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This day was our only day in ChiangRai. So, we began with a trip up to Doi Tung Palace, which is where the King’s mother used to live. According to our guide, the entire mountain used to be poppy fields. However, the Queen decided to fix the problem by turning the whole place into her private villa and gardens, employing all the poppy planters as her gardeners instead. Let me just say that the photo doesn’t quite do it justice. The gardens are extremely impressive and well kept, even for tourist standards. I’ve been to some royal gardens in Europe and they don’t quite compare as the amounts and types of foliage are very different. We sorely lack this type of monarchs in Malaysia, who actually come up with real solutions to real problems.

After the tour around the gardens and palace, we drove off towards the Golden Triangle. It was at this point that I realised why there were so many roadblocks along the way – to check on drug smuggling. Although the photo looks like I had to sneakily take the shot, that was not the case at all. It’s merely because our driver drove very quickly through the roadblocks and I was seated right at the back of the minivan. So, I had a matter of seconds to compose the shot in a moving minivan. However, it turned out to be a rather ‘ominous’ kind of look, which is neat! Anyway, our tour guide kept telling us all kinds of legends about the Golden Triangle and the business that goes on there. It was all fun to listen to in anticipation of our journey there.

One of the first stops we made was at the Thai-Myanmar border. According to our guide, it is not worth crossing over to Myanmar because it would cost about 1000 baht per head and there wasn’t really much to do over on the other side. So, he brought us to a jade factory instead. Myanmar is currently flooding the world market with jade, which is the reason why the prices have gone down in recent years. So, we did not step into that country, which was not on our agenda anyway. Instead we decided to cross the Mekong into another country instead – Laos.

We took a boat ride down the Mekong river and were shown the reason why this place turned out to be a haven for the drug trade. The river is huge – it is the 3rd largest river in Asia. At this particular point, it forms the border between 3 countries – Laos, Myanmar and Thailand. Our guide even showed us a little island within the central point of the river, that serves as an open market for drugs. The reason that enforcement is difficult is simply because it is too easy to escape. If the Thai police storm the little island, all the people need to do is run off towards Myanmar or Laos and vice versa. So, that is how drugs came to be openly traded on the river Mekong. I do not know how much of the story is true, but it is certainly logical and plausible.

Another interesting story at that particular junction in the river is the casinos. On the Myanmar side, there was a visible casino called ‘Win & Win Paradise’, which is opened by the Chinese from HongKong-Macau and on the Laos side, we could see another big casino complex under construction, which is being developed by the Chinese from PRC. I guess that the very reasons that attract the drug trade to this region, is also attracting the gambling businesses there. The casinos are being built right along the river and can be approached by boat. In case you did not know, this very same river flows all the way from southern China. So, I’m sure that there is an easy market for these casinos.

On our way back to ChiangMai, we stopped by this rather modern looking white temple just outside ChiangRai. It is at this point that I realised that ChiangMai is very Buddhist as random temples were strewn all over the streets. However, the situation is ChiangRai was quite different as there were a lot of churches all over. I think that it is because ChiangRai is a smaller place and according to our guide, a lot of missionaries went in there to help the people there. This made a lot of sense as even until today, Christian missionaries still flock to the third world and try their best to do some good in the poorest parts of the nation.

This day began with a visit to an elephant camp, where we went on three separate rides – elephant, bullock cart and raft. It was mainly a trip meant for the kids as they loved elephants (influenced by Horton Hears a Whoo). In my case, it was also an interesting experience as I cannot remember when it was that I went on one, last. While on the elephants, I had to rely a lot on luck to get any good shots off. It was extremely difficult to compose any photographs with such a bumpy ride. No amount of image stabilisation is going to help when an elephant takes a step! However, I still managed to get a large number of good photos in the end, particularly ones with the children in it.

Now, what particularly impressed me about these elephants was their drawing skills. When we first arrived at the camp, I saw lots of ‘artwork’ being sold for about 800 baht each. My first thought was that these things were tourist traps and the art was probably drawn by some person and peddled off as elephant-art for a premium. However, during the ensuing elephant show, a pair of elephants were given a blank sheet of paper and a white t-shirt to draw on and they took about 15 minutes to finish their works of art. So, my initial cynicism was wrong. According to the narrator, Asian elephants are smarter than their Indian cousins because they have a bigger head/brain, which is visible as they’ve got bumps on the forehead. So, they are capable of remembering procedures and steps even if they are colour blind. For that problem, they have a human assistant who hands out brushes to them with the right colour on it.

