By Alexander Villafania
INQUIRER.net

THAILAND is known for its beautiful beaches like Phuket and Ko Samui. Most tourists tend to stay near the country’s fine shores instead of the countryside. In comparison, there are wonderful places in Thailand not often seen by visitors but are worthy of praise as the country’s beaches. Seven hundred kilometers north of Bangkok is a land-locked city known as Chiang Mai. After visiting a couple of Thailand’s beaches in the past, I got the chance to go to Chiang Mai recently. It takes about one hour by plane to reach the city or about a day’s travel by bus. Lucky for me, I took the shorter and more comfortable way.

My trip to Chiang Mai was part of an IT conference organized by IBM. I stayed at the wonderful Chiang Mai Shangri-La Hotel where most of IBM’s partners and clients also stayed. The walk around the hotel alone was superb. The entire structure had been designed with historic Northern Thailand architecture in mind but with many modern touches. The path leading to the main entrance had four elephant sculptures that welcomed visitors. The façade had three tiered gazebos with wood shingles and designed to look like traditional temples.The hotel’s backyard garden had very modern landscaping with trimmed grass, lined up palm trees, properly placed ferns and shrubs. However, a walk past the garden revealed dining areas with a few Thai motifs and just over a red brick wall is a huge pool that also had covered gazebos where swimmers can bath underneath aged roof panels. The elephant ornamentation is also widely present in the pool area.

Shangri-La Hotel didn’t spare any expense to build a luxurious spa area. Instead of having a room inside the hotel, the spa was built outside and was even more traditional in design than the hotel itself. Although I didn’t get to have a genuine Thai massage I got to smell the herbal aroma emanating from inside. It would have been heavenly to experience it first hand.

While the hotel offers a lot to its guests, luckily it is near the Kalare Night Bazaar, perhaps the busiest area in the whole of Chiang Mai. The first you’ll notice here is its similarity to our own Greenhills kiosks, with dozens of shops peddling just about every kind of gifts, souvenirs, food and beverages. There are a few shops that sell unique items not usually, if at all, found in the Philippines.

One that caught my eye is the scented colored soaps shaped into different and often familiar flowers. These colored soaps are placed inside globular containers, which also have their own unique designs. Too bad I wasn’t able to get any of the sellers’ numbers. These items would have been a hit in the Philippines.

Kalare, by the way, is a huge place. Although one main road cuts right in the middle of the night bazaar, one could easily get lost in all the shops selling trinkets and toys, stalls that sell Thai street food, and even some stages with regular folk dance and puppet shows.

It’s never boring even though most of the shops are selling the same items. What makes this place appealing is that people can bargain for the items, which are already cheap as they are. One can already take home several items with only P1,000 (500 baht), more if you’re willing to shell out another P1,000.

Traveling around Kalare might be tiresome for others so there are vehicles called “tuktuk.” These are motorcycles similar to our own tricycyles or “trikes” to some foreigners, but instead of a sidecar, the passenger carriage is at the back. For about 50 to 70 baht, the tuktuk driver can take you anywhere in Chiang Mai. The tuktuk became even more popular when it was featured in a Citibank card commercial starred by 007 actor Pierce Brosnan and Chinese actress Zhang Ziyi. Apart from the tuktuk, another method of going around is via 4×4 pickup truck fitted with a roof and seats on the side. These vehicles, called “songthaew,” are mostly Toyota Hilux pickup trucks. This seems to be a copycat of our own jeepney. Riding these pickups is actually like riding the jeepney in the Philippines.

In such a short while, I’ve basically experienced a small part of Chiang Mai. According to a Thai local, there are other areas in Chiang Mai that could be visited, such as several Buddhist temples (called “wat” in Thai), the Elephant Nature Park, a weekend market along Rachadamnoen Road, and of course, dozens of massage parlors that provide genuine Thai massages. It would be a treat to come back to this city if only for the night market and the massage!