A Nice Place to Visit...

As with all places in the world, there are things I love about Chiang Mai, and things I ... well, don't.


I love that I can go out at 10 pm and walk in any direction, guaranteed to find a noodle cart selling bowls of soup for the equivalent of 40 cents. I love that there's a woman selling hot, sweet, hand-made soy milk (yes, hand-pounded soy beans fresh every day) also on the street each night. And, I love that every morning I wake up to three sounds, roosters, the 5:30 ringing of the temple bell, and my landlady pouring rice grains into her rice cooker to feed the monks on their morning alms rounds. These are just a few of the things I love about this place.

The trouble is, the things I don't like about this place are pretty damn fundamental. Take, for example, the air that we breathe.


I've been laboring for some weeks to take a photo that will show you the hazy swill we are living in, and last Sunday I hit it just right. Chiang Mai is an ancient city in a mountain valley, and we are deep into the middle of dry season, both critical factors in our struggle to breathe free. Our little mountain valley is a hot dusty bowl of foul air with no outlet, and it hasn't rained a cleansing drop since November (and it won't until mid-April, at best). As the temperature rises from January to April, so do pollution levels. At present, the air is so thick you can see it, and I don't just mean when you gaze out from some viewpoint. You can see it as you gaze across the street. At night, motorbikes and cars have cones of light around their headlights. Street lamps have haloes. And, in the day belching machines of innumerable description and the witless burning of trash and leaves just keep adding to this soup we call air.

Before my recent chest cold (sure, hit me when I'm down), I had already developed a heaviness in my chest too low to reach with a cough. This year is the worst I've seen in the last five (wow, five winters in Chiang Mai!). But the real kicker is that this year our little baby is breathing the same stuff. Enough to send you to the airport for a ticket to anywhere else.

So, while we wait for the cleansing rains that will surely bring relief (and for my husband's U.S. visa to be approved), we are keeping indoors, walking in the alleys with fewer cars, avoiding rush hour, and dreaming of the fresh crisp air in upstate New York.