January 14, 2013

Massages, custom-tailored suits, night markets, elephant camps, temple sightseeing and Thai cooking classes sums up the itinerary of most visitors when they come to Chiang Mai, and I must admit that we were no exception.  One Thai massage was more than enough for both of us; it took days for us to recover from the after effects of being pummelled and kneaded and bent in ways our bodies had never experienced before.  Chris splurged on a couple of tailored suits and custom shirts while I decided to forego the experience for myself.

At the regular night market, open every evening of the week, you can find everything imaginable, including lots of delicious street food.  As you know, we’re not doing much shopping on this trip, but I must admit I have been collecting badges of flags of the countries we have visited and have sewn these onto our large packs.  It makes for a great conversation starter and makes our bags easily recognizable which is a good thing from a security perspective.  I was thrilled to find a lady selling flags from most countries and stocked up on all the countries we were missing.

Our favourite night market has been the Sunday night market, which attracts both locals and tourists.  You need to get there early because by 9:00, you can barely move along the street that has been closed to traffic so that vendors can fill the sidewalks with their wares.  The best part of this market is the street food.  Contrary to our usual cautious approach to food, we made a point of trying different foods each week, and we’ve enjoyed most of what we’ve sampled.  Prices are ridiculously cheap, ranging from 60 cents for a snack to a buck or two for a full meal.

Speaking of food, after spending almost a month eating Thai cuisine, we thought we should learn how to cook it ourselves and so we spent a day at a farm about a half hour outside of the city, cooking up an array of dishes in the company of 10 other tourists and under the careful direction of Huey, our talented and patient instructor.  We each prepared five dishes: a main dish, an appetizer, a curry, a soup and a dessert.

Of course, we ate everything we cooked.  The class was very hands on, and was a great way to learn about Thai seasonings, cooking techniques and other unique ingredients that we had never seen before.  My favourite dish was a chicken panang curry, which quite frankly, was the best panang curry I have ever eaten.  The other dishes were made with varied success, some better than others.

Chris and I look forward to practising our new culinary skills on our friends and family when we return to Canada in the springtime.  But for now, we’ve got more exploring to do.  Today marks the end of our sojourn in Chiang Mai; we’re heading south tonight by overnight bus to Bangkok where we’ll catch a flight, bus and ferry to Koh Lanta, an island off the west coast of Thailand.  We plan to island hop over the next few weeks, making our way back to Bangkok by the end of the month.

With our return date to Canada looming in the not so distant future, we’re planning to get a few more countries in under our belt.  Coming up, we plan to visit Cambodia, Vietnam and Laos and if we can squeeze it in, Myanmar (Burma).  I may even get to India if I’m lucky.  So don’t give up on us now, we’ve got more adventures ahead to share with you.

I don’t know where we went wrong, but we have been banned for life from using Adsense ads!  As you know, last month we initiated an experiment with advertising on this site to see if it was possible to earn income from a travel blog.  We incorporated Adsense ads as well as Affiliate ads into our site.

The application and approval process used by Adsense is particularly rigorous.  I guess they need to make sure the sites that host the ads of their paying advertisers will comply with their equally stringent rules and policies.  After getting approved, it then took some effort to incorporate the ads into our site, although, admittedly, this was quite easily achieved through the use of a very user-friendly plug-in for WordPress.

We spent the month of December monitoring our Adsense account, watching our earnings grow almost daily.  Daily earnings ranged between a few cents at the low end and a little over a dollar on a good day.  We had no idea how this compared to the average site, although these numbers were much higher than we expected.  By the end of the month, we had earned a whopping $28.82. This got us thinking about the possibilities of setting up multiple sites on niche subjects that we could write about.  It seemed a simple matter of economies of scale, the more sites we hosted, the higher our earnings.  Could we be onto something here?  Or was this too good to be true?  You know what they say…….

Concurrent with our Adsense ads, we set up a few affiliate ads for companies that we have personally done business with and would recommend them to our friends, namely: iPage our website hosting provider, World Nomads our travel insurance provider, and CheapoAir where we get the best prices on airfare.  The pricing model for affiliate ads is quite different from Adsense where you get paid based on users clicking on your ads.  With affiliate ads, you get paid a percentage or flat fee when someone makes a purchase through the link on your site.  Our one month of affiliate ads yielded a big fat zero in earnings.

