not much, he wants to live a life that makes a difference before things like marriage and kids require more focus on income. Sunshine is a direct descendent of the native tribe of Thailand that has been caring for the elephants for thousands of years.

Following our day at the Elephant Nature Park, we decided to get all of the tourist sights knocked out in one shot. It proved to be a good choice. We walked all across town to see the various wats (Buddhist temples) and finished the day at the night market. I’m sure that if Chiang Mai was the only place in Thailand we’d visited these activities would be more impressive, but sadly after a week it had all become rather routine. Temples all start to look alike and it’s hard to appreciate the significance of each. This was the same phenomenon we experienced with the churches in Europe. At one point while I was lying in the hotel room I noticed the temple photo that graced the cover of our guide book and found it astonishing that just two weeks earlier that photo had seemed so foreign and mysterious. At that moment that very same photo seemed so common and routine.

Rounding out our full day, we hit up the night bazaar where we encountered yet another on-going travel theme for us: the things we’re “supposed” to see and do end up far down the list of our favorite experiences. We set out from the hotel intent on getting dinner at the night bazaar, which is when the streets outside of the old town flood with vendors of all kinds and people flock from all around to browse or enjoy some street food. After walking for maybe 20 minutes and seeing countless knock-off American products and restaurants serving crummy food to white people, we bailed. Hopping a tuk tuk, we cruised to the exact opposite side of town and enjoyed a fantastic authentic northern Thai dinner in a quiet restaurant.

Our final day in Chiang Mai was a memorable one. Just as our time in Thailand started with a food tour in Bangkok, we finished with a food tour in Chiang Mai. Waking up that morning, Christina and I both had little motivation for another scheduled activity, but we were thankful we stuck with it. The guide, an ex-pat from England, was one of the authors of the very guidebook we were using as part of our trip planning (what a surprise we knew of his particular food tour). Unlike the tour in Bangkok, which focused primarily on understanding the different influences in Thai food through sampling many dishes all across the city, our Chiang Mai tour was much more of a cultural education. Having spent the last week exploring on our own, this private tour became an opportunity for us to ask all the questions we’d built up. For every food question Christina would ask I would chime in with a question about Buddhism and the temples or the local jobs and economy. We learned so much and filled in so many holes that it gave us a renewed appreciation for all the earlier sights and experiences of our trip.

With the afternoon free of any obligations, we opted to check out a Thai spa. Christina chose to get a mani-pedi and I went with a 1.5 hour traditional Thai massage. Both services cost us a grand total of $23. It has continued to amaze us just how inexpensive Thailand can be. A 30-40 minute taxi ride across Bangkok? Three bucks. A three-course course dinner? Anywhere from $10 - $20. Matt and Christina travel staples like ice cream and bottled water? Just $1.30 and 25 cents respectively.

On our tour I wanted to dig into this with our guide and try to discover if the unreasonably low prices were a function purely of the exchange rate or if someone working in Thailand of similar education and experience as me would have the same buying power. What I learned was shocking as a typical Thai student coming out of college with a four year degree would be hoping to land a job paying only around $300 a month. We make more than that in a day!

There is no doubt that as Christina and I keep traveling the world our perspective will continue to grow. It’s easy to view Thailand as an excellent inexpensive travel destination but for anyone willing to look just beneath the surface, there are people and animals paying a price. So we continue to count our blessings, try to make wise decisions with our travel dollars, and wrestle with the mixed emotions.