We went rafting down the river on bamboo rafts. I took this time to explain to my 7 year old nephew, why bamboo was chosen to build the raft (evil me, trying to incite some spark of engineering interest in him) – air pockets, structural strength, light weight. It was a 45 minute raft ride and mid-way, we were greeted by a small sampan floating on the river selling refreshments. How wonderfully entrepreneurial again! I guess that such things probably happen on the Rejang river as well, but it is certainly something strange to us peninsular folk. There were of course other sights to see along the way, but nothing was quite as interesting as this one. At the end of the trip, we were all hustled into our minivan for our journey to ChiangRai.

The journey itself was rather uneventful as I ended up sleeping most of the 4-5 hour drive up. However, our tour guide once more, told us about how different the northern Thai people were to their southern brethren. Seems that northern Thailand was once part of a different kingdom and they were only annexed by Siam from Burma at a much later point, around WWII. He also mentioned to us that because the northern people loved Thaksin so much (incidentally, he is from ChiangMai), they would have no problems seceding from Thailand, forming their own nation and installing Thaksin as their new president. However, they still love their king though. So, I think that if such a thing were to happen, they would still keep the Thai King as their constitutional monarch.

We arrived in ChiangRai in the evening and we requested to be taken to a local night market. It was much smaller than the one in ChiangMai but it was still interesting nonetheless. At one point, I was caught in the packed crowd and felt some hands groping me. I immediately shoved my hands into my pockets to make sure that my valuables were not stolen and then quickly exited the area. At this night market, I decided to buy everyone some ‘rotee’, which is what we call roti canai over here. The best one seems to be the one filled with egg and banana (roti telur pisang). However, the biggest difference is the amount of banana that actually goes in – it was densely packed with bananas and you could taste them in every slice, unlike the kind you get at the local mamak. The price of it was similar to that in Malaysia though, 25 baht each – but it tastes really good!

This was our first proper day tour in ChiangMai. What amazed me when I first got out of our hotel was the conditions of the streets outside. While the area was lined with the night market the night before, it was totally cleared up by morning. Not a single speck of rubbish was to be seen on the streets and the only visible evidence that anything had actually been there the night before was bags of trash being piled up by every street corner, which was promptly taken away later that morning. I seriously wonder if this was the common practice or if it only happened in tourist districts.

We were kind of lucky to have arrived during the King’s birthday celebrations. So, there were some rather interesting things to learn about Thais. Thais love their king and he is like a father to them. Since it is his birthday, there were many altars set up around town where people placed offerings to him. While we were being driven through the streets to our first tour stop, we were witness to a pindapata ceremony, where people lined the streets giving alms to the monks who came out in full force that morning. This reminded me that Thailand is a very Buddhist country in the Hinaya tradition.

Our tour guide also regaled us with stories of his time spent in the monastery. According to him, it was fairly standard practice for poor people to go into this sort of life after they reach a certain age. For one, they would have food to eat and they were given an education in the monastery. After spending 16 years of his life in the monastery, he left to find a way in this world. So, although Thai people may be poor, they are not poor-poor. At the very least, they will have food to eat and a chance at a basic education. Personally, I think that this is something that we are sorely lacking in Malaysia. Our poor are reduced to begging on the streets (although it can be argued that even beggars make quite a good living in KL).

Anyway, our first stop of the day was to visit some local tribes who worked the poppy fields. Alright, that’s not all that they do, but according to our guide, it is their primary source of income. If you’ve never seen a poppy plant, that’s one in the photo. It’s a really lovely flower and it will not be our last encounter with the plant during our trip. Northern Thailand is afterall, part of the Golden Triangle. According to our guide, it is called such because drugs used to be traded in gold in this region, weight for weight. He then told us grand stories about the King of Opium who lives further up north and stuff that would make the Corleone family look like sissies.

Seeing that we were a family of Buddhists (Theravada tradition), our guide decided to take us to see a touristy temple – Doi Suthep. The reason that it is a touristy temple is because it is located on top of a mountain and provides an excellent viewpoint overlooking the entire city of ChiangMai. However, it was particularly misty (or foggy or smoggy) that day and I did not manage to get a clear photo of the city. It would be a great place to take a night-shot of the city though. To make matters worse, the golden Chedi that was built 700 years ago, was being refurbished and there was too much scaffolding in place to get a good photo as well.

