chiang rai

        So to the far north of Thailand.  Chiang Rai is a sleepy trading post with not a lot to recommend it, except a night market with as at its heart a huge open air food court.  I suppose it would once have had an exotic air, with mysterious hill tribe people trekking for days to bring their produce: village-grown coffee, tea and herbs –  and maybe opium under the counter; leggy chickens, floppy-eared pig heads and unknown species of river fish; ethnic clothing intricately woven from vegetable dyed yarn.  Some of this you can still find, but now it’s mostly tourist nick-nacks, and for the locals, car parts and rip-off DVDs.  Still lots of mysterious hill tribe faces though, Burmese and Tibetan and Chinese: tiny, ancient, shyly spoken ladies in gaudy bonnets, and edgy looking young men in bobble hats sharing a large bottle of Chang beer. 

        But we have elected to stay in a resort style hotel a little way from the centre, very upmarket but cheap at this unseasonal time of the year. As in the south, the rains are lingering on much longer than normal, so the weather is distinctly mixed with some huge downpours but mostly dry and calm.  It’s not bad enough to keep us away from the layered pool, dropping down, infinity edge after edge, down towards the muddy river Mae Nam Kok.  The gardens are immaculate and the hotel buildings have been built around two huge old jungle canopy trees that shade the courts.

        We decide to explore further and drive up into the mountains near the Burmese border, passing through some of the corrugated iron roofed villages high up on the ridges that run through this area, the last knockings of the Himalayas.  Not a scrap of flat ground: it’s all hills, mostly wooded, but some clearings with steeply sloping tea plantations in neatly clipped rows, others with a few terraces of hill rice, scraping a subsistence living.  Ridge after blue smoky ridge ahead of us: the infinity edge of Thailand.