Chiang Mai (Northern Thailand) Tourist Guide


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TRIPPING AND TASTING ALONG THE HANDICRAFT HIGHWAYS

by Mim Saisin

We’re getting into the rainy season now. Nights are cool and damp; days alternately blazingly hot and clear-skied - and overcast, showery, even stormily wet. Long trips out into the country can be a bit of a toss-up in these conditions, and I personally prefer to stick to the city at this time.

That’s why I’ve chosen the handicraft route for this month’s outing. Chiang Mai city, particularly inside the moat and walls, has limitless places to keep you amused and enlivened - temples, cute little by-ways, museums, ancient sites and no end of food-stalls and restaurants with their snacks and cosmopolitan dishes. But I’m going outside the walls, just. A square mile or so at the other side of the Chiang Mai Gate on the south side of the city.

This is where so many of the workshops and retail outlets of the local arts and handicrafts are situated, along the Wualai and Nantaram roads, and the network of lanes between. My friend Fon (‘Rain’), up for a business seminar from Phuket came with me, looking for some of the souvenirs she could take back south when she went. We started on the road facing the Gate, and the beginning of the Wualai Road. There are big silver shops here, either with their own craftsmen supplying them from the nearby workshops, or at one remove. Highly acclaimed silver products - bowls, necklaces, pendants and so on, beautifully worked. I particularly liked some of the big presentation bowls, with Ramakien and Jataka imagery worked into them, but they were way outside our budgets so we looked and passed on the Nai Bai Noodle Shop further down.

But what I and Fon most felt like was provided at yet another restaurant - somtam, that toothsome and spicy papaya salad, with gai yang, soft, sweet, good-smelling and succulent grilled chicken. There again, we could have gone for the khau man gai Nantaram, white rice soaked in chicken broth, with strips of chicken laid beside it. Not to speak of the bowls of steaming chicken broth with its floating sprigs of parsley. Another day, perhaps - Nantaram is a famous restaurant and has many branches around town.

We then turned our attention to souvenirs and nick-nacks. You don't go on trips in Thailand without coming back with something for friends and relatives. For my mum I bought some klouay tod - sweet fried bananas - and kanom kai nokkratha: cassava fried and mixed with wheat flour for office friends. Fon did her shopping at the next venue though - on the Nantaram road itself.

There's a shop here called Prateung Lacquerware. Lacquer is of course one of the famous Northern products and handicrafts, and this shop has an excellent selection at what Fon thought were reasonable prices. So she scurried around looking at the boxes and decorative items with their handsome black and gold designs, and by haggling and being picky, wound up with a little store of goods that would keep her in good standing back in Phuket.

That was it for us - we were shopped and visited out by now. What I'd like to suggest for you, though, giving you greater mobility and an even wider range of the crafts of this part of town, is that you should rent a bike or scooter, and save your legs the wear and tear.

You'll enjoy yourself, anyway.