Five flavours: Day 15 Chiang Mai

Soundtrack: “Jet Airliner”, Paul Pena/Steve Miller Band

Today was about mixing things up, getting out of the Ancient town and into the rest of the city. The historical parts of Chiang Mai are interesting, but also with a focus on tourists. It finally dawned on me that for Chiang Mai at least, if I wanted to get out and see and taste what the locals eat, I wasn’t going to find it in places full of foreigners. Also, Chiang Mai has one of L and my favourite places, The Arrow Rest, an archery cafe, and I’d booked some time there.

After a hotel breakfast of noodles and egg, I took a rideshare out of the old parts and into the suburbs. It probably says something about me that even though The Arrow Rest isn’t far from a huge shopping complex, I hadn’t noticed it before. And it wasn’t new, google tells me it’s been there for 13 years, so before I ever first came to Chiang Mai. After a delicious coffee, it was time to fling some pointy things at an innocent piece of paper, who had once been a majestic tree providing shade for animals, and was then mulched and pulped into flat sheets to have multi-coloured concentric circles printed on, before being pinned to several inches of dense rubbery plastic stuff. Did I think about the tree and how all it’s dreams of growing tall were crushed simply to make paper before I loosed my first arrow at it, the sharp point piercing it through one of it’s blue rings? I certainly did not. Did I fill with rage at every paper cut I’ve ever had? Sadly I didn’t think about it at the time, as that would have made a better story. I just pulled another arrow out of my supply and made another hole. And another. As it’d been a while since I’ve shot, the target started pretty close, but once I got back into the swing of it, the wonderful folks moved the target further back until I was puncturing the paper from about 10m. And I did okay, I’m a novice, I can shoot well enough over a short distance without causing undue worry. So for an hour I did that.

Paper target well and truly pierced, I wandered next door where there was a sign with pictures of food, and two tables with cutlery and condiments set up in someone’s carport. Putting my trust in google translate, I hopefully asked for whatever their most popular food is. I was shown a picture of something that might have rice and egg, and nodded. Best case scenario, I’d be eating something tasty, freshly made, and very cheap. Worst case scenario, I’d end up in the foetal postition wrapped around a toilet exploding from every orifice (I’m discounting the place being some lure for a human trafficking/organ harvesting ring, as it didn’t seem like a place that would get a lot of strangers just dropping by). The end result was a tasty scrambled egg dish with several large prawns and some rice. With the addition of a little chilli sauce it was delicious.

I realise I’ve likely been a bit boring for my regular readers on this trip, there hasn’t been a lot of crazy food experiences, no strange ingredients, ultra-hot chilli, offal, or unusual dishes that most sensible folk would recoil from. I haven’t even had any durian this time — for while I love it, it’s almost guaranteed to repeat on me and that’s less fun. The craziest has probably been mystery meat sausages. So apologies folks, I’ll see what I can do for the next couple of days.

Chiang Mai Central Festival Mall is for or so stories of mixed retail, plus some amusements and a cinema. There are a lot of premium brands on the first floor, the second floor is full of smelly shops, like Lush, and a Liverpool FC merch store. Third floor is lots of technology, mobile phones, that kind of thing. There’s food and books and amusement stuff on the fourth, and cinema, food, and more amusements on the fifth. The ground floor is weird, there’s two parts that don’t connect: one is a food hall, the other has tailoring, clothing repairs, and massage. I had a look around the tech mostly, as well as marveling over Thai language editions of books, some interesting things but nothing at a price too much cheaper than Australia.

I headed to the food hall, where I figured I could get something spicy. Pork and chilli paste noodles sounded like they’d do the trick, and while the bowl was definitely tasty, lime and chilli and lemongrass and all the good stuff, the chilli heat was bearable. And so cheap, it’s amazing that a tasty bowl of noodles at Chiang Mai’s upmarket mall, costs about the same as you’d pay at a regular place. It’s kind of a travel paradox: when you want to eat what the locals eat, that sometimes involves going to a Mall.

From the mall I headed further out to Golden Goblin Games, possible Chiang Mai’s only specialist gaming shop for card games, board games, TTRPGS, and Warhammer. They also have gaming space upstairs. Had a quick chat with the staff about the gaming scene in Thailand, and if there were any local producers of games. It’s still at a fledgling stage, while some organisations are bringing out versions in Thai, there’s not much of an industry of local producers making Thai-centric products yet. Fingerscrossed for the future. Bought some dice, and I’m sure after I left they wondered why someone would come all the way from Australia to a gaming store in Chiang Mai.

There was another store in the same area that looked like it might have a multitude of gaming products for sale, but it turns out they are all about Magic cards. Seems that game is popular everywhere. There was also a durian stall next door, something that sadly is not popular everywhere.

I headed back along the busy road to a smaller mall I’d seen along the way. Obviously I’d been looking the wrong way, because directly opposite, sitting in a carpark, was a Boeing 747.

