Okay, I thought that I should get this all written down while the memories are still fresh in my head. So, here goes.
We left for the LCCT at the wee hours of the morning and drove two cars there. Since this was my first experience with AirAsia at the LCCT, I would like to put on record that it is nothing like my experience with Stansted and Ryanair. The place was jam packed with people and as you can expect, the check-in counters were awash with humans. It was fairly chaotic and the staff were not very friendly either. Although our flight and group did not have any problems, I saw some rather disgruntled passengers at the counter next to ours who were told that they were at the wrong counter (after lining up) because the airport had displayed the wrong information on the notice board.
After checking in our luggage, we went through the rest of the usual airport processes without any hassle. Then, the time came for passenger boarding. While almost every other airline would allow babies and senior citizens to board first, AirAsia does not. It only allows people over the age of 65 to board first. Seeing that we had 4 senior citizens below 65 and 2 babies, it was rather cumbersome for us to find suitable seats on the plane. However, everyone got seated in the end and the flight took off and landed without incident (except for the rather bad landing with the plan touching down on one side).
The moment we arrived at ChiangMai International, things were rather a breeze. When we walked out of the arrival gates, we were promptly greeted by a bunch of cute looking girls with flower garlands whom immediately posed with us water fish for photographs. We will soon discover that this is not the last time that we will see this particular group of people. They seem to know exactly where we will be as they popped up during our welcome dinner at the restaurant and correctly brought our set of photographs to our dinner table, to sell it to us for 100 baht each. Wonderfully entrepreneurial!
Anyway, our family had opted for an extended tour. The typical tour was a 5D4N tour while we opted for a more relaxed 7D6N tour. So, our first day was a free and easy day and we decided to roam around the hotel area on our own. That was when I caught sight of my first engineering marvel in ChiangMai – the electrical poles by the road. It gives a whole new meaning to the word SNAFU (pardon the parlance). I have a whole lot of respect for the engineer who has to figure out which power line is causing the problem, when there is a fault in an area!
Another interesting thing that I came across while exploring, was the sale of foreign newspapers. While these are also available in Malaysia at certain news outlets, they are not always up-to-date. However, these entrepreneurial Thais have taken it upon themselves to actually print their own local copy of the papers, up-to-date. The papers are printed on quality white paper and sold at a premium. It is exactly the up-to-the-day version of the paper that is sold in newsprint all over the world. How wonderfully entrepreneurial again!
That night, after our welcome dinner, we explored the local pasar malam as well. Even this impressed me tremendously as it was extremely well organised for a night market. At about 5pm, the stalls began appearing and people were setting up. Unlike the night markets in Malaysia that inevitably end up hijacking the roads and blocking all vehicular traffic, these night markets were arranged in such a way as to face the pedestrian walkways. So, the vehicles were still able to pass along the main roads, albeit at a slower speed. While our experience at the ChiangRai night market was more similar to the ones in Malaysia, this one at ChiangMai was still pretty impressive to me.
After all the hassle of waking up early in the morning and flying over, we decided to call it a night and went to bed early. Oh, I forgot to mention that I decided to tailor myself a new suit and went to visit one of the local tailors to decide on the design and material. I’ve been meaning to tailor a very specific kind of suit for a while now. So, since the opportunity presented itself, I thought that I’d give it a try. These tourist tailors loved to display glowing letters of recommendation by foreign tourists but there was one particularly odd one, where a french tourist (wrote in French) telling other french tourists to go next door instead as the quality and service was better!
Sybreon Ones Nought 