Chiang Mai Redux

Khao Soi, coffee, and yoga - that was the mission.

Our trip was off to a rocky start. It would have been easier if we had airline woes to blame for our foul moods. Instead, we found ourselves laying in bed, jet-lagged and depressed, watching the US electorate set itself on fire while dark clouds outside our hotel window unleashed a torrential downpour. I couldn't help but wonder, how long would it take for these ripples to make waves overseas and force us to pull the parachute on our multi-month adventure overseas? Would our banks accounts spontaneously combust leaving us stranded in Thailand? Come to think of it, is there a better place to be stuck than Chiang Mai?

I'd been hyping up Chiang Mai for so long that I worried it wouldn't live up to my memories. A Chinese visa blunder three years ago had forced me to buy a cheap ticket from Hong Kong to Chiang Mai. It wasn't until I bought the ticket and was struggling to find accommodation that I found out I was arriving during the annual Loy Krathong & Yi Peng festival. It was a stroke of luck that I'll never forget and an experience I really wanted to share with G, especially since she found me that fortunate flight out of HK.

The city offered plenty of distractions from all the depressing news overwhelming our feeds. Khao Soi, coffee, and yoga - that was the mission. We embraced the escapism offered to us by a city full of beautiful temples and delicious food. We tried to recreate the ideal routine that I had established during my first visit. Wake up, fresh fruit, yoga, market breakfast, scenic meander, khao soi lunch, coffee shop heat escape, sunset temples, night market street food, cheap beers with new friends, foot massages, sleep, repeat. My memories were not disappointed.

Khao Soi with Chiang Mai sausage

Ristr8to Coffee

We spent the first couple of days in the city's Nimmanhaemin neighbourhood eating our way through The Guardian's Chiang Mai essential street food list and planning our upcoming adventures from the comfort of Ristr8to's fancy cafes. We even managed to find a yoga studio near our airbnb that was in the middle of its teacher training exams so we got free yoga in exchange for giving feedback at the end of the class.  

Nimman is a popular spot for young expats and university students. It gives you the impression of being a little Bangkok attached to the old city of Chiang Mai. Nice restaurants, hipster cafes, fancy malls, and co-working spaces filled its blocks, but all at the cost of excrutiating traffic jams.

After a few days of living like Chiang Mai expats, we moved closer to the Tha Phae gate area in preparation for the festival. Our flashpacker hostel was perfectly nestled down a quiet alley and within easy walking distance to the best fruit stall in the Ming Muang Market, Blue Garden Yoga, and the river banks where the festivities would take place.

Loy Krathong and Yi Peng are often referred to as the "lantern festival" but they are actually two different holidays celebrated around the same moon cycle.  Loy Krathong is celebrated by floating a candle down the river to wash away your karmic sins while Yi Peng is celebrated by lighting a paper lantern and sending it into the heavens with your wishes for the year. Like most ancient religious festivals, their meaning and history are debatable, but there is one thing that's certain: the visual effect is magical.

The river is lit up with Krathongs and the sky is filled with paper lanterns.

This year's festival was very tame compared to the one I visited three years ago due to the king of Thailand having recently passed away. There was a ban on live music and fireworks were forbidden. I think G was happy about the latter after I told her stories about people shooting fireworks at each other and trying to hit lanterns out of the air. The muted celebrations didn't take away from the indescribable majesty of a sky and river filled with a seemingly endless parade of lights.

G and I lighting our lantern

After three days of festivities, we slurped down our last bowls of khao soi and bought bus tickets up to Pai to check out the backpacker haven that we'd heard so much about. In a way, it was exactly what we'd hoped for at the same time as being exactly what we'd feared. It was like a vortex for lost souls who wanted to find a piece of rural Thailand without any of the discomforts of rural Thailand. It's the type of place where motorcycle rentals are cheap, but so is the emergency room consult where they bandage up the legs of people who don't know how to ride motorcycles. But for all its faults, it is a stunning place to escape the heat in the mountains, drive around rice paddies, swim in hot springs, eat good food, and listen to live jazz performances from your hammock. Each night, we ended up at the same bar that proudly displayed signs saying "we do not serve dirty hippies" and "no stupid farangs" while playing old Motown classics in order to "select for the right crowd," according to the owner.