Yup, just sitting along the main road, kind of fenced in, just parked, in full Thai Airways decoration, on completely the other side of the city to the airport, is a fricking Jumbo jet. I wandered closer, there didn’t seem to be any security, though a scooter was parked in the shade under it, I didn’t see anyone. I thought about going up to touch it, but I’m guessing that most plane tyres really feel the same. Still, except for last year when I was a passenger in one, this is about the closets I’ve been to a 747, in a carpark in Chiang Mai. I did some google later about it, I think this one was bought by a businessman when Thai Airways started getting rid of their 747 fleet, and was a cafe for a while, or maybe was intended to be refitted to open as a cafe — the different sites I was looking at seemed to be unsure. From what I can tell it’s not operating as a cafe at the moment, as it certainly wasn’t open for business.

Jumbo jet fix sated, I checked out the Ruamchok Mall, a small set of shops, an outdoor food court, a supermarket, and an undercover fruit and vegetable market. The stalls had many tasty looking things, lots of big meaty mushrooms, amazing fresh fruits, piles of mangoes. It’s interesting to wander along and see many items of the same type at each stall, there isn’t one stall for mangoes, one for dragon fruit, and so on (unlike the uber predatory behaviour of the large chains in Australia that do their best to drive out of malls anyone even remotely providing competition). I checked out the supermarket and picked up some chocolate for the flights home, as well as some odd snacks that caught my eye, as they just seemed too wrong. Tasting notes are as follows:

Cheese in Fish Sticks (Pizza Taste) just sound wrong, there is nothing that even remotely appealing in those words put together in that order. I wasn’t hit by the smell of an outdoors fish market at the end of a hot day when I opened the pack, just a bunch of stick-like strips on a little tray. And surprisingly, they taste okay. There’s no fishyness that I can detect, not in the smell nor the taste. They smell like tomato flavour, and the taste is similar to a Pizza Shape biscuit, the weird not quite tomato flavour with a hint of something pretending to be cheese. Texture-wise, they are not right, they aren’t crunchy, they have a chewy, slightly squeakiness, maybe that the fish part. Google translate tells me they are 60% fish meat, but I’d never have guessed, the flavour and aroma of fish has been stripped out during the transportation from whatever plane of Hell these come from. They aren’t horrible, just disappointing.

Crispy Chicken Skin (Wasabi Flavour) I have high hopes for these, I’m looking for something crunchy that will clean out my sinuses. Sticking my nose into the bag I’m not hit with a big wasabi punch, it smells more like a wheat or corn snack. taking one out, there’s definitely a good amount of spots of green powder coating something fried and crispy. in the mouth they are crunchy, lso crunchy as if they’ve been born with crunch and then stolen all the crunch from the fish sticks while the packs sat together among my shopping. Then comes a wave of wasabi, enough to make me breath better but sadly there are no tears, and except for a few lingering moments the wasabi subsides into salty. Having another is almost the same, though I can feel the wasabi starting to build on itself before subsiding a little too fast. It doesn’t take long to get through the pack, and there’s a bigger punch at the bottom among the smaller pieces of chicken skin and the extra deposited wasabi coating. But I’d certainly left in no fear about upending the final contents straight into my mouth, though there’s a bigger punch it’s fading as I reach for my water. They are good, tasty, but again, slightly wrong. The wasabi level is just right for a snack that you could eat over a long session with some beer. But it’s DEEP FRIED CHICKEN SKIN. Not the sort of thing you’d want to regularly munch through a 300g bag of, because the cholesterol would fuck you up. Wasabi peas, sure, make them mild because other than the salt levels, they at least have something vaguely healthy going for them. But DEEP FRIED CHICKEN SKIN (with extra palm oil) is something that really should only be consumed in a 30g bag, and for that amount I want the wasabi to peel the skin from my mouth and strip every hair from my nose, it should make me cry like a Portuguese football player. I don’t want it to want me to go back for more, I want it to beg me to MAKE IT STOP.

At the outdoor food court I asked for the most popular dish, and got something that was kind of Thai nachos, a flavourful mince dish with extra crunch from deep fried wanton wrappers, lots of lemongrass and chilli, but again not torturously hot. Though with the sun out, the weather was getting towards torturously hot so I booked a ride back to the hotel, full of food that the locals eat.

After blogging, watching the rain, sorting laundry, looking at rainbows, I took a stroll out and about. Sometimes relaxing can get tiring, especially when it’s doing lots of walking like I have been. Wandered up to a food market for a papaya salad, all the fresh goodness of shredded papaya, fish sauce, chilli, and other magical things. I really should eat more of this, it’s such a good thing. I also had some squid fried with garlic, though the garlic part was more the flakes sprinkled on top.

It seemed a quiet night in Chiang Mai, especially for a Saturday. Maybe all the English and Norwegian tourists were getting ready for the football, or maybe folks head to Bangkok on weekends. My walk took me past the 6ixcret show, and I could see they still had a good crowd, so that something (I’d earlier passed some of the queens touting out front, they recognised me so I promised I’d revisit before I left Chiang Mai).

So it was an early night for me. Tomorrow as last full day will likely be a larger one: The Arrow Rest again in the morning, then massage, the big Chiang Mai Sunday Night Market 9one last run to get tacky souvenirs for the folks back home), and one last time at 6ixcret. At least I’ve got a Monday afternoon flight out, so can pack in the morning.