Charmed by a city off the beaten track of Thailand

Thailand is known among busy tourists for the nightlife in Bangkok, the full moon parties on the island of Koh Phangan and the hedonistic walking streets in Pattaya. It’s also a magnet for the bohemian and wellness crowds who flock to the mountain destinations of Chiang Mai and Pai.

But the most ignored by foreign tourists is Lampang, in northern Thailand. This utterly charming riverside city of around 90,000 inhabitants has retained the historic architecture and stately squares from its time as an important city in the ancient Lanna Kingdom and a hub in the teak trade. Wooden temples from centuries ago and two-story teak mansions from the late 19th and early 20th centuries still stand. Cat Kong Ta enclave is like an open-air museum with well-preserved Chinese shophouses and European gingerbread-style buildings.

There are extremely friendly residents everywhere in the city, as well as statues and images of chickens – from manhole covers to roundabouts. Chickens are the symbol of Lampang and appear on the ceramics prized throughout Thailand, including bowls and cups hand-painted with black and red roosters.

Lampang’s charm comes not from entertainment and attractions built for tourists, but from exploring integral parts of a functioning city. Shophouses have grown into boutiques and cafes. Ceramic factory stores are ideal for gift shopping. Even the horse-drawn carriages that tour the city with tourists were originally the main mode of transportation for train passengers after the station opened in 1916.

View of the river, Khao Soi and the power of Buddha

I first heard about Lampang in 2022, when my wife, Susan, and I moved to Chiang Mai and we met a doctor named Lawrence Nelson, a retired physician-researcher known as Doc at the National Institutes of Health in the United States. He recommended a visit, and in early January we finally began our five-day visit to Lampang on a Spartan four-car train from Chiang Mai (for less than $1 each) on a 2.5-hour ride into the forested valley that between the city. .

You can find dozens of suitable homestays and hotels for less than $50 per night, and few are more expensive than that. We were lucky with a spacious room Kanecha’s Home, a homestay in the heart of the city overlooking the Wang River and the white dragon’s back Ratsada Phisek Bridge.

We cycled along the quiet road next to the river, which gleamed with the silver spiers of a temple, in search of a signature dish of Northern Thailand, Khao Soi. We found a delicious version of the curry noodle soup at the Jay Jay Chan roadside restaurant (a banner with Thai script looking like “17” meant it was vegetarian), with a neat buffet on the shaded sidewalk and a large wok gurgling with vegetable soup. Total bill, 120 baht or about $3.40, including several tasty black bean bars sprinkled with sesame seeds.

Late in the afternoon we wandered through the city. The weather was perfect, mid 80s, and the sky was dotted with cumulus clouds. We strolled through the grassy, ​​tree-shaded town square, past a tiered shrine with three tall teak pillars that locals wrapped in colorful ribbons for an auspicious start to 2024.

A market building made of square blocks of concrete was about to close when we stopped across the street at a flower shop on the sidewalk. A man named Reangprakaiy Decha nodded hello and went on to explain that his family has been selling bunches of daisies, chrysanthemums and garlands of orange marigolds as temple offerings for fifty years.

Mr Reangprakaiy, 39, meditates daily “to be sharper; Not to cheat people, but to help them,” he said. Why, I asked, did the city seem so peaceful and the people so friendly? He told us it had to do with the power of a certain Buddha statue.

Nearby is a beautiful temple, Wat Phra Kaeo Don Tao Suchadaram, Mr Reangprakaiy said, where legend has it that in the 14th century an elephant carrying the sacred emerald Buddha statue was diverted from Thailand to Lampang and would not budge. The statue adorned the temple for 32 years. It is now enshrined in the Grand Palace in Bangkok, but its energy remains, he said.

“We believe that the power of this Buddha statue is very strong,” Mr. Reangprakaiy said, “and it is spreading so that the Thai people can be peaceful and happy.”

Banana trees and ubiquitous chicken bowls

Mornings are for markets in Lampang, and before sunrise the main market on the north side of the Ratsada Phisek Bridge is a smorgasbord of everything from pig heads to live eel, fried fish to fresh vegetables. As we approached the entrance, where monks in orange robes stood guard with their alms bowls, we found a model of ingenuity: a deconstructed banana tree. It was divided on a metal table into piles of fruit, flowers and stem (all edible) and piles of flat, dark green leaves, which were used throughout the market to wrap cooked delicacies such as bitter melon, pork and rice.

We then used the ride feature on the Grab app for a lift to the next market, on the west side of town and adjacent to the Nhong Krathing Park. We found dozens of bamboo stalls offering traditional breakfast foods such as quail eggs, rice flour muffins and perfectly cupped coffee from regional farms. Strums of an amplified guitar and tinkling wind chimes mixed with chatter from local residents dressed in running and cycling clothes and crouched on small stools under a canopy of plum and fig trees.

That afternoon we rented a motorcycle and rode two miles southeast to get to the bottom of the city’s chicken fixation.