Pai Canyon at sunset is a worthwhile adventure

Pai got old pretty quickly, especially since G was not a fan of driving over-powered motor scooters on the left side of the sandy mountain roads, so we made the journey back to Chiang Mai and got on the overnight train heading south to Bangkok where we'd fly further south to go diving. 

Re-Designing W+W (Again)

"Why are you building this in the first place?"

Wonders & Wanderlust started as a minimalist Wordpress photo blog hastily set up about a week before departing on a multi-month travel adventure. A few months into the project, it became clear that my most vocal audience (i.e. my mom) wanted context of my travels surrounding the images. Reluctantly, I started writing.

I was painstakingly slow, self-critical, and voiceless. Was I a travel food blogger? Was I fabricating a fluffy version of my travel journal? Or was I just desperately typing words to fill text blocks between the photos that I actually enjoyed producing? I never figured it out. In the end, I gave up working on the project when my travels led me to cash-draining European cities. Research, photo editing, writing, copy editing, layout adjustments, the ongoing struggles of hostel wifi... It all added up to hours hunched over a laptop. I had left a lucrative design job at a major tech company to go see the world, why was I spending so much time jacked-in? I focused all computer hours to research and photo editing, abandoning the blog entirely.

Skip forward a few months. Home in Vancouver, hard drives clogged with RAW photos and footage, aimless and unemployed. What the hell was I supposed to do with all these images? What else does a designer with too much time on their hand do? I signed up for Squarespace using a coupon code pushed on me by one of the dozen podcasts singing its praises. After hours of tinkering and con-templating (constantly switching between their vast library of templates) I thought I'd created something appealing, but not entirely useful.

Of course I needed to use a template with the sexy parallax scrolling. Of course I had to upload hundreds of high-res photos. Of course I had to use all the fancy features that made the site look sleek and contemporary. Of course I forgot to really ask myself "why are you building this in the first place?" The project fizzled and sat parked again. 

A purposeful approach

Design work has taught me that starting again doesn't mean failure. It's a necessary step in getting it right. I just needed to seal the cracks in its foundation. I needed its raison d'être.

When asked why I want to build a travel website, my casual reply went something along the lines of, "you know those advice emails you write your friends when they ask you where to go in a city you've traveled to? I just want to make a site I can link them to instead." While that is certainly one the motivations, it's a pathetic mission statement.

So what's the real purpose of this project? In simplest terms, W+W should be a gateway drug to travel. Its stories should inspire readers to dream of travel, then offer the tips and tools needed to make those dreams achievable. 

What kind of content will appear in W+W? In general, posts will fall into one of these categories:

• Travel Logs that recount personal adventures from recent journeys across the globe. These entries will be rich in hyperbole and useful for route planning.
• City Guides for readers who are looking for well-organized and specific information like where to to eat, sleep, and explore. Guides will offer maps, addresses, reference photos and useful links.
• Travel Advice articles that help readers travel smart and avoid common blunders. Advice will cover a range of topics like how to pack light, what apps you should have on your phone, or how to avoid bursting into a rage when forced into contact with the worst of your tourist brethren.  
• Photo Galleries to inspire readers and communicate the aesthetics of a potential new adventure. 
• Spotify Playlists that accompany the long journeys inspired by the local landscape and tradition.

Did I miss anything you'd like to see? Post it in the comments!

A (temporary) new look

Squarespace has a lot of templates and they all have their pros and cons. I've read countless articles about how to choose the right one and I'm still not happy about its current structure, but in the end I chose Rally for two main reasons. It surfaces latest blog posts to the top and it retains some of the full-bleed banner image functionality that showcases my photography. I axed the parallax because, frankly, it's become so overused that I have a hard time believing its wow factor is worth the performance hit.