The Road Less Traveled

Where we stay in Mae Rim is a small village about 45-60 minutes from Chiang Mai city (where most of the actions are). Mae Rim is close to many of the more “natural” activities such as visiting hill tribes, Tiger Kingdom, elephant camps, zip lining etc.

There are signs along the road to point us to Mae Rim town center from where we stay. We had been mostly following the signs and ignoring Google Maps instructions since we knew the way from observing the drivers who drove us before, but I always wanted to try out the Google Maps road, at least once.

So yesterday, Gary and I decided to just turn slight right instead of left at the fork. We ended up driving for a mile or two on some country road. At first, Gary said that this was a nice experiment but he would go back to the main road again next time because it was a bit nerve wrecking to drive on uneven grounds and narrow roads. However, as we drove along, we saw more of the countryside.

The serenity and beauty of this place were difficult to capture with my iPhone camera in a moving car. Despite what Gary had said initially, today we took the same country road again to avoid a lot of the crazy “city” traffic.

What is true about this Mae Rim country road is also true about life. There may be many surprises along the way, and many not so pleasant ones, but somewhere along the way, there are also unexpected rewards, beauty that one hasn’t imagined nor expected. Those brief moments of unexpected joy make the whole experience worthwhile. I have always like Robert Frost’s poem “The Road Not Taken” since I first stumbled on it in college. My only regret is that I haven’t had the courage to take the road less traveled by until now.

Driving Around Chiang Mai

By now, it has almost become a routine that we drive to town every day after breakfast (and sometimes after swimming too). Google Maps has been a great help. Frankly, we wouldn’t survive the driving without it. However, you do have to be careful with how to enter the addresses. In Thailand, it seems that everything has multiple names, and that the same name can apply to multiple places. If you just cut and paste an English translated address into Google Map, it may come up with multiple results, or it may point you to somewhere completely differently. We found this out the hard way when we went to visit Rhys last week and spent over an hour getting to his office when we were actually just a few minutes away.

I have since become very careful about entering addresses. The best way is to search that place by name on Google Maps (or just on the internet) and see if the map location it comes up with seems correct by other means (most sites do have info on where they are located). Once you enter the right address, Google Maps is pretty good on getting you there. I now spend hours beforehand to try to map the right location, instead of spending hours on the road. And once you map the right location, save that location to your smart phone so that you can find it again more easily next time!

The Thais don’t help by their tendency to refer to everything by landmarks instead of physical addresses. Even the foreigners who live here seem to have adopted that trait. It took us over twenty email messages with an American doctor to try to find out how to get to his office for vaccines (which we finally did today). We asked the potential tennis coach which Land and Houses development he was in, and he told us Mae Jo (street name), while his friend told us San Sai (district), and she also gave us very detailed driving directions (which were pretty much impossible to follow for non-Thais) but no address.

The good thing about getting lost is that we have ended up seeing a lot of the city which we may not get to see so quickly. Just forget about getting to any place on time initially.