Our Last Excursion… For Now

We embarked on our last excursion in the last week of February, just as the full threat of COVID-19 was beginning to be understood. We visited northern Thailand.

Chiang Mai

The journey started in Chiang Mai, a city of over a million people that is normally a bustling tourist hub. The effects of COVID-19 were already being felt. There were few tourists. The streets were quiet. Bars and restaurants were subdued. The nightly market outside our hotel was deserted. Vendors sat chatting to each other, anxious to sell something, anything, to the occasional customers that walked by. Taxis and tuk-tuks sat empty. Massage parlours had no clients. Some offered free massages just in the hope of getting a tip. Adding to the feeling of gloom, the skies were filled with smoke from illegal fires.

Despite all this, Thais kept smiling and welcoming us. We visited some of the famed temples, including Wat Phra Doi Suthep. An unexpected treat was stumbling across a bar with a wild heavy metal band. Not usually our style but too much fun to pass up – and we were pretty much their only audience.

Mae Hong Song Loop

We followed the Mae Hong Son Loop, a highway (using the term loosely) that loops from Chiang Mai north to Pai, on to Mae Hong Son near the Myanmar border and back to Chiang Mai via Doi Inthanon National Park. The road is famed for its 1,988 bends through the mountains. It is so notorious that a vendor at the bus station sells motion sickness pills.

The first stop was Pai. We stayed in a small cabin in a rice paddy outside town. Just us, the farmer’s four dogs plus the occasional stray, two cats, a banana-eating cow and a resident water buffalo. Pai is a bit of a backpackers’ haven. Lots of meditation retreats, vegetarian restaurants and cheap bars. Though it had a bit more buzz than Chiang Mai, Pai too was relatively quiet. This was before anyone had heard of “social distancing”, so we took a tour of the countryside in the back of a “songthaew” (really just a pick-up truck with benches at the back) with a great group of new friends from all over the world.

Mae Hong Son

After Pai we continued to Mae Hong Son. The road was even twistier and more hair-raising. Mae Hong Son is the provincial capital and largest town in the region but even it was deserted. The night market was shut down entirely; many restaurants and tourist businesses were closed. There were no more than 20 tourists in town. Our hotel had over 100 rooms. Three were occupied by tourists and another handful by businesspeople. We didn’t think it possible but the air quality was even worse than Chiang Mai.

Our final stop was Mae Sa Riang. It is not a tourist destination – so much so that there are no taxis. The only way to get from the bus station to the hotel was by motorcycle taxi, backpack and all. Again we had our hotel practically to ourselves – just us and some NGO staff working in the area.

We stayed only one night before finishing the loop back to Chiang Mai. In those seven days the world had changed. Thai authorities had always taken COVID-19 seriously, but they were ramping-up precautions even more. Health authorities did temperature checks at bus stations, national parks, and at random highway roadblocks. When we got back to Chiang Mai it was even quieter than it had been a week earlier.

What Next

Media reports made it clear that travelling the way we had for the past 11 months was no longer viable. We cancelled our onward travel plans and decided to “shelter-in-place”. We booked an AirBnB on the island of Koh Samui to self-isolate and monitor developments. We were comfortable and safe, but of course the world situation continued to deteriorate. After a few weeks we concluded we had little choice but to return to Canada.

We are now home in Vancouver. We hope to resume travelling when it is safe to do so. In the meantime, everyone stay safe.