Written Environmentally by John Irvin                   No. 14                                                  May 15, 1998

THE QUALITY OF LIFE IN CHIANG MAI

In my last newsletter I talked about my life in Chiang Mai and how my feelings have changed since I first arrived. This time, I will talk about the quality of life in Chiang Mai as it affects me and many other people who live there.

Chiang Mai is a very attractive city, and a very livable city. The lifestyle is fairly free and easy here. It is possible for a foreigner with a little savings to live in here and work only part time. For a writer, artist, or anyone at all who has a special project that they are working on, this can be a great advantage. It feels much more pleasant here than Bangkok, which by comparison, is a huge, sprawling, congested, urban mess.

But Chiang Mai is not without its faults and limitations. We have pollution, traffic problems, crime, and other kinds of problems. There is a complete lack of planning regarding development of the city, which has grown very fast in the last ten years. I will try to look at both sides, the positive and the negative, in this newsletter.

Daily living in Chiang Mai has a number of good features. There are a great many good restaurants here, from the casual street stalls up to nice places along the river. Prices are fairly cheap, the food satisfying, and the atmosphere pleasant. In the low budget places, the service is generally pretty quick – if I’m having a busy day, I can stop for a bowl of noodles and be on my way in ten minutes. Even in Bangkok, huge as it is, there are neighborhoods where there seems to be no decent low budget Thai food.

Shopping seems adequate, at least at first. In addition to the local markets, there a few fairly modern supermarkets, a couple of bakeries, a couple of video rental stores, and then there’s Computer Plaza, a small indoor mall filled with high tech stores. We now have about four “superstores” outside of town, big places along the lines of Price Club, where you can buy everything from food to clothing to electronics at a discount.

But after a few months of living in Chiang Mai, you begin to see that there are limitations. Sometimes products disappear from the shelves for a whole month before being replenished. Restaurants are often out of some of their main dishes. Sometimes people are not in their stores, and it takes several days to get something done. There are power blackouts, which leave me stumbling in the dark, lighting candles, unable to work.

Chiang Mai is not a big city, and its location in the north renders it somewhat isolated. There is a provincial feel to the community here. There are no daily English language newspapers in Chiang Mai, unless you count the Bangkok Post and the Nation, both of which originate in Bangkok. Foreigners either read those, or wait for the monthly Chiang Mai Newsletter, which contains interesting local stories, but which is not really a newspaper. There are only about two major bookstores in Chiang Mai, and the selection, other than English textbooks, is pretty limited. If you want to get any books by Carlos Castaneda or Gore Vidal you’re probably not going to find them here. Amy Tan you might find because she’s popular and she deals with Asian themes. There are a few used paperback shops, and there you can generally get whatever people have brought in, which is sometimes okay. But for the most part, if you want a good selection, you’re going to have to go to Bangkok. The same is true for music and CDs.

If you want to see a movie, you will find two major theaters in Chiang Mai, plus the Alliance Francais, which shows French films. At the English language theaters, they show blockbusters, no offbeat films. If you want nightlife, you can go to a handful of clubs along the Ping River which have live music. The atmosphere is pleasant, and some of the bands are actually pretty good. There are a few other more low down music places, and some discos, and of course there’s the night bazaar, where you can go shopping and look at tourists. Or, there are the bar-beers – low end places where you can drink and play pool. But, after a year in town, you may find yourself yearning for something different to do.

In addition to consumer and leisure issues, there are serious environmental problems which affect everyone. One big problem is the pollution. I didn’t notice it at first, but after I had been in Chiang Mai for a while I began to realize it had many forms of pollution: noise pollution, air pollution, and water pollution, to name a few. Some of the klongs that run through the city are so filthy that I’m afraid to look and see what is in them. I don’t understand why the Thais don’t clean them up, but they just allow them to sit there. They’re unsightly and they’re a health hazard.

And then there is the traffic. Just to put things in perspective, you can still go across town in less than half an hour in Chiang Mai, usually in just ten or fifteen minutes, whereas in Bangkok, at certain hours of the day, it can take two hours or more. But Chiang Mai does have traffic jams, largely due to the narrow roads which have not been widened to accommodate its growth. And there are so few stoplights, and so much traffic, that it is very difficult to cross the street in many sections of town.

With all these cars and motorcycles comes the air pollution, and noise pollution, especially from the motorcycles which have had the mufflers tampered with. I guess you just can’t have everything you want. On the other hand, I have almost never heard car alarms anywhere in Thailand, at least, not yet.

It seems that there hasn’t been very much planning in the development of Chiang Mai. There are almost no city parks. On a beautiful day, there is nowhere to go and just relax, except along the klongs, with cars whizzing by all around you. Buses went out of service last year, so the only viable public transportation is the songthaews, which are about three times as expensive as buses used to be. These problems are begging for attention, but nobody seems to be listening.

I guess a lot of this depends on what you’re used to and what kind of resources your lifestyle requires. I grew up in Santa Barbara, a small city, but once I left and lived in cities like Los Angeles and New York, I got used to the vast array of choices and ideas there. People who are used to small cities, or people who want to escape from living in big cities, will probably be willing to overlook most of Chiang Mai’s problems and just be happy there.

As for me, I try to enjoy all the good things about Chiang Mai, the convenience of it’s size, the beautiful trees with flowers, my house in the country, and the wonderful food. But I also relish the opportunity to visit Bangkok every chance I get, so I can catch up on my books, shopping and so many other things. For now, I will make the most of being in Chiang Mai while I am here.
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Next Issue: The Thai economy.

© Copyright 1998, John Irvin

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