After lunch, it was time to do a little shopping. No trip to Thailand would be complete without a visit to the local jewelers who sell precious stones. I even managed to snag myself a tie-pin there, though the selection was severely limited. The entire store seemed to be 99% dedicated to women, which doesn’t surprise me one bit. We also visited a honey factory. Now, you may not think that there’s anything special about honey, but these particular honey bees, feed off poppy flowers! It’s a bit of a stretch but I guess that the bees must be buzzing all the time, while spreading all the pollen. Anyway, it was an interesting visit to me because I managed to learn a few things about honey that I did not know before.

No shopping visit to Thailand would be complete without silk. So, we visited the local Shinawatra Silk factory. Now, if that name rings a bell, it’s the family business of their deposed PM, Thaksin Shinawatra. I ended up giving them some of my money in return for a few custom made silk shirts. They sure have a huge selection of silk cloth of every colour imaginable! It was at this point that our tour guide began to tell us some stories about Thai politics (for some reason, the Bangkok Post seems particularly thin on this subject). According to him, Thaksin’s power base is the North and the people up there love him. Thaksin basically took a page out of the old political playbook by helping the poor clean up the streets and giving them an education. That is why, when there are political problems, it only seems to happen in the south.

That evening, we ended up having a touristy dinner, with cultural performances to boot. During the dinner, we were once again visited by the cute local girls in costumes and photographer and had our photographs taken again. Anyway, it was during these cultural performances that the mythical Thai beauties began to appear. Our guide kept raving about ChiangMai beauties but there were few to be seen on the streets. According to my friend, most of the beautiful ones would have all gone down to Bangkok to work, which made perfect sense to me. So, the only ones left seem to be the ones who managed to secure gainful employment locally. According to my sister, the local spa (recommended by our guide) was also filled with beauties. Unfortunately I did not join them for that.

After our dinner, we once again visited the night market. This time, I noticed something else that was very entrepreneurial – mobile bank kiosks! The streets were littered with these little things. They are both an ATM machine and a Bureau de Change in one. There were different ones from different banks and financial institutions. It is so obvious a tourist thing, to make money off tourists, but it certainly beats having to go around hunting for a money changer when you’re trying to haggle down the price with a stall owner.

One last thing that I feel needs to be mentioned – there are so many skilled craftsmen in ChiangMai. They literally fill the streets. You can actually see them working alongside their little stalls at the night market. That is why the labour cost here is so cheap and the reason why a lot of these things are selling really well. Of course, there are a lot of standard goods and our guide literally warned us about the Made in China syndrome inflicting his city. However, you can also clearly see that there is a lot of products that are locally made, and of high quality. The suit that I had tailored, was certified by our family tailor as being of extremely good craftsmanship – certainly not something we can get in Malaysia without paying a handsome premium.

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!

There is good reason that my blog has been silent for a week. My whole family decided to go to northern Thailand for our holiday this year. So, we all packed up for a 7D6N holiday in Chiang Mai and Chiang Rai, which was filled with a lot of interesting activities. I will be writing more about the things that I did over the course of the week, after I upload some of the photographs. However, I will just put down some overall thoughts for now.

My family has only traveled to parts of southern Thailand in the past and this is our first trip north. Although we have never ever been to Bangkok before, I do think that Chiang Mai is quite a beautiful city. We had an excellent tour guide who also doubled as a baby-sitter for my niece and nephews. He told us many stories about local things including local politics. He also brought us to a lot of local places, instead of just the touristy places. So, it was quite an interesting experience.

I thoroughly enjoyed my trip there although it was really tiring and I also fell ill on the very last day. There are may things that I will take away from this trip, including several tailored suits, tailored silk shirts and other souvenirs that I bought from there. It seems like a great place to go shopping for clothes every few years as the prices are really good while the workmanship quality is quite impeccable.

One big lesson that I learned from this trip (and from my other trips around South East Asia) is that we have been exceedingly lucky. The main reason why Malaysia and Singapore has managed to emerge as leading nations in this region is not due to any magic sauce or economic miracle of our doing – it is simply because our neighbours have been far to busy shooting themselves in the foot for them to exact any sort of significant progress. In the case of Thailand, they have been rewriting their own constitution so many times that even the constitutional lawyers have trouble keeping up.

So, the only countries that I have yet to step foot into in SEA are Cambodia, Vietnam and Myanmar. I plan to fix that soon. I would certainly like to visit Angkor Wat some time soon and get some good photographs there. I fancy that Vietnam would be another interesting place to visit, particularly the north. As for Myanmar, I’ll just wait till the Junta sorts itself out before dropping by for a holiday.

