A lot of people we talk to about our trip(s) to Thailand ask us why we like it here so much – it is always hard to quantify the whole rationale because it is not one thing that is the ‘gotcha’, but a bunch of things working together in concert.

One that is on the top of my list though is the relaxed pace of life here.  Don’t get me wrong, people work hard here, and most of what they do is done manually, but the sense of urgency that we seem to be wrapped up in back home just does not seem to exist here.  Sure we are on vacation so care a little less, but even in the mannerisms and actions of the locals you can tell that the rat race we are exposed to every day is a lot more subdued here.

I had almost forgotten how easy it is to almost shutdown here and completely relax, but it is just a few days in and already I feel like the treadmill has been dialed back from 11 and is set at a zen inducing 3 🙂 Time for us is now measured not by what day it is, but by how many days we have left at this particular hotel before we check out.  We get up in the morning, have breakfast (some time between 8am and 10am when it ends), and while sitting outside enjoying our morning meal decide what we are going to do with the day.

For the last few days this has consisted of just walking around the city and getting a bit of exercise while doing a little shopping, and seeing some of the old city.  The big decision of the day so far has been if we should go for our massage before dinner, or after dinner, and I guess what sort of massage to get – Thai massage, back massage, foot massage, etc.  With so many options I guess I shall just try as many as I can 🙂 Rachael in fact has asked me to get 3 or 4 a week for her, so really I am just following orders.

We finally connected last night with our tour guide from last year (Riam).  We had thought we might bump into her again at the temple where she found us last year, so had walked through there a few times, but finally resorted to the cell phone.  She agreed to meet us at our hotel in the morning to suggest some things we might like to see outside of the city.  We have a few ideas including a trip to Doi Inthanon – the tallest mountain in Thailand – but they are full day trips, so we chat for a few minutes and decide to stop at a couple of ‘factories’ on the way to one of the smaller national parks and a short hike in the jungle alongside a waterfall.

Along the way we stop to see a place where they make silk fabric, and there is an area where we can see them extract the silk threads directly from the silkworm cocoons and spin the fine filaments into a larger thread that is cleaned and then dyed into the various colors for weaving.  All of the work here is done by hand right from the spinning of the threads to the weaving of the cloth.  A weaver doing a solid color/pattern can do about 5 meters (about 15 feet) of cloth per day, but someone doing one of the many intricate patterns slows down to about 5cm per hour (about 2 inches).  The cloth and the patterns are quite exquisite, but Mrs Columbus is more in sightseeing mode than shopping mode, and after looking around a bit we move on.

Our next stop is at an orchid and butterfly farm.  I had no idea how orchids were grown, and that they were quite a tricky plant to grow and get to flourish properly.  There is apparently a large number of these farms and they spend a lot of time trying to grow ‘crops’, and cross pollinate different species of plants in order to try and create completely new ones.  In addition to growing and selling the flowers there is quite a market to sell the plants to tourists who take them home in a special bottle (where they can apparently thrive for a few weeks), but they also have a process for encasing the flowers or the petals in a lacquer to make pendants and ear-rings out of them.  They also do this with butterflies (hence the butterfly part of the farm) and the array of jewelry is actually quite impressive.  I don’t escape this place quite so lucky as the last though because Mrs Columbus has managed to get her shop on and pick up a few items to return home with.

Our next stop of the day is at Mae Sa National Park to hike up the waterfalls – there is a series of 10 waterfalls cascading over each other along about a 2km hike.  The scenery is amazing, and hike is very serene and peaceful, but it is about 90 degrees out and we are in the jungle, so for us it is damn hot!  By the time we get to the top Mrs Columbus and I have shed about 5lb each in sweat, and we both look like we just walked through a car wash!  Some relief is found at the top though as we wade into the refreshing water and cool down a bit, that and of course most of the trip back is all down hill 🙂

On the way down our guide Riam offers to take us to see her garden on the way back to Chiang Mai, and this is a bit of an honor for us to be invited to see some of their personal world so we feel very fortunate.  Her ‘garden’ is really more like a small farm (sorry Rick she has you beat by about 2 acres).  They grow lots of vegetables as well as some fruit trees, and some of the local Thai spices like lemongrass and galangal.  We get to pick some Longan right off the tree as it is very close to being ready to harvest – this is something we don’t see in the USA but can perhaps be described as like a grape but with an outer skin you peel off to expose the fruit inside.  It is very popular all over SE Asia, and we are lucky to get some fresh off the tree.  We end the afternoon with a short ride back to the city and a plan to meet again in the morning for a trip out to Doi Inthanon.

