Chanting from the Laos side of the Mekong river woke me with sunrise. I stepped through our hotel door and found a seat on the grass outside to watch fog curl around the riverbank, rise to a soft mist then dissipate toward the mountains in the distance. We get on the road before breakfast, hoping to find something along the way from Chiang Kong to our next destination of Chiang Rai. At this early hour, Chiang Kong city is quiet with it's shops still drawn closed with metal garages rolled over glass doors. As we return to the countryside, we share the road with field workers in rubber boots and baskets hanging off their motor bikes. Morning fog and magic hang on the horizon in patches.
We pull over on the side of the road and find a little restaurant serving the morning work crowd. We enjoy a hot and savory broth over rice and chicken, the flavors of ginger, lemongrass, galangal, garlic, and red pepper steeping in a pot weighted down by chicken bones.
By the time we return to the road, the sun had burned off the layer of fog and a blue bird day serves as a canvas for bright yellow flowers that hang on rows and rows of trees that line the road. It's beautiful, and we open the car windows to let a sweet fragrance blow through and toss our hair.
As we near Chiang Rai, the roads widen and we are joined by the whir of a thousand other motorists. We hunt down our hotel spot and park the car, relieved to be free of it’s wide berth. As we sit in the lobby, waiting for our room key, Andrew and I are both consumed by a strange sense of nostalgia, an awareness of history we don't know much about. The chandeliers in the entry, swaths of floral fabric strung to create a canopy over the patio, wooden furniture obviously hand carved and polished, the antique bronze and glass jar menagerie perched on shelves. We take our key and use the hundred year old skeleton prong to open the door to our room. Gauzy swaths curtain a four post bed, an antique style mirror, table and upholstered bench sit in the corner. Thick wood slats sanded smooth sound heavy against our footfall.
“If I had to describe an opium den...” Andrew says, looking around.
Chiang Rai is just South of what is known as the “Golden Triangle” the point where the borders of Thailand, Laos, and Myanmar meet. In the mid-1800s, a vast quantity of opium was grown and distributed via the silk road and through shipping back to China for consumption and use by the Chinese population until the Chinese government realized its economy was suffering significant harm as a result and attempted to put a stop to the trade. Two separate wars (1839–1842) and (1856–1860) broke out between Britain and China over the matter, in what is now known as the “Opium Wars”. Something of the mood hung in the curtains and wall tapestries of our hotel.
We stop for a pot of tea and a small lavender tea cake at an historic tea shop nearby, before continuing on to make a circuit of the “can't miss tourist attractions of Chiang Rai:” The White Temple, the Black Temple, and the newest Blue Temple.
Though a city older than Chiang Mai a few hundred miles South, Chiang Rai is coming into its own as a tourist destination, offering several buildings built less as functioning temples and more as modern art displays. Most famous is the White Temple, designed and built in 1997 as a contemporary, unconventional, privately owned art exhibit in the style of a Buddhist Temple. Instagram is thick with photos of tourists with selfies half way along the “Bridges of Rebirth” or along side sculptures of Michael Jackson, Neo from “The Matrix”, Freddy Krueger, the Terminator, Harry Potter, Superman, and Hello Kitty. Every tourist brochure you pass includes a tour of the White Temple, from hundreds of miles around you can find tour companies offering to pack you on a bus for a day trip up these swooping single lane roads so you won't miss North Thailand’s spectacular attraction: the White Temple.
On the way, though, you can stop at the Blue Temple, the Black Temple, and another new temple quite white in its own right. The Blue Temple was closest to our hotel, so we headed there first.
It is impossible to miss. As we get closer according to sign posts and maps, tour busses line the road, smoking and grumbling to keep their air conditioning units alive while the occupants make the circle around the nearby attraction and return to carry on down the road. We squeeze between rows of these monsters, leaving little space for even pedestrians to squeeze through. I marvel how they might share the road together when it's time to leave. As we turn the corner, a temple themed of dragons, lions, and bright blue spreads itself across the block. Monks dressed in their bright orange robes make a complimentary scene to the blue. I watch as they take photos of their own tour of Thailand, just like me. And, I wonder: where are these gentlemen on their own path toward enlightenment.