Anyway, I’ll need to go sort through the hundreds of photographs that I took and upload the more interesting ones. Stay tuned for a more detailed account of my experiences there.

A rather odd thing happened to me recently. One day, while checking my email, I came across an email from an old friend – someone whom I’ve not seen or heard from in more than 16 years. It was a rather strange sensation, being contacted by someone from my distant past. However, it was also a very curious and interesting experience too!

Anyway, my friend, Angeline had recently dusted off an old photo album while cleaning out her cupboard. So, on a whim, she decided to try to contact some of her old friends. She tried looking some of us up on Facebook but she couldn’t find me. As you all know, I don’t have a Facebook account for numerous reasons. However, as I have a heavy online presence, she found me through Google instead.

After catching up with her, I decided to help out in the hunt for old friends simply because I think it is terribly exciting to do so. I’ve managed to contact another old friend, Umi, who is finishing her PhD at Oxford (they call it a DPhil over there for some reason). She’s now married with child. How terribly fun! If I had known that she was over there, I’d have dropped by for a visit at some point.

She in turn, told me that there’s another friend at Oxford as well! So, we’re trying to get hold of her as well. I managed to recall the last name of another friend and found her on LinkedIn and tried to contact her through that method. I’ve also asked my sister to help me track down another friend who is also a doctor.

I think that Angeline is probably going to try to gather as many people up as possible for a Christmas dinner or something. Well, I never say no to makan especially when it is home cooked food. This is just some totally random luck that happened in my life. I think that it will be good to catch up with the last 16 years of all our lives.

Man, I should also try to hunt down my secondary school pals. I’ve already managed to contact one through LinkedIn. I think that I should try to organise some sort of get together for everyone too. It will also be fun to hear what everyone has been doing this last 10 years or so. However, I’ll only do this after I settle my own stuff first.

According to a MalaysiaKini article today, Lim Kit Siang claims that, “Umno Youth chief aspirant Mukhriz Mahathir had committed sedition in calling for the closure of Chinese and Tamil primary schools. He pointed out the Constitution Amendment 1971 had imposed absolute prohibition on Malaysians from questioning the four issues, which includes anyone who propose the closure of vernacular schools.”

Does this mean that my previous blog entry might be seditious as well? As I am not a lawyer, I wouldn’t know for sure. So, looking at the Sedition Act 1948, it mentions in 3(1)(f) that:

“A seditious tendency is a tendency to to question any matter, right, status, position, privilege, sovereignty or prerogative established or protected by the provisions of Part III of the Federal Constitution or Article 152, 153 or 181 of the Federal Constitution.”

As we all know, Article 153 deals with the special rights and privileges of the Malays and Bumiputra while Article 181 deals with the royalty. However, Article 152 does deal with the issue of languages. So, let’s see what it actually says:

The national language shall be the Malay language and shall be in such script as Parliament may by law provide: Provided that-
(a) no person shall be prohibited or prevented from using (otherwise than for official purposes), or from teaching or learning, any other language; and
(b) nothing in this Clause shall prejudice the right of the Federal Government or of any State Government to preserve and sustain the use and study of the language of any other community in the Federation.

While Mukhriz had called for the closure of vernacular schools, he has not called for an end to the study of any of the vernacular languages. Quoting the M’kini article, “We can make it compulsory that the Chinese and Indians study their own language in their mother tongue while these two languages can be optional for Malay students to learn or we can make it compulsory for students to learn at least three languages.”

Obviously, our respected Lim Kit Siang and all the other politicians who are rising up to the defense of vernacular schools, have been misinformed. They are also in the business of spin and trying to play this issue up for their own political mileage. What Mukhriz is calling for is in fact an reinforcement of Article 152 of the constitution, a fairer and more sustainable way of doing things.

If there is anyone who is acting seditious, it is the Dong Jiao Zhong who have fought previous attempts at introducing vernacular languages in national schools. So, if Mukhriz gets elected in as UMNO Youth Chief and then gets appointed as the Minister of Education, I will support any attempts that he makes at phasing out the vernacular schools.

However, he must put his money where is mouth is and introduce a third-language into our schools. We already have the option of taking Arabic, French, Mandarin, Tamil in SPM. So, please introduce all these languages in schools and allow anyone to take any languages that they wish. It will make all our kids trilingual and that can only be a good thing, particularly for national unity.

I stand by my previous statement that vernacular schools need to be “burned down” (not literally of course!). However, we should also open up all our national schools to everyone, meaning that there should not be any measly quota restrictions anywhere. Let’s all play fair now!