Chiang Rai and Phu Chi Fah

We began our northern voyage in the city of Chiang Rai, Chiang Mai’s lesser known cousin. Chiang Mai takes the cake as my favorite city, but Chiang Rai proved to be a similarly rewarding province (so it can take the cupcake).

The city of Chiang Rai was pretty accessible, and featured a blend of hippie culture and Thai tradition that I now find oddly familiar. We spent our evening in a bar called “Peacehouse” run by several jovial rasta Thais and laid back ex-pats. We sat around a fire while people played drums and guitar, many of them regulars who found a haven in this bar. One smiley Thai guy with dreadlocks and carved ear gauges let me hold his pet hedgehog, and I experienced the now frequent sensation of living in another world.

Chiang Rai also featured one of my top must-sees in Thailand: the White Temple (aka Wat Rong Kun). At this point, I’ve seen a lot of temples, and a wat is a wat: ornate columns, swirling triangular roofs, gold statues, a carpeted floor leading up to some sort of Buddha figure. As much as I’ve enjoyed visiting these sparkling staples of Thai culture, they’ve inevitably begun to blend together. The White Temple, however, was the most original temple I’ve ever seen: it’s completely white and silver, and features statues and art that bordered fantastical, with spirits and goblins lining the entrance.



Apparently the designer, Mr. Chalermchai Kositpipa, was attempting to create an imitation of heaven. The entrance represents the human world, and the earthly passions that we must shed in order to enter the realm of the gods (the mortal demons were represented by hands reaching desperately towards the sky). The inside the temple an artist was painting a modernized version of a Thai historical painting. His work was in the style of classic temple art, but with the insertion of pop culture figures like Spiderman, and political references to 9/11 and war.


That afternoon we took a tuk tuk to the local national park, and hiked to Khun Korn waterfall. The waterfall itself was huge and breath-taking, although even more amazing was the amount of drunk Thai people we passed on the walk up there. The park was clearly a local destination, families were having picnics all along the water and tons of Thai people were stumbling drunkenly down the (quite rocky) path, shouting “hello!!! You wannn thai wiskeyyy?”

The night market in Chiang Rai was probably the largest I’d ever been to. It was here that I shared some of my local culinary favorites with my visiting friend, Hannah: thai tea (10 baht), coconut ice cream (15 baht, must be served in an actual coconut shell) pad thai (15 baht, served in banana leaf).

Our next destination was Phu Chi Fah mountain, where we stayed in a cozy shack with a group of awesome Thai people who insisted we drink small shots of whiskey while they cooked us delicious food over the fire (Thai language 101: “chon gao” = cheers, “mut gao” = bottoms up… beware of these phrases). After Hannah graced us with a fire-spinning show, six tired American girls crawled into one big bed and passed out. We awoke at the ungodly hour of 5am to catch the sunrise on the top of Phu Chi Fah mountain, and it was worth the trek. The skyline was cloudy, but this added a hazy quality that gently accentuated the distant mountains in the distance.


Our next stop was the border of Laos, but I’ll save this for the next post.