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I am staying in Chiang Saen for a few days. I’m just learned that Chiang Saen was sacked in the early 1800s and was something of a ghost town for a hundred years. It shows. Chiang Saen lacks a certain vitality. It seems rather impoverished. Massage shops in Thailand may be a sort of bellwether. Like a Starbucks—if there is a Starbucks in the neighborhood, you know that there is a lot of foot traffic, and that people are spending money. Chiang Rai has an abundance of massage shops (probably too many) they cater to both tourists and locals with discretionary cash. Chiang Rai is thriving and has a vitality about it. I didn’t see any massage shops in Chiang Saen. It has some nice historical sites to see, but I wouldn’t want to live here.

I rented a motorbike from the only motorbike rental shop I could find within walking distance of my hotel. It was a dreary little shop. The bike I got had a lot of miles on it. It was hard to start,  the speedometer didn’t work, and the front end was a little squirrely. I drove it around the block and then took it back to get a better replacement, but it turned out it was the only bike in the shop that would start. So I slowly drove to to The Golden Triangle, about 10 km to the north.

My first stop was the Opium Museum. A very nice small privately run funky museum. This was my second visit to this museum. About five years ago I visited with a Thai lady friend. One of the first exhibits you come to is a recreation of a bamboo and straw hut that rural a Thai or Burmese might live in. Inside the hut was a wax or fiberglass man laying on his side on a platform, smoking opium. My friend looked in the hut and exclaimed PAPA! She forced her way through the door of the hut that was tied shut with a string and began talking to the man. She talked for at least two minutes with quite a bit of sadness in her voice while I stood outside looking on with my jaw dropped in stunned silence.

After she exited the hut, she explained that she didn’t remember her Father very well, because when she was about five years old, she and her brother were sent across the border from Myanmar by their mother to live with their Aunt in Thailand, because her father was an opium smoker and they were very poor.

After remembering that experience, I finished touring the museum and left for the much larger Hall of Opium Museum about 2 km to the north. The Hall of Opium is a Royal Project, and like the other Royal Projects I have seen in Thailand, it is a very impressive, very beautiful facility. But, at least on this day, not very popular. There was only one car in the rather large parking lot.

I walked up the the ticket office by the entrance, and said in my best Thai, “One, ticket, museum” That’s the best I could do. I am not too good at speaking in real sentences yet. The lovely Thai woman surprised me by asking in English, “Do you live here?” “Yes, in Chiang Rai”, I replied in English. She smiled and said, “One hundred and fifty baht.” It was then that I noticed the sign:
Foreigners: 200 Baht
Thai: 150 Baht
She had given me the Thai price, the locals price! I used to encounter the dual pricing system a lot in Bangkok, but I hadn’t seen it very often in Northern Thailand. I have always happily paid the foreigner price. That she gave me the Thai price struck me as rather amazing. I decided that, perhaps, by speaking in my fractured Thai, I had appeared to her something like the child dressed in a big cowboy hat and big boots appears. And what do we do when we encounter a child dressed like that? We extend to them exaggerated respect to make them happy. She charged my the locals price. It did make me rather happy.

I didn’t have exact change, so I gave her two hundred baht, and I was so flummoxed that I took my ticket and headed for the entrance without getting my change. And guess what? She ran after me, and gave me 50 Baht.

The museum was a very nice, interactive, multimedia, exhibit. Well worth visiting. It went on forever, and it took me about an hour to reach the end. I exited the building and was trying to figure out where I was, and where my motor bike was. There was a parking lot, but it was empty. I was walking around  trying to figure out where I parked, when a mini van driven by a man in uniform pulled up beside me.
“Are you looking for your car?”
“Yes.”
“Do you have a car or a motor bike?”
“Motor bike”
“Get in.”

Now what the heck was this all about, I thought. Did I park my bike in the Prime Minister’s spot, and it got towed? Did it get stolen?

It turns, that after touring the museum, you exit at the rear of the building. This was an air conditioned shuttle service back to the front parking lot. And it’s along way—it would have been about a ten minute walk. Nice.

Today is better than tomorrow.
Kevin