We stayed at a very quiet guesthouse called Boonbundan and there was this awesome rasta Thai dude selling handmade leather crafts down the street. His name was At and when we told him we were from California, he invited us to toss around the Frisbee sometime after dark when the traffic would die down.
Our first stop in Chiang Rai was a really great cultural museum called Hill Tribe Museum and Education Center run by Population and Community Development Association (PDA). In addition to the collection of artifacts and a great time line about the history of opium they had a narrated powerpoint presentation and a video about the different hill tribes in the province and how they were impacted by tourism. The PDA also ran culturally sensitive treks from an office there and we were pretty excited to finally find a trek we felt good about. We especially wanted to visit a village called Ban Lorcha that is the only community supported hill tribe tourism operation in Thailand. That means that the guides are people from that village and all the money goes to the village. This means you get a more genuine educational experience, and that you're not supporting begging or the near slavery of some of the other hill tribe tourist traps (for example, all the long neck Karen in Thailand are physically imported and forced to live in "rustic" settings as tourist attractions). Unfortunately, none of the treks they were booking looked interesting to us, and none of them visited that village, so we passed on the trekking.
Downstairs was a branch of the restaurant called "Cabbages and Condoms."
The profits of this restaurant go toward making condoms as easy to find as cabbages in Thailand. It was here that we had one of the most delicious dishes I've had so far in Thailand (Lyndsay was not nearly excited as me for some reason). It was hor mok served in a young coconut.
Hor mok is a souffle-like seafood curry usually made with fish and served in a banana leaf packet. This one featured squid, shrimp, and big delicious fish balls. Oh, and the young coconut meat had been scraped out and cooked in the hor mok. My mouth is watering thinking about it again. We also had some little fried chicken nuggets wrapped in pandan leaves. They were very good but a little fatty.
That night we went to the night bazaar, which is similar to the one in Chiang Mai, except with much more unique souvenirs. We were still pretty full from the hor mok so we just got a sausage on a stick. The sausage I picked turned out to be this one they make by mixing ground pork with lots of garlic and lime juice and wrapping it in a banana leaf packet. This packet is then left out to sit for something like 3 days and gets "cooked" by the acid in the lime juice. Don't worry, this one was grilled in addition to its lime juice cooking.
Later we got the spiciest som tam (papaya salad) we've had so far. The cook held out a handful of chillies and we shook out heads until she was only holding three. One and a half chillies per person was enough to make our mouths burn painfully.
On our way back to our hotel we stopped for dessert and ran into Aaron Mandel, a fellow Whitman graduate in our class. We were not too surprised to run into him since we knew he and a bunch of his friends were going to be traveling in Thailand at some point, although we though they had already returned by then. Turns out they had already been traveling for three months and are still planning to visit Lao and Vietnam (they'll be in Hanoi at the same time as us). Here is their travel blog.
Aaron told us lots of good stories about a guesthouse named Mr. Whisky run by an alcoholic with a cat named "Meow." We also heard good stories about Adam Sachs (another Whittie) including his week-long Buddhist retreat, him crashing a motorcycle into a parked tuk tuk, and him falling out of the bed of a pickup truck.
They all happened to be staying at the same guesthouse as us, but no one was in their room when we checked before going to sleep. Oh, and on our way home, we saw that At had lost his Frisbee on the roof, so we didn't get to play with him.
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