The Thailand rafting trip

Thailand is rightly named "the land of smiles." I've never met a more friendly and welcoming people anywhere else, and I've traveled a lot.

The country has a very long coastline and there is a significant contrast between the northern hill country with its colourful hill tribes and the south, though the entire country is rain forest where ever you travel.

There are a plenitude of rivers too, all over Thailand, including the Might Mekong which can be accessed up north in Chiang Khong and you can take a 2-day boat trip into Laos to Luan Prebang from there.

Having such a long coastline means that there is an amazing variety of seafood and fresh fruits found virtually all over Thailand, and Thai food tends to be very spicy so the first thing a "farang" or foreigner learns is to say 'mai pet!' when ordering food, which means "not too spicy please...!"

Bangkok in the center, to use as the hub, Chiang Mai, Chiang Rai, Pai, May Hon Song, and Chiang Khong are the northern towns and each unique and beautiful in their own way.

Pattaya, Phuket and the islands in the south are the place to go for sea going boat trips and island visits, though we were warned off Phuket because it is a Muslim area with some imported trouble-makers who stirred up violence and there were signs outside some Muslim owned hotels which read "No Jews or Israelis welcome," We didn't need that kind of experience, so we avoided going there... though Pattaya was pretty riotous, with crowds of tourists and locals thronging the promenades.

Travel is superbly easy all over the country, and particularly in towns.

Quick Tips:

Avoid planning a long stay in Bangkok. It is noisy, dirty, and tourists complain about being regularly ripped-off there.

Use Bangkok as the hub to first make a quick tour to see the Emerald Bhudda, the King's Palace, and Floating Markets on the river, and then quickly book your trip out of Bangkok, either heading north or south.

No one visits Thailand without having a Thai massage. They are wonderful and very cheap, between 300 to 500 baht an hour... that's between and hour. If like me you've never had a massage before, Thailand will make you a devout fan. They are soothing, relaxing, and above all given by Thai masseurs who have an uncanny sense of where the pain and ache spots are and hone in like they possessed a personal radar. After the first experimental try, I had one almost every day. Marion pays for a 1-hour massage in California, and in Chiang Mai they cost 300 baht an hour for either Thai Massage, Oil Massage, or reflexology. Not to be missed.

Best Way To Get Around:

Try using the local airlines ("One, Two, Three, Go" for example), which get you very cheap return flights north and south.

Book hotels via the internet and get a 10 to 20% discount. In fact, hotels and car hire are always cheaper if booked from abroad. We booked our Chiang Mai stay at the Top North Hotel, and the 2-night stay in the New World Lodge in Bangkok via the Internet and got a 10% reduction and the bookings worked perfectly.

The ubiquitous "tuk-tuk" vespa 3-wheel taxi is extraordinarily cheap and one haggles for the price of the trip before boarding.

Red pick-up taxi trucks run like mini-buses, on a fixed route with a fixed price, costing something ludicrous like 10¢ for a trip across town.

Regular taxis can be hired for day trips too, for example, visiting elephant farms, orchid nurseries, and the like for per day. We were two couples, so that worked out at per head for an all-day trip to Maisai where we did a border crossing over to Burma to get a new visa. The visa cost , and the trip was  each, and we treated our driver to lunch. It was the cheapest day trip I've ever done, I can tell you.

Inter-urban buses run between all the towns, and the locals use the regular routes. The tourists pre-book tickets at the bus stations on the V.I.P. buses, which are a little more expensive, but compared with London or New York prices, extremely cheap.

They are more comfortable that airline seats, and the "hostess" offers a bottle of cold water, a cold face towel, and a sweet roll as part of the service.

I wouldn't recommend the trains, even though they run through scenic routes, because they tend to be overcrowded and have to be booked well in advance.

This means two trips to the railway station.

Take a Thai cooking course. I did a 3-day course and it was wonderful, costing . The Sompet Cooking School, on the banks of the river running through Chiang Mai, had a wonderful chef/teacher and beautiful scenery.

One can also take a Thai massage course too, and that's not too expensive either.

The Top North hotel in Tai Pai Gate, Chiang Mai, is centrally located, well-found, has excellent service and conditions, a very helpful staff, and a friendly atmosphere. The hotel is a 3-star family hotel. We paid 800 baht per day, per couple (around $20 per day) and used the Top North as our base for 8 weeks. We enjoyed our stay there immensely. The pool, two handy restaurants on-site in the hotel, a tourist office, and a massage service-plus a helpful cleaning staff made for a wonderful holiday base.

Decent cheap hotels in Chiang Ma range from between 500 to 800 bhat per night, per couple, with air-conditioning, clean sheets, towels every day, en suite shower and bath, fridge, and plenty of cupboard space. Luxury hotels cost a bit more, but are still cheap by U.S. standards. The 5-star Chiang Waycome Inn cost us 1,200 bhat ($28 dollars per night, per couple) but the Waycome had a night club, a big restaurant, a pool, massage service en suit, a bakery, a tourist info' office, and a shuttle service to the airport. The rooms were enormous and extremely well-found. Budget travelers can find decent boarding houses and small hotels with prices ranging from 300 to 500 bhat.

Dining in Thailand.

As a requisite to enjoying a visit to Thailand it helps if you like Thai food!

Perhaps the greatest enjoyment comes from eating ‘street food.’

At the Sompet Market near the Old City Wall I stopped at a roadside ‘basta’, where the owner had a small fish tank with fresh fish swimming, and pointed to the fish I wanted. The lady owner cleaned the fish, popped it on the grill, filled it with dill, and grilled it to perfection. She plated it together with French fries and a small green salad. A bottle of coke and a plate of fresh fruit (mango, pineapple, honey melon, watermelon, and banana) completed the menu and the whole meal was 120 bhat (less than $3. dollars).

