Chiang Mai 1/30

After breakfast we embarked on an adventure to visit the furniture manufacturing/marketing region. It is in and near the village of Hang Dong, 9 miles outside of the city. Chiang Mai has a system of public transportation consisting of converted pickup trucks. The rear bed is covered and there are benches along each side. There are red ones for intra city and they seem to be everywhere. The yellow ones are for inter city. We got on a yellow one and 30 minutes later we were in Hang Dong ($1.20 for two). We walked around, but didn’t see any furniture places. Finally, an English speaking man told us we had to take a tuk tuk to a crafts market 4 km away in the village of Ban Tawai. The tuk tuk was a converted motorcycle and the driver looked 90 years old, We had our doubts, but we got in. After we turned the corner, still in Hang Dong, we started seeing all kinds of furniture and design places. They continued until Ban Tawai. 2 miles down the road and ($3) we arrived there. We saw lots of stuff but nothing that appealed to us. Big and gaudy. We walked the 2 miles back to Hang Dong stopping at most of the places we saw from the tuk tuk. We saw some interesting antique stores, but no appealing furniture. In HD we jumped into a yellow truck back to Chiang Mai. On our walk back to the hotel we stopped at Gekko Garden restaurant for lunch. It is owned by a Californian who left the Bay area 12 years ago and settled in Thailand. The food was great – a California/Thai fusion with some unusual spices.