C

Our visit to Chiang Mai began with a Thai staple: a visit to the night market to sample some Thai food in the cool of the evening and then stroll around the stalls selling handicrafts and other tourist goods. A wonderful introduction to a feature of most Thai tourist centers. Here you can buy yeverything from batteries to sunglasses tie-dyes to silks. After the heat of the day in Sukothai it was delightful to be in the cool of the northern mountains.

Our day begins with a fragrant gift from Pi Bol. She brings us leis of a lovely fragrant white flower, which is possibly jasmine. Its delicate perfume accompanies us for the rest of the day. We leave the hotel around 10 and drive first to Wat Jed Yod (Photharammahavihan), a Burmese style temple. Pi Dom explains to us that in this part of Thailand there is still a mix of cultures including the Lanna and the Burmese as well as Thai. There are temples that reflect each of these cultures and by the end of our second trip to Thailand a year later we are somewhat familiar with them and can recognise them all.

From Wat Jed Yod we drive up to a hilltop overlooking the city to visit the wonderful royal temple of Doi Su Thep. We walk up the ritual staircase with its dragon-decorated sides to get to the platform on which the temple sits. But before we can enter the temple proper we have to don wrap-around silk skirts (me) and short-but-wide cotton trousers (Dave and Gerry) to hide our bare legs. Our first sight of the inner temple is nothing short of stunning. Because of the bright sunshine and the plethora of gold leaf, the place is a mecca for photographers. But it is also a place of worship and to recognise this Gerry buys a ‘kit’ so that Jan can say a prayer for her mother back at home in England. The kit consists of a rose to lay on the altar, a candle to light, some joss (incense) sticks to burn, and finally a small square of gold leaf to attach to a metal plate. Jhap approvingly supervises Jan's bowing technique!

On the way out of the temple, we stop at some of the souvenir stalls and Gerry buys himself a mask of Buddha and then bargains for a wrap-around silk skirt and a length of dark blue and gold silk cloth. Having successfully closed the deal, we walk down to the parking lot to find Pi Dom and Pi Bol and there we eat a pleasant lunch of noodle soup in a small open-sided restaurant. An aside for students of foreign toilets: Thailand is the cleanest Asian place for toilets. Even the most primitive loos are clean, odor-free, and have clean water available for hand flushing.

From lunch we drive back down into Chiang Mai and then out of town in a different direction to visit an orchid nursery and butterfly farm. By this time it’s already 3 pm and there’s no time for an elephant show so we go back into town and find a computer shop, where we help Dave choose his first ever computer. He picks a Compaq Presario notebook computer which he orders for pickup the next day before we leave town. We're very happy to welcome another member of the family to the online world.