editorial

Words by Christopher White April 1, 2024
A road trip through northern Thailand offers a fresh perspective on the region, not to mention the perfect bowl of khao soi.
<figure id="attachment_136562" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-136562" style="width: 1200px" class="wp-caption aligncenter"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="wp-image-136562 size-full" src="https://staging.destinasian.com/wp-content/uploads/Thailand-Story-2.jpg" alt="The Shan-style Wat Nantaram temple in Chiang Kham." width="1200" height="800" srcset="https://staging.destinasian.com/wp-content/uploads/Thailand-Story-2.jpg 1200w, https://staging.destinasian.com/wp-content/uploads/Thailand-Story-2-300x200.jpg 300w, https://staging.destinasian.com/wp-content/uploads/Thailand-Story-2-1024x683.jpg 1024w, https://staging.destinasian.com/wp-content/uploads/Thailand-Story-2-768x512.jpg 768w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 1200px) 100vw, 1200px" /><figcaption id="caption-attachment-136562" class="wp-caption-text">The Shan-style Wat Nantaram temple in Chiang Kham. (Photo: Christopher White)</figcaption></figure>
We spend the first night of our five-day road trip through northern Thailand in a clear plastic bubble. You know, when kids blow bubbles with plastic wands, and sometimes they stick together as they float away? Our suite looks something like that, set on a wooden deck. We enter through an opaque “airlock” of thick pistachio-green polyester, where our butler advises, “Make sure one door always stays closed, otherwise the whole thing will collapse.” Swallowing my fear of suffocation, I follow my wife, Yupin, into the bedroom, a transparent dome that arcs to its apex above a curtained four-poster bed. Attached to this is a smaller bubble, also opaque, also pistachio, that contains the bathroom and all the amenities of our “day” room back in the main building of the Anantara Golden Triangle Elephant Camp &amp; Resort. The point of these so-called Jungle Bubbles (of which there are three, set in their own forest clearing) is to remove visual barriers between yourself and nature, but it’s cloudy tonight, so we won’t be seeing any stars. No matter, though—we’re here for the elephants.
Less than a kilometer from our bed, the Ruak River, a tributary of the Mekong, winds muddily between the Chiang Saen floodplain and Myanmar’s Eastern Shan State. It has rained all afternoon, and mist floats from the jungle along Thailand’s northern border. About an hour after our butler departs, Yupin notices we have a visitor. We rush to the edge of our bubble and peer out upon a full-grown adult elephant munching on bamboo grass just beyond our walkway.
It’s wonderful to be in Thailand again. This is Yupin’s home country, and where we met while I was living in Phuket in the early 2000s. We haven’t been back since before the Covid outbreak. The last time I wandered Chiang Rai, the country’s northernmost province, was in 1996, at the close of a three-year stint with the U.S. Peace Corps. Yupin has never been before. We’re looking at it through fresh eyes, and our road trip from here to Chiang Mai (via the neighboring province of Phayao) should allow for soaking up maximum flavor in minimal time.
<figure id="attachment_136561" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-136561" style="width: 1200px" class="wp-caption aligncenter"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="wp-image-136561 size-full" src="https://staging.destinasian.com/wp-content/uploads/Thailand-Story-3.jpg" alt="The lobby entrance at Anantara Golden Triangle, and on the road to Phayao." width="1200" height="894" srcset="https://staging.destinasian.com/wp-content/uploads/Thailand-Story-3.jpg 1200w, https://staging.destinasian.com/wp-content/uploads/Thailand-Story-3-300x224.jpg 300w, https://staging.destinasian.com/wp-content/uploads/Thailand-Story-3-1024x763.jpg 1024w, https://staging.destinasian.com/wp-content/uploads/Thailand-Story-3-768x572.jpg 768w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 1200px) 100vw, 1200px" /><figcaption id="caption-attachment-136561" class="wp-caption-text">Left to right: The lobby entrance at Anantara Golden Triangle; on the road to Phayao. (Photos: Ken Seet (left); Christopher White)</figcaption></figure>
Fortunately, our bubble room is watertight. At about 5:00 a.m., a thunderstorm slaps raindrops down with a volume that puts the cicadas to shame. After the sun rises and the skies clear, a tuk-tuk takes us along dirt roads deeper into the 160-hectare sanctuary of the Golden Triangle Asian Elephant Foundation. We walk for over two kilometers with two other adult females and their little “nephew,” a four-year-old dude who loves eating figs and rubbing his back against trees. Along the way, we learn how the foundation has not only rescued elephants—around 30 live here now—but also provides jobs and housing for their mahouts.
