Wesley Mattson Writes

The wave of humidity when I stepped through the automatic doors was like opening the lid off a pot of boiling broth. Curls of chemically-cooled air shot out, each in its own time overcome by the dominion of heat that rules this part of the world. It had been a fine-enough journey: one twelve-hour layover in Singapore that felt like 24 (nothing to do after midnight in the top-rated airport in the world, really?), and flights so short that the middle seat was worth the bargain. If anything this heat was a respite from Saigon, hitting the body more like a breeze than a radiowave. 

An old coworker told me a few months ago that she had been to Thailand. She had only gone to sleazy Bangkok for an extended stopover and got solicited by a sex worker, despite both parties being women. She declined. Friends, however, told her about an ancient walled city far to the north. In a word: magical. In many: not too big, not too small. Not far too hot, not cold in the slightest. It’s a place with culture at the center, not the shallow pleasure found in the farthest rooms of karaoke bars or on rows of bright white chairs facing empty blue. As I would hear casually at an expat bar days later, “God, I could be here forever.”

But those are words and Chiang Mai is a city.