Temples and more of the north

I don’t know how you prepare for another culture. You read books. You watch films. But when you park your bag in the clean hotel room and you grab your cotton cap and you wander out into the streets and wham…..is it the noise? The smell? The feral cats darting from alley to alley. The minor motorcycles zooming everywhere. The open spaces on the ground level, with tables on an angle where people sit and drink or sit and eat or stand and cook. The sky is visible in strips above you as the narrow streets with their two storey buildings crowd it out. Every where underfoot there are slabs of uneven concrete perhaps covering water pipes. The streets have potholes, the sidewalks come and go on a whim. The poles carrying hundreds of electrical and telephone wires interrupt your way and the wires sling and circle above you like a knitters nightmare. Staying within the walls of the Old City. It is where you stay when you come to Chiang Mai I am told. It is not like a city. It is as it was. With sections of the old brick walls and a moat that defines it’s borders. It isn’t that it is dirty, but it is cluttered. In a way that has secured it’s survival, it is now full of hotels and guest houses. Using the existing buildings for the most part. Restaurants, some haphazard with plastic chairs, some inside what looks like a furniture store. Many, now cleaned up and spacious, sadly serving pizza and burgers. There are many massage places. Blind massage, Thai massage, every version of massage that you can get on a sandwich board. But there are also places like the Coconut Cookery school where you share tables with other visitors and eat paper spring rolls with basil and rice turned blue with a local flower and sweet curries served out of a coconut. Met a young family from near Strasbourg in France, who were coming to the end of a six month trip with their daughter Capucine. They told us of the many bus trips they had been making as they made their economical way around South America and South East Asia. They said all you need are Two T shirts, a pair of shorts and a pair of jeans. That was the key apparently. Note to self. Don’t need the pink linen trousers. The boutique hotel was called “ ElliBum”. An airy, eclectic place full of flowers and wicker furniture. Run by these glorious sisters. One whom has pink hair and when I asked her where the name came from she turned and patted her bottom. “ the most famous bottom in Chiang Mai,” she said. “ As big as an elephant’s.” Elephants like sticky rice with Ginger. Just in case you ever get the chance to feed one. And cucumbers and bananas. They will stand and pick up things from your hand one by one with their glorious trunks. For hours and hours. The ones at the sanctuary I met ranged from 6 years old to 76. Each with their ‘mahout.” The person who stays with them like a favorite uncle, makes sure they are safe and don’t get into trouble. Temples. Criminal to confess but after marveling at one and possibly two, it’s a relief to look at something with straight lines. I remember many years ago a great British travel journalist called Julian Pettifer, talking about how people had stopped using their eyes to record what they were seeing but used a camera. I think he called it “ missing the Diamond.” That it was a like a screen between them and what was unfolding in front of their eyes. What would he make of it now, I wonder. There is no arm without a cell phone pointing at a sight or held high to catch oneself and the sight or just to catch oneself and bugger the sight. The white temple of Chiang Rai was awash with single poses and walking videos and requests and gathering of groups and even a dog with booties who was lifted up to be remembered by the Buddha. It was a total chaos of little screens. It had a bridge that you walked over , apparently to Paradise. Surrounding you as you start your ascent was a sea of cement hands clawing upwards