Now, back to decision time – massage before or after dinner…….?!

I had to take a few days to mull this post over and get back into more of a zen state before writing it all down – it will likely help keep the curse words out of my rant 😉

It feels to me like in our ongoing chase for the loot, we continue to excel at lowering the bar.  As we outsource more and more ‘menial jobs’ we sugar coat it by talking about our intellectual property and our strong service industry.  Sadly it seems to me that on the service industry side the expectations of actual service get lower and lower all the time.

As Mrs. Columbus and I were setting out on our summer adventure we were all prepared to get the show on the road.  We had used some more of our affinity points to book business class tickets so that we could enjoy the trappings of ‘the good life’ on the flights and not have to endure 30 hours of economy class discomfort (often referred to as ‘cattle class’ by members of the family).  We show up at the Seattle airport with our bags in tow (1 checked and 1 carry-on per person), all our documents at the ready, and eager to step into the business class check-in for the ‘large domestic carrier that starts with a U’, thus bypassing the long line at the regular check-in and one of the ‘perks’ of flying business class….  You are first prompted to use the self-serve kiosk, but realistically for anyone not traveling domestically only, you are going to have to see an agent – as the kiosk re-affirms for us after going through the full process to try and check-in: Please see an agent to check-in.  After standing at the front of the line for about 15 mins, I figure out that there are 2 agents that are servicing the elite status check-ins, however, one seems to be fairly busy with a single lady – it turns out that the lady is some sort of travel agent, and the counter agent is doing the check-in for a ‘large group’.  The large group is not actually present, and are all flying economy class, so it turns out that these people, who are not even at the airport yet, and who would normally have to stand in the regular check-in line, are actually getting better service than all the other people waiting in either the elite status line, or the regular line!! I ask the lady if there are any other agents working the business class check-in and get rudely snipped at: “I am working on a large group and going to be a while, you will have to wait for the next available agent.”  The other agent is/has been working with a group of three other business travelers who’s flight has been delayed for several hours and are trying to find another route home.  Apparently the delay is ‘weather related’ so the ‘large domestic carrier that starts with a U’ is not interested in trying to transfer them to another flight.  We finally get frustrated enough waiting in line (about 20+ mins) that we actually go to the economy class counter, where a more pleasant agent apologizes a couple of times and checks us right in.

So finally we are checked-in, make our way through security, and are off to the gate to wait about an hour or so for the flight to board (us being some of the people who actually show up early and prepared per the recommendation).  Now we are about to take advantage of the 2nd perk of our business class status – the business class lounge.  The business class lounge was always the utopia for fliers – free drinks (sodas, cocktails, etc.), snacks, light meals, and a quiet relaxing place to step away from the chaos of the general departure area.  In the ongoing lowering of the bar, the lounge has been ‘cutback’, and no longer offers much in the way of food service besides a light snack, and clearly the supply of peanuts and pretzels that used to be given out to the cattle class passengers.  But still offered is the complimentary libations and sodas and the lure of a more comfortable chair – or not…  I get to chuckle to myself as we walk up to the door to see that the lounge has temporarily has it’s liquor license suspended by the state and the refreshments are now limited to non-alcoholic beverages.  Not really a big deal to me as I am not planning to get loaded for the flight, but seriously – how does a business class lounge in an airport get it’s liquor license suspended?!  The joke is really on me though as when we actually walk through the doors, the one ‘agent’ working the front desk is swamped and there is actually a line to check-in.

