The Gold Buddha Count

Stumble out the guesthouse door and into the street, and Chiang Mai is a tangle of traffic, posters for trekking tours, and temple doors. I’ve lost count of the gold Buddhas, the ornate temple facings, the times I’ve scrambled for my wrap because a monk is approaching and he isn’t supposed to see bare shoulders. There’s a layer of religion across the town, but mostly there’s a veneer of tourist industry. Trekking with elephants? Trekking with waterfalls? Trekking to waterfalls? Biking to waterfalls? Rafting waterfalls? Massage? Pedicure? You can get a foot massage on the street—you can get your cocktail on the street, too.

Actually you, dear tourist, can get most anything you’d like on the street. The storefronts are multi-story cement and plaster fronts buffered from the traffic by mere inches of sidewalk. Still, shops often move a portion their contents onto the sidewalk, so walking across town means ducking tables of brightly-colored merchandise.

And the people love us. Or seem to. Never before have I been in a city where the people literally stop me on the street to ask where I’m from, where I’m going, what my name is. They tell me who their friends are, caution me away from some of the tourist companies running treks in the jungle, point me toward one thing and away from another. On Valentine’s Day, one of them asked me, almost mid-conversation, how to spell “love.”

I spent an afternoon just wandering in and out of temples, taking photos and talking to anyone who started to talk to me.


But I found the people I wanted to talk to at a set of tables off to the side of one of the larger temples in town. Temples organize “Monk chat” and advertise it as a way for tourists to learn about Buddhism. In a practical sense, it’s a way for the monks to practice their English. So I went to talk to a monk—a real, live monk, the kind I’m supposed to step into traffic to avoid coming into contact with on a sidewalk. And, it allows the monks to practice their English.

And that's how I met Garong, who has been a monk for the last seven years. It's a chance for him now to get an education without paying to go to a university. His focus area: English.

Our conversation went like that of any two strangers at first. Where are you from? What do you do? Then we roamed into other territory, like the two kinds of Buddhist meditation, one for focusing on your breath, which he said is for knowing true happiness, and one for focusing on what’s happening in the world around you, which is for knowing the truth of nature.

He also asked about Valentine's Day, what the holiday meant. I told him it's about romantic love and he nodded. There should be more times to recognize the other kinds of love, he said, the loves that lead to kindness instead of the love that leads to desire. (Profound for 21, right?)

Must be all the meditation, though I have yet to figure out how they meditate through all the residual noise. I hear motorbikes ripping by every 10 seconds.

The urban environment has left me a little shell shocked. So much pavement and so many people. Back in a city, I do city things: I buy things I probably don’t need and browse bookstores endlessly, looking at but not buying books I probably do need.

So, to cope, I go climbing. I met a couple partners through the partner finder board on at rock shop just down the street—yes, my guest house was selected for its location. Brandon and I got to play that fun game of, I’ll tell you where I’ll be and what book I’m reading, and you walk up to a stranger and ask if you’ve got the right person. Surely there won’t be two people here with Collapse on the table. He’d met Dan. Dan had a rope, and (no, Dorothy, this isn’t America anymore) we rented quick draws (for non-climbers—there may be places in the States that rent quick draws, the carabiners and webbing used to protect climbs in sport climbing, but if there are, I’ve never seen them) and motorbikes.


Yes, motorbikes. The cliff is about half an hour outside town. Initially, the drive feels like a pleasant cruise through the countryside, passing the rice paddies faithfully attended by farmers in broad hats and tall boots, but it’s just long enough to vibrate your hipbones into a steady ache.

Crazy Horse Buttress, is, well, a bit crazy. The climbing is wild. In 30 meters, a Crazy Horse climb will rotate through multiple personalities, swapping weird side pulls for a jug haul roof, traversing stalactites, and shoving itself into a corner. Easy 5.8 climbing becomes suddenly steep, tricky 5.10b climbing—for two moves, and then it’s over. If it's all one kind of climbing the whole way up, it's probably tiny holds on gray dagger rock. Before that rock has worn down, it looks like climbing over the top of a pipe organ, toes poised on the rim of each tube. When it's broken down a bit, it's more like climbing on bell curves turned upside down. You aim to get your toes and fingers in between the pointy bits. Definitely a change from the glass-polished climbs in Ton Sai.

Still, any climbing is better than no climbing. It's better, I dare say, than any number of gold buddhas.