We have yet to find a spiritual guide the likes of Wayan, our Taxi Cab Guru from Bali, and we are left to piece together what we can of the Thai Buddhist culture from Wikipedia entries on the internet and the sometimes poorly translated signs guiding us through temple after temple. A disconcerting sense of frustration lingers for me. Left to my own devices, I feel unable to peel away the layers of new tourism and the superstitious practices of offerings for wealth or luck from the spiritual core of the religion itself. Maybe you can’t. Maybe you shouldn't. Maybe all religions are not only what they are meant to be, but also what they come to be in practice. Either way, I forego the line waiting to paste a gold leaf square on a line of golden spheres, and instead peer through my camera lens to add one more layer of glass and tuk-tuk exhaust between my self and enlightenment.
From the moment we arrived in Thailand, we felt this complexity. For example, Thailand is known for spiritual and warrior based tattoos. Yet, we watched the hordes of Russian tourists walk past trinket huts and tattoo parlors offering butterflies for purchase to permanently adorn the valley of their lower back just above the crevice of their butt cracks. Thailand is known for friendly welcome and hospitality, and indeed, I have walked by bars and restaurants to find a beautiful young woman(*) spoon feed - literally spoon feed! - a fully grown adult man. I'm not judging, per se, I just can't sense what is real Thailand, and what is contrived to satisfy the prurient interest of tourism. Our expected love of Thailand grayed to confusion, as it seems the real Thailand is there, but also distorted.
We wave goodbye, taking one last look at the pure white Buddha statue in the driveway, and I wonder if I will come to a settled impression of this place by the time we finish our tour.
Next up in our Chiang Rai temple circuit, we head toward the “Black Temple.” Also an art exhibit rather than a functioning temple, this one is shrouded in some controversy for it’s depiction of death and darkness that tend to plague humanity in our lesser moments. Many of the conservative Buddhist Thai people dislike it as they are encouraged to always rest their eyes and minds and hearts upon gratitude and the path of enlightenment - not the pitfalls that can take you into despair on either side. As we approach, we see swarming masses of humanity buzzing their frenetic pace around buses and trinket stands. How many temples must we circuit to say we’ve done this properly? I see Andrew physically leaning back and away. When we discover there is an entry fee, the cheapskate wins out and Andrew turns a 180 degrees.
I snap a photograph from outside the gates and mourn the undeniable fact you never have enough time, money, or maybe even attention span to see everything in this great giant world.
“I think that’s enough temple-ing for me today," he declares. "We still need to find a new Thai food to eat today." We set a course to what turns out to be the most colorful night market we have found yet, located inside the Chiang Rai Flower Festival Gardens.
Our dinner is as colorful as the scenery. First, we find a salt packed fish, roasted over open coals. The salt crust packed between its skin and meant creates a delicious seal that keeps all the juices inside and the meat tender. This is meant to be laid upon a sharp and jagged, bitter leaf related to the cilantro plant., then topped with a hot and sweet diced chili sauce. We eat this along side a salad we've never had before: rice simmered in coconut milk and pea flower to make the beautiful purple color, torch ginger to make the pink spicy floral taste, lemongrass, shredded carrot, thinly sliced zucchini and purple onion, a dry roasted red pepper powder, dried, roasted and shredded coconut, and kafir lime leaves. Mix this all together with a dressing involving lime juice, fish sauce, palm sugar, and red pepper - it is a flavor and texture pleasure.
To drink, neon purple lemon peaflower juice. A delicious lemonade tinged bright purple by steeping the petals of the pea flower.
Ah Roy! - Which means “delicious” in Thai.
“Don’t you feel the least bit bad we didn’t visit the Black Temple today?” I ask, scrolling through Wikipedia entries trying to answer a few more Buddhism questions. I scroll past advertising for the Black Temple and find an entirely new one. “Oh my gosh, there is a red temple, too!”
“No.” Andrew says, popping the top off his Chiang beer.
“But, it says here you cannot miss this on your trip to Thailand!" I say, trying to calculate a revised course for tomorrow's trip.
“Buddha says excess is the game of the unenlightened man."
I cannot argue with that. “We’ll see the White Temple tomorrow, and that will be good.”