Back in our rental car, we steer south toward Chiang Rai’s namesake provincial capital with no real agenda beyond Yupin’s desire to have a look at Wat Rong Suea Ten, a.k.a. the Blue Temple. We’re attempting to travel blind, open. Sure, we arranged our flights and accommodations, but we’ve avoided reading guides—a very different approach from the days when I would mine my 800-page Lonely Planet Thailand before every outing. I loved that routine, but this time around, I’m feeling a liberation in just winging it.
Beyond the bustling streets of Chiang Saen, we detour through the rolling hills of a cannabis farm and then drop down to the Nong Bua Luang reservoir, a placid lake where people come to have lunch on individual bamboo rafts. It’s June, still early in the rainy season, so while the weather’s mostly sunny, the landscape has already turned green. The remaining 90 minutes of the drive whirls through recently planted rice fields, rubber plantations, and pineapple farms.
After dropping our bags at our hotel on Chiang Rai’s main drag, we duck into a temple called Wat Jet Yod to wait out a passing shower. By now, we’re craving caffeine, and I’m hungry for khao soi. The unofficial noodle curry of the north eludes me, how &#8211; ever, so we settle for regular fare from a hole-in-the wall restaurant with a view of buses and oily rain puddles. Then, at the storefront of an office-supply store, we stumble upon a sign, handwritten in Sharpie on a cardboard box, that reads CHIANG RAI HOMEMADE COCONUT ICE CREAM. An elderly Thai man digs into a steel drum and serves up the most amazing ice cream that I’ve had in over 20 years.
<figure id="attachment_136560" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-136560" style="width: 1200px" class="wp-caption aligncenter"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="wp-image-136560 size-full" src="https://staging.destinasian.com/wp-content/uploads/Thailand-Story-4.jpg" alt="A bowl of khao soi, northern Thailand’s iconic curry noodle soup and the gardens at Chiang Mai’s 137 Pillars House hotel." width="1200" height="894" srcset="https://staging.destinasian.com/wp-content/uploads/Thailand-Story-4.jpg 1200w, https://staging.destinasian.com/wp-content/uploads/Thailand-Story-4-300x224.jpg 300w, https://staging.destinasian.com/wp-content/uploads/Thailand-Story-4-1024x763.jpg 1024w, https://staging.destinasian.com/wp-content/uploads/Thailand-Story-4-768x572.jpg 768w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 1200px) 100vw, 1200px" /><figcaption id="caption-attachment-136560" class="wp-caption-text">Left to right: A bowl of khao soi, northern Thailand’s iconic curry noodle soup; The gardens at Chiang Mai’s 137 Pillars House hotel. (Photos: iStock/Nungning20 (left); Christopher White)</figcaption></figure>
My first impressions of Chiang Rai, from 1994, were of a large town in a valley between ranges of lush green mountains that recalled my home state of Vermont, in the northeastern United States. Today, it’s a full-blown city, but one that feels manageable. At dinnertime, we roam the Night Bazaar, where Yupin purchases a dozen Thai silk scarves for gifts, and we feast on green papaya salad with salted crab (som tam boo plara) and whole tilapia grilled in salt. Aside from this and the sapphire-hued Blue Temple, we’re hunting less for big sites and more for little nuggets. One of our favorite finds is Hakucho, a hipster-run coffee shop just up from the hotel. In the morning, before checkout, we cap off our stay with pour-overs of a single origin called Lampang Yeast.
Route 1020 is the smaller of the two highways leading from Chiang Rai to Phayao, and it makes for a gorgeous drive: smooth pavement, minimal traffic, and unfolding vistas of farmland and distant mountains. When I spot a tented roadside eatery advertising khao soi noodles, I eagerly pull over for a fix. With its rich coconut curry and meat-falling-off-bones chicken, it absolutely hits the spot.
Near the border of Phayao Province, the road rises through a mountain pass. Limestone karsts and jungle roll by, and we drop down through the villages of Si Chom Chaeng and Sak Thung. Here we take a left onto Route 4033, the most fun road of our drive. It runs in a straight line through rice fields for 800 meters, then abruptly turns 90 degrees, then back again—and it does so at least half a dozen times. We call it the road of 10,000 turns. Soon enough, the 4033 deposits us in Chiang Kham, at the foot of the Phipanam Mountains, where we stop at the Shan-style teakwood temple of Wat Nantaram. Aside from a small group of schoolchildren, we are the only visitors. Yupin is a casual Buddhist, and I enjoy aspects of the philosophy, but we visit temples because they are pretty rather than for religious purposes. And Wat Nantaram is breathtaking. You can almost sense the soul of the wood.