Now you might ask, how does all this relate to the lowering of the bar of the service industry – well all of the frustration to this point aside, you get through it all and start to relax, and then we cross the invisible line that is the international carrier – it is like walking from a black and white photo to a full color frame complete with rainbows and sunshine!  After our jaunt from Seattle to LA on the ‘large domestic carrier that starts with a U’ we transfer to our international carrier (Thai Air) – the business class check-in is fully serviced with 3 agents, the service is polite and helpful, and customers seem to be treated with regard.  We have a 6 hour lay-over, but the lounge is large and roomy – there is hot food, cold beverages, and actual attendants passing through from time to time pre-announcing the boarding for flights so that you can pack your belongings up and walk comfortably to the gate.  And then in the final slap in the face of our domestic experience, we board the plane with lots of smiling, helpful flight attendants (6 I think for the business and first class cabin).

If all you ever did was travel domestically, you would think that we have it as good as it gets, but in reality we have fallen sooo far.  The level of service we have come to accept as ‘OK’ is nowhere near what it used to be, and miles behind what many other parts of the world offer. All in the name of progress?!?

/rant off

PS: This is of course not at all unique to the airline industry, but very representative of most of the service industry that we live in.  🙁

And so it begins 🙂  After a lengthy amount of time on planes and in airports we have arrived back in the Land of Smiles.  Our plane got in to Chiang Mai at about 9am this morning and we have begun to start the acclimatization process.  It was a paltry 82F here at 9am when we got off the plane with the temperature expected to get into the low 90s by mid-day – a huge change from the crappy start to summer we had so far in June back home.

We spent a little time this morning getting ourselves setup with some local currency, a Thai SIM card for our cellphone and a walk around the neighborhood near our hotel.  We have booked a few nights in at the Raiming Lodge (the same place we stayed last year) as it was a place we knew and would give us a chance to look around before deciding what to do next.  We are patiently waiting for 3pm to roll around so that we can get started on our massage regimen 🙂 so we popped out to one of the numerous eateries for a Thai lunch (Tom Yum soup for me and Chicken with Cashew Nut for Laurie), add a couple of fresh fruit shakes and you are well fed and watered for $6.

We are not certain if it is some additional slowdown of the low season, but it seems very quite here today.  We had heard that tourism had taken some hit from the protests earlier in the year in Bangkok, but it seems VERY quiet in downtown Chiang Mai.  Perhaps it has something to do with the World Cup – lots of pubs here are advertising the games, and with many of them being on at hours that Mrs Columbus and I are well into sleep land maybe everyone is up late for the games and just sleeping off the morning.

Our plan is to head out tonight for the Saturday night market – it is about 30 blocks of impromptu shops, street food, street performers, etc.  Laurie and the girls went last year when we were here and came back reasonably well loaded down with treasures, so we will see what we can find this year.

Tis all I got for now…..

I just can’t wait to get on the road again….

In an odd twist of events, our summer travel plans have been all over the map – literally!  Initially Brooklyn and I were going to go for her ‘grad trip’ back to Thailand, but then in what appears to be an almost yearly event, some political protests turned into civil unrest and it looked like Thailand was going to be off the table for travel.  Between that and a change of jobs for Brooklyn, she has decided to post-pone her trip for another time.  She really wants to go back to Thailand and wants to be able to do it when she knows her schedule is not in flux, and that her destination is not subject to change.

At any rate as we were doing all the planning, Mrs Columbus decided that she was going to come along, so when Brooklyn put her trip off, we started to look at other places the 2 of us could go for a little R&R.  We looked at Costa Rica, the Caribbean, and some spots in South America, but it seemed like Mother Nature was mostly working against us – volcanoes erupting in Ecuador and Guatemala, a giant oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, and the start of what is predicted to be a very active hurricane season in the Caribbean seemed to just put some sort of dark cloud over each spot we started looking at.

And then the odd twist of fate happens – after about 4-5 weeks of protests in Bangkok, the whole thing ends with a couple of days of rioting and a crackdown by the Thai military.  After a couple of weeks it seems that all is normal back in our beloved Land of Smiles – so one morning on the weekend there we are sitting down having some breakfast bantering about where on our narrowing short list of places we should go, or if we should just give up and stay home, and Mrs Columbus gets on the phone to see what our options are like for points tickets.  And then BAM, after weeks of indecisiveness she spent a couple of hours on the phone, and just booked them.

Our final destination – yup, back to Thailand 🙂  We figured if we are going to use up our points we might as well get good value for them, and Mrs Columbus feels good about places she knows, and after the great time we had in Asia last year, you just can’t go wrong with something you know and love.