08.02 Day 24 Chiang Rai
Day 24 - Thursday 8th Feb - Chiang Rai
A quieter day planned today with a slow start and time put aside for school work in the morning. The view from the rooftop offers occasional glimpses of the hillsides around us but only by peering through the smoke, caused by farmers burning the stubble of their picked crops in the surrounding countryside. This is mentioned in the books, and was also a risk for Chiang Mai too - although it's not pervasive, sitting on the rooftop, occasional flecks of ash land around us, and our clothes at the end of the day have a smoked tinge to them. Not one for the asthma crowd.
After schooling to build up a hunger for lunch we walk through the town centre to a large covered market, stalls encroaching on narrow steps between one another. Like others you can get a whole raw chicken to cooked meals to fruit and veg and currently a lot of red Chinese New Year paraphernalia. Red lanterns, cakes and clothes doing an especially brisk trade with Chinese New Year in two days time.
Lunch next to our hostel is Pad Thai three ways and then with the lure of another visit to the cat cafe, two more stints of school work as we catch up on a slightly slow start to the term. Excusing myself, Kate takes the kids back to the cafe around the corner armed with a bit of reading material.
Meanwhile, after the white temple, the blue temple, the gold temple, I continue the colour collection visiting Baan Dam - Black House - finding a local bus to take me the 25 minutes to outer Chiang Rai followed by a kilometre walk down a side road.
By the time I arrive at 4pm almost all the tour buses have been and gone and the afternoon heat is tempered by the shade created by the dropping sun.
Now that I've been to the Black House and its other 20 or so buildings, I still can't tell you what it is. Officially it is ‘aiming to expand people’s perception of art and foster connections with contemporary global issues such as history, ethnicity, cross-border migration, and the ecological system’. It felt more like an individual has a love affair with animal horns, trying to make anything he can from them, starting at basic table legs to outlandish entire chairs, and impractical ceiling fans and tables adorned with animal skulls or alligator skins for good measure.
Kind of weird, kind of different, glad I didn’t drag the kids here. Interesting enough to walk around for 40 minutes, the variety of buildings / huts maintaining interest. I leave when it closes at 5pm walking back to where a bus had dropped me off.
After 20 minutes fruitlessly waiting for a returning bus I Grab taxi back to the night market to catch up with Kate, Sienna and Seb for dinner. Then we all amble along the uneven pavements to the Clock Tower to watch the 7pm light and music show I’d accidentally stumbled across yesterday. From our vantage point you can also this time see a large lotus flower lower down from within the clock tower, the petals opening to reveal a giant ‘crystal’ which adds a little more glitz to the show.