Chiang Mai and I got off on the wrong foot.
Doing dishes in my AirBnb condo, I bumped a plate that was drying, which knocked over a glass mug, and both of them exploded spectacularly across the hardwood floor. I promptly began to clean up the glass with the bottom of my bare feet–you don’t wear shoes in a Thai house–a process that has continued (despite much sweeping and mopping) for much of the week.
It was only one metaphor among many that came to mind during my one week stay.
The largest city in northern Thailand, Chiang Mai has an international reputation as the hub of international digital nomadism.
Digital nomadery is a phenomenon that has largely emerged in parallel with the rise and spread of the Internet, which has enabled folks with jobs that don’t require being in a particular physical location to perform them from pretty much anywhere. Although this has made for a lot of disruption as companies in high-cost countries have realized they can now hire staff in low-cost countries without dealing with all that pesky immigration business, it has also worked in reverse: knowledge workers in high-cost countries have realized they can improve their quality of life and indulge in a sort of permanent vacation by traveling to the low-cost regions of the world.
Chiang Mai is the poster child for digital nomad destinations. Low cost of living, moderate climate, many Western amenities, and rock solid Internet access made it a prime destination for early waves of nomads.
Now, the whole scene is a little sick of itself, having hit a tipping point recently where almost as many foreigners are here selling other foreigners on the wonder and freedom of the digital nomad lifestyle as there are actually living that lifestyle. But there are still a lot of expats here with the tourists, some of them actually doing real work and enjoying life.
It’s a strange combination of noisy and quiet. The condo building I am in is older and looks vaguely run down, a reminder of more optimistic days. Half the lights are kept off, most of the commercial spaces are abandoned, and flower pots sit empty on every floor.
Yet there are always noises from adjoining apartments, coming through the paper thin walls.
The town, too, is like that. It is overrun with tourists and expats, but there is little of the street market liveliness of Bangkok, and the place seems to shut down at 8 pm (apart from the night market, near the river). The area where I am staying, Nimman, is supposedly the hub of a thriving expat scene, but it must be happening in bars and coworking spaces out of my view.
Everything here just seems a little tired and run down.
I’m having trouble figuring out if I really don’t like it that much or if I am just missing Bangkok.
As long as I’m here, though, in addition to doing my own semi-digital nomading, I thought I’d check out the sights.
I started with the old city (“Chiang Mai” actually means “new city,” which it was, when it was established in 1296), a square chunk carved out of the modern city by an ancient moat and fragments of the original city walls. It’s not unlike many European cities in that respect, and like them, there is as much modernity inside the “old city” as out.
It does seem like the narrow, twisting alleys there are the center of the granola-chomping, coffee-swilling, Western backpacker element in town. There are dozens of hostels and a coffee shop on the ground floor of each of them, clouds of incense drifting out and tattoo and pseudo-spiritual trinket shops to either side. A few temples round it off as the complete tourist precinct.
Just the other side of the old city is the strip of shops and open lots that host the night market. As a rule, most Thai towns seem to have one or more of these, and I hadn’t gone to any yet–they’re most about buying stuff, and what am I going to buy? I came with a full backpack.
But I did decide (probably too late) to pick up a couple of new shirts, better suited to weather and circumstances than what I bought. We’ll see if I can actually fit them into my pack…. Anyway, leaving in the dead of winter, I had to pack clothes to do double duty, which meant a lot of synthetics. Cotton, of course, is preferable in this environment. I got some really good, lightweight but sturdy pants at REI before I left to maintain propriety when visiting temples, but I figured a decent cotton polo shirt would be better than the dark synthetic stuff I’d packed.
Unfortunately, it’s all but impossible to find any sort of shirt in a tourist market here that isn’t a counterfeit knock-off of some name brand. Indeed, buying those cheap knock-offs is the primary point of visiting those markets for many people. But I just wanted a plain old generic shirt, preferring not to encourage counterfeiting.
After spending a couple hours walking the market, though, I gave up. I’m now the proud owner of:
- 1 poorly-fitting black (ostensible) Abercrombie and Fitch t-shirt
- 1 poorly-made white (ostensible) Ralph Lauren Polo shirt, with an embarrassingly bad replica of the Polo logo on it
All this was in service of the next day’s expedition up the mountain to Wat Phra That Doi Suthep… the subject of our next blog entry.