In the walled Old City of Chiang Mai, in the heart of the all-night market, there is a food co-op. The co-op members rent the square from the city fathers and own the tables and chairs, with seating for well over 100 people. One cannot buy food at the stalls with cash. At the square entrance one obtains food tickets. I bought tickets for 200 baht and then went around selecting items from the stalls and the variety was amazing. Indian curries, Phad Thai stalls, seafood stalls, Chinese food, Japanese teriyaki and sushi served with saki, grilled meat brochettes with a choice of beef, pork or chicken, pancakes spread with honey and fruit, sweet sticky rice with mango, and drink stalls with sodas and beers. Cost 130 bhat.

We were fortunate in that we had some Thai friends who took us to Thai restaurants that tourists wouldn’t find, and there we had some exquisite meals.

In one restaurant we had a complete meal comprised entirely of dumplings. Savoury, spicy, and sweet and sour, served with fresh green salads to lighten the palate, and for dessert, dumplings filled with raisins, nuts, and honey. It was all washed down with large glasses of iced Thai tea. That meal was an absolute blow-out!

We also went with our friends to a restaurant in downtown Chiang Mai where there was a metal cooking dome with a high rim in the center of each table. The waiters came to the tables carrying enormous trays, laden with piles of white porcelain square dishes containing a large selection of protein and fresh vegetables.

The four of us each selected three or four dishes, strips of raw pork, beef, shrimp, liver, chunks of chicken, strips of fish, and a selection of raw vegetables. The waiter left our selection, together with a large glass jug of chicken soup stock, and we all placed the meats and seafood on the hot dome and vegetables into the broth heating in the dome rim.

The food was cooked to each person’s satisfaction and was deftly lifted off the hot dome, or from the bubbling broth, and packed away until we could eat no more. It all came to about $5. dollars per head, and the meal was absolutely delicious!

Chiang Mai has a number of museums and they are all well worth a visit. The Chiang Mai History and Folklore Museum was fascinating, particularly the hill tribes section, as was the history of the opium trade and it's effect on the country's history.

The Botanical and Insect Museum was good, too, and a prosaic subject like "mosquitoes" was a really interesting theme.

The Chiang Mai Zoo was one of the highlights of our visit to Chiang Mai. The elephant ride was really great fun. The elephant had a mind of its own, and took short cuts off the path to swipe huge swathes of foliage from the trees and bushes for "munchies" as we lumbered along the trails.

The white tigers were amazing, really huge beasts, bigger than lions, and the thoughtful way they eyed the tourists was very impressive. The pandas were as cute as they always are (even though they are reputed to be bad-tempered creatures, and one ripped the shirt off a keeper the day before we got there, which hit the newspaper headlines as a warning to would-be panda petters).

The zoo had an amazing collection of birds in a gigantic, enclosed aviary, and in a separate set of buildings there was a fine penguin collection.

The zoo also boasts a really fine restaurant next to a lake and waterfall, and the food there is superb. One can visit the restaurant without touring the zoo by arriving by taxi and taking the zoo shuttle into the park.

The Queen's own Botanical Gardens, north of Chiang Mai, near Chiang Rai, was a truly amazing visit. As an ex-landscape gardener myself, I have a pretty good eye for colour and layout, and the Queen's garden absolutely stunned me speechless. The orchids were out of this world... orchids lining the paths, growing like weeds, and an orchid research center where they experiment on orchid propagation.

The grounds stretched as far as the eye could see. The masses of colour and the arrays of flowers, shrubs, and bushes were astounding. We could have spent a week in there, never mind a day's visit, and still not have covered it all.

Experiences in Thailand

They have a saying in Thailand, mostly used by the "farangs" or foreigners. They say "T.I.T.," which means "this is Thailand" and is used to explain, with a helpless shrug, that the locals meant well but, by golly, they really managed a God-awful mess-up in one way or another, usually with the best of intentions.

‘T.I.T.’ comes from two things mainly… the Thais do not generally speak English, and if they do it is extremely basic. That’s one. The other is their desire, deeply felt, not to disappoint a foreigner or worse, embarrass themselves. If asked directions to anywhere and they do not know, they will nevertheless give directions no matter what.

One particular T.I.T incident happened to us when we left Chiang Rai to move south to Chiang Mai. We found that the hotel we were staying at in Chiang Rai, the Chiang Wacome Inn, had a sister hotel in Chiang Mai and we asked the chief receptionist at the desk if we could get the same deal in their sister hotel. This was on Monday and we planned to leave on Thursday. She said she could arrange it for us and we left it with her. She obviously gave it to one of her staff to deal with (there were eight of them lining the reception desk).

The following morning, I slipped down to the hotel bakery to get some fresh hot rolls and pineapple turnovers for breakfast. As I walked past the desk, one of the staffmembers called out to me with a huge smile, "so sorry you are leaving today…,"

"Excuse me?" I said, a note of rising panic in my voice.

"Yes!" she said blithely, "No worry, you don’t have to leave until noon."

In a calm controlled voice I asked to use the desk phone. "Marion," I said, "I think you better get down here while I go get breakfast." When I got back, Marion was staring thoughtfully at the Bhudda statue in the corner and murmuring "Oooohm" while the chief receptionist stood screaming at her underlings, fanning herself with her clipboard frantically.

Upstairs we found the cleaning staff waiting patiently to help us vacate and clear out the room… it took us until noon to finally sort it all out. This Is Thailand.

And don’t get me started on the number of times a tuk-tuk taxi driver swore he knew where we wanted to go and then got us to the American Embassy, instead of the Cinema Complex, and other such adventures.