A road trip around northern Thailand can feel like a walk through a robust talat nat, or evening market, where there’s so much to see and smell that you want to try everything. We actually repeat the mistake of buying too much fruit—durian, juicy nam dok mai mangoes, rambutan—at least three times and have to keep telling ourselves, “It’s okay, we’ll come back.”
The town of Phayao sits scenically on a lake with mountains rising from the opposite bank and wide marshes full of birds. From our hotel, we walk across bamboo bridges among giant pink lotus flowers to have dinner with Yupin’s friends Bun and Tri, who make a surprise visit all the way from Sukhothai, then catch a local cover band for a set of Thai pop in a nearby beer garden. It feels as though we can’t fit anything else in, and yet we’ve had only a taste.
After a fitful night on a plank of a mattress in Phayao, we drive two hours to Chiang Mai and settle into our colonial-styled suite at 137 Pillars House, a serene resort built around a restored 19th-century teak residence in the Wat Ket neighborhood. Having ditched our rental car at the airport to avoid the stress of big-city driving, we’re now enjoying chilled coconuts on our balcony’s day bed. Later, we’ll visit old haunts on the Ping River and rediscover the best coconut cream pie ever at Love at First Bite, a garden-side bakery and café nearby. And of course, we’ll cross the pedestrian bridge that leads to Kad Luang, Chiang Mai’s largest open market, for more gifts and another hit of durian. But these can all wait. For now, we’ve reached the end of the road, and the sounds and scents of birds and flowers in the gardens of 137 Pillars are perfectly enough.
<figure id="attachment_136563" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-136563" style="width: 1200px" class="wp-caption aligncenter"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="wp-image-136563 size-full" src="https://staging.destinasian.com/wp-content/uploads/Golden-Triangle-Asian-Elephant-Foundation-Thai-Story-1.jpg" alt="Residents of the Anantara Golden Triangle’s adjoining elephant camp." width="1200" height="800" srcset="https://staging.destinasian.com/wp-content/uploads/Golden-Triangle-Asian-Elephant-Foundation-Thai-Story-1.jpg 1200w, https://staging.destinasian.com/wp-content/uploads/Golden-Triangle-Asian-Elephant-Foundation-Thai-Story-1-300x200.jpg 300w, https://staging.destinasian.com/wp-content/uploads/Golden-Triangle-Asian-Elephant-Foundation-Thai-Story-1-1024x683.jpg 1024w, https://staging.destinasian.com/wp-content/uploads/Golden-Triangle-Asian-Elephant-Foundation-Thai-Story-1-768x512.jpg 768w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 1200px) 100vw, 1200px" /><figcaption id="caption-attachment-136563" class="wp-caption-text">Residents of the Anantara Golden Triangle’s adjoining elephant camp. (Photo courtesy of Anantara)</figcaption></figure>
Navigating Thailand’s North
GETTING THERE
There are daily flights to Chiang Mai from Kuala Lumpur, Singapore, and Hong Kong, as well as from Bangkok. Chiang Rai’s airport, while international in name, mostly services flights to and from Bangkok. Both airports offer car rental facilities.
WHERE TO STAY
<a href="https://www.anantara.com/en" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Anantara Golden Triangle Elephant Camp &amp; Resort</a> 
About a hour’s drive from Chiang Rai, this Lanna-inspired hillside retreat doubles as a sanctuary for rescued and retired elephants (from US$930 a night, all-inclusive).
<a href="https://lepattachiangrai.com/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Le Patta Hotel Chiang Rai</a>
A courtyard pool and convenient location are the highlights here (from US$65 a night).
<a href="https://nagatararesort.com/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Naga Tara Resort</a>
Pool-access villas are the rooms to book at this small property overlooking Phayao Lake (from US$60 a night).
<a href="https://137pillarshotels.com/en/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">137 Pillars House Chiang Mai</a> 
Named for the number of sturdy teak columns that support its historic central building, 137 Pillars House is a 30-suite urban resort with good access to both the city and the countryside (from US$465 a night).
This article originally appeared in the <a href="https://www.destinasian.com/magazine" target="_blank" rel="noopener">December 2023/February 2024</a> print issue of DestinAsian magazine (“Driving Ambition”).

Residents of the Anantara Golden Triangle’s adjoining elephant camp.

The Scenic Route between Chiang Rai and Chiang Mai