As we prepared to settle down in Chiang Mai for a while, our creative juices were flowing  as visions of dollar signs danced in our heads.  We spent time researching ideas and playing with the technology.  Our enthusiasm ebbed and flowed as we got excited with each new idea, only to be crushed when we poked holes into it or realized it had already been done before.  While we were doing all of this work – and it really did feel like work, at least from what we remember work feels like – I met Monique, the lady with the non-profit Association who I mentioned in an earlier post, for whom I offered to create a website.  My efforts at finding a money-making venture were put on hold, as this altruistic project consumed far more time than I had planned.

Suddenly, out of the blue, we received an email from Google Adsense, telling us that our ad account was permanently disabled because we were in violation of their policies.  No explanation.  All appeals for an explanation, for more information, for some direction on how to correct our mysterious violations, were flatly refused now that  we were allegedly guilty of invalid click activity.  Not to mention any names, but we strongly suspect some of our readers may have been a little over-zealous in helping our coffee fund.  Obviously, Big Brother is watching!

To add insult to injury, we can’t even get paid our measly $28.82 because they locked us out of our account before we received our PIN number which we needed for security reasons.  They really aren’t kidding when they say we are banned from their program.  In reality, our Adsense earnings for the month was another big fat zero.  Good thing we didn’t quit our day jobs…..wait a minute, we did quit our day jobs….guess that’s why we’re heading home in April.  

Thanks guys.

Chiang Mai is home to over 300 Buddhist temples designed in a mixture of architectural styles that reflect the varied heritage of Northern Thailand.  Each temple is extravagently decorated with intricate woodcarvings, serpent staircases, gold trim, glass and mirror mosaic, elephants, gilded umbrellas, and buddhas in all shapes, sizes and materials.  Unlike the temples in Bangkok which are rarely more than 200 years old, many of the temples in Chiang Mai date back to the founding of the city itself, over 700 years ago.  

Outside the city, temples flank the hillsides like shiny beacons of light, including one of the most important temples in the area, Wat Phrathat Doi Suthep.  Located about 20 km west of the city, this pilgrimage temple is also a popular tourist attraction.  According to legend, a Buddha relic magically replicated itself just before it was about to be enshrined in the big chedi at Wat Suan Dok. The “cloned” relic was placed on the back of a sacred white elephant, which was allowed to roam whereever it wanted. The elephant eventually climbed to the top of Suthep Mountain, trumpeted three times, turned around three times, knelt down and died. This was taken as a sign that this was the spot where the relic wanted to be, so King Ku Na built the original of the chedi on Doi Suthep at the end of 14^th century.  

We visited this temple with a couple, Andy and Sue from the UK, who we met at our guest house. They invited us to join them on a day trip up the mountain and we were happy to tag along.  Leading the way on their motorbike, we putt putted behind them on our rented scooter, up the winding road to the top of the mountain where the temple was located.  Once we got the hang of it, navigating the turns turned into a lot of fun and I felt the carefree, exhilaration that motorcycle enthusiasts rave about.  

The temple sat at the top of almost 400 steps which were flanked by two green dragons that extend along the full length of the staircase.  It is said that every Thai must visit this temple at least once in their lifetime which may explain why there were so many locals and monks praying and making offerings.  The temple was beautiful, but I was a little put off by the crowds of tourists which gave the site a Disney-like appearance. 

On the way to Wat Phrathat Doi Suthep,  our new friends
Sue and Andy pose with a view of Chiang Mai in the background.

The White Temple was our first stop on our way to Chiang Rai during a day trip in a rented car accompanied by Monique, our friend from our guest house, and Momo, a young man from Taiwan who we met a couple of days earlier in our Thai cooking class.  This temple was perhaps the most unusual temple we have seen thus far.  Parts of it were downright weird, like the sculpted heads hanging from the tree branches. It was beyond me what these represented.

It is a contemporary, unconventional Buddhist temple that is still a work in progress. The architect who began this project in 1996 asserts he doesn’t expect it to be completed until 90 years after his death.  True to its name, all the buildings in the temple complex are white, sparkling with mirrored mosaic tiles that are embedded in intricate patterns covering every square inch of surface.  In contrast, the building housing the toilets was made of gold.  I’m not sure if there was any significance to that.

There were plenty of other temples on the way to Chiang Rai, but it was impossible to stop for each one of them.  Our final destination on that trip was the Golden Triangle, where three countries – Thailand, Myanmar (Burma) and Laos – intersect at the confluence of the Mekong and Ruak Rivers.  Today this destination is popular amongst tourists, especially those needing to exit the country to renew their Thai visa (known as a “visa run”), but in the past, this area was the centre of one of the largest illicit opium growing regions in the world.

Monique at the entrance to a temple on the way to the Golden Triangle.

Posing with Momo, our young Taiwanese friend who we met
at the cooking class we attended.