Local Thais tell the story of how Buddha came to the city, and the deity Indra disguised himself as a rooster to ensure that the residents woke up to offer alms. A more recent explanation can be found at Dhanabadee ceramics factory, which claims to be the original source of Lampang’s ubiquitous chicken bowls.

During a tour of the factory and museum, an English-speaking guide explained that the factory’s founder moved from China in the 1950s and discovered that the local white kaolin mineral was ideal for making ceramics. He opened a factory and borrowed hand-painted chickens on cups and bowls, based on a motif that had been popular in China for centuries. Adoration for Lampang chicken dishes spread across Thailand in recent decades, and now there are countless workshops and factories producing chicken-decorated tableware.

‘Living well this year’

Almost everywhere you go there is a temple. We spent a day visiting a handful, including Wat Phrathat Lampang LuangBuilt in the 14th century and believed to be one of the oldest teak buildings in Thailand.

Entering the grounds of a Buddhist temple in Thailand can be both fascinating and baffling, and that’s exactly how Susan and I felt.

We came across a mysterious rope stretched from the stone stupa with its golden spire to the courtyard and tied to the bottom of the clothesline was an array of flowers, bells, streamers of Thai currency and a roll of orange cloth. .

Just as I was sad that we didn’t have a guide, three Thai visitors approached us in the courtyard and asked if we wanted to know more about the temple. The two men were old friends from university, now in their 60s: one was an artist from Lampang and the other a developer, along with his wife, who splits his time between Bangkok and Atlanta.

The trio guided us around the temple for over an hour, and Cheerapanyatip Chamrak, the artist, explained the background of the rope. The offerings, he said, were flown to heaven every evening during this first weekend of the new year, in prayer to Buddha “to protect you and have a good life in this year.”

Wealth built on logging

After moving south of the city to the lush and tranquil Lampang river lodgeIn a teak and bamboo suite overlooking a lily-covered pond, we met Doc for lunch at the gable-roof house of Lampang’s first governor, built in the early 20th century and now occupied by the Job Phraya Suren restaurant.

Delighted with our dishes of basil, fried rice and pork, topped with egg and spicy grilled pork salad, we talked about how Doc met his wife, a native of Lampang, while she was working in the Washington, DC area, and how, after his On his first visit to Lampang in 2017, he quickly helped support a local university’s research into women’s health.

He compared the city to Brigadoon, a mythical Scottish town that only comes to life one day every hundred years. “When I first went to nursing school, I felt like I was in a black-and-white movie from the 1950s,” he said.

We had an appointment that afternoon to take a step back in time with Jantharaviroj Korn, whose great-grandfather came to Lampang from Burma 126 years ago to work for the timber baron Louis Leonowens, the son of Anna, the British teacher for the children of the king. of Siam, immortalized in the musical ‘The King and I’.

We met Mr. Jantharaviroj, 60, at his grandfather’s 108-year-old mansion. Thailand was a rarity in Southeast Asia in avoiding colonization by European powers, but the British were granted generous teak concessions: Thais did the hard work and many Burmese moved to the island together with the British (who had colonized Burma and exploited the teak wood). area to serve there. administrators and timber barons themselves, he said.

Mr. Jantharaviroj’s family got rich from logging, he said, but his ancestors made good by clearing the teak forests.

“My grandfathers believed that if we cut down the tree, we will destroy the spirit habitat, so we must build the temple,” he said, adding that his grandfathers made significant contributions to several Burmese-style temples in Lampang.

Our last day was reserved for the temple in the sky, Wat Phra Phutthabat Sutthawat, about an hour’s drive north. The only local guide I could find was out of town and referred us to a young woman, who picked us up at 4am to watch the sunrise on the mountaintop. The problem was that the park office didn’t open until 7:30.

The wait was worth it.

After winding up a one-lane road in the back of a pickup truck, we climbed steep steps to a jagged limestone plateau with unadorned wooden shrines on the rocks. Each had a gong or bell, and we each struck three times with a prayer, the reverberation blending with the chirping of birds and a gentle breeze. We were alone as the mist evaporated from the forested ground half a mile below until a Dutch couple arrived, followed by a handful of pensioners from Bangkok.

Twenty years ago, a monk, inspired by bathtub-like impressions on the mountaintop, said to be Buddha’s footprints, had about twenty stupas built in the forest of stony peaks, some of which were three-story golden cones, others in the shape of round white bells . .

The view and energy of the place were so soothing that I didn’t want to leave after 90 minutes. But we were starving, and when we went back down we discovered that the dumplings and noodle stalls were just opening for lunch. We placed a small plastic table on the veranda so we could look at the stupas high in the sky.

As we munched on a perfectly prepared papaya salad, we doubted there was a better lunch spot in Thailand.

Patrick Scott writes regularly for Travel. Follow him on Instagram: @patrickrobertscott