Not a bird

 This is probably Horsfield's Baron, Cynitia cocytina.

More birds of Chiang Mai

Every day around sundown, I see cranes flying over our house, headed west-south-west ish.

Frustratingly, Wikipedia lists three species of crane in Thailand, but the range maps for all three do not include any part of Thailand! (Maps include migratiom range, not just breeding range.) And since we have only seen them in flight and at a distance, I can't speak to their markings. Most likely they are the common crane, Grus grus, which has a wide range and winters in parts of SE Asia although the official range map doesn't reach this far south.

Also: I have seen a crow! It landed on the cell tower visible from my balcony, sat there for a few minutes, and called a couple of times: unquestionably a crow. Alas, I didn't have Merlin up to confirm. I believe it was a large-billed crow: the Indian house crow is also found in Thailand, but this bird was quite a bit more robust than the Indian house crows I remember, and playing back both their calls, the large-bill sounds more like what I heard, Its voice is deeper and huskier.

I'm so excited that Chiang Mai does have crows, even if not the giant corvine conurbations that Portland and other US cities have.

Finally:

 This is a greater racquet-tailed drongo. The lesser version looks very similar, but has a small crest and lacks the tuft of feathers at the base of the bill.

More nacreous cloud

 

This seems fairly common at sundown.

Closeup

Closer up

 

A few minutes later after the sun had set

 

Nacreous cloud at sunset

 Seen from our balcony.

 

Monsoon Rain

 

This is apparently the tail end of the monsoon. Weather reports say over the next two weeks, rain will taper off and cooler air will move in from the north.

No serious flooding in the city this year, though some other parts of the province saw rivers overflow and people having to evacuate. (Including an elephant sanctuary.) But the Mae Ping is for sure not the same river we saw in January.

Important to note: over the last year, the city has done a lot to prevent and prepare. There's been extensive dredging and levee-building inside the city, significantly increasing the capacity and flow rate of the river. There was a major tunnelling project just completed, which also enhanced stormwater management (I am not sure exactly what it does, it doesn't seem to be a siphon like the Big Pipe that was built in Portland some years back). I believe these measures spared the city a world of hurt - as the river did reach what has formerly been considered critical flood levels, but didn't overflow.

Local agencies were on alert through the early days of this week, as Tropical Storm Bualoi was breaking down over Vietnam and drawing the southwest monsoon strongly into the peninsula. But the threat did not materialize and everyone was able to relax. Except that apparently some rogue cows escaped their pasture and went wandering into a highway... 

Oh, and when the rain stops, you get a sky like this:

 

The street in front of our house

 

Red and purple bougainvillea; yellow bauhinia. Taken near dusk on a stormy day. Somehow the colors seem more intense than they do in full sunlight.

Our new house

 

We are renting this house for, oh, about half what a one-bedroom apartment goes for in Portland these days. It's amazing. 3 bed, 2 1/2 bath, front and back yard, balcony...

We slept here for the first time last night. This morning I woke up about 6 AM and was up and about when a rainstorm hit: heavy but brief. It looks like the rains here come from the southwest. I guess it is the monsoon off the Indian Ocean, pushing up into the continent. The plateau that Chiang Mai sits on appears to be the last significant flat area before the Himalayas take over the landscape.

 I get sad for Portland, and probably always will. At the same time, I love it here.

Caffeine

 So... This is weird.

I've been a caffeine addict since, oh, the early 90s. I have never particularly liked coffee, but if I don't have my daily morning cup, I'm tired and logy all day, and I get headaches. (And when I say "cup," I mean generally 16 oz. of pretty strong drip coffee.)

 There've been a few years where I tried to quit during the summer, figuring the day length would make it easier. I haven't done even that in at least 15 years.

But as soon as we got back here, I went to coffee every other day. And not because I felt I needed it, more out of habit, and because if I want an iced drink, coffee is always an option (one of many).

Right now I haven't had coffee in about three days. And I feel fine. No headache. Alert and focused. Also, now that the travel fatigue has receded, I seem to need less sleep than I ever have in Portland.

So what gives?

I noticed this the last time we were here but I didn't go all the way to no coffee. I thought, and think, that it's the angle of the sun and intensity of the light, more than day length - evidenced by the fact that days in Portland summers are much longer than the longest days here. But I remember vividly sitting on the steps in front of Vollum Auditorium, when I was a student at Reed fresh from Tanzania, and being unable to convince myself that it was noon because the sun was so low in the sky. It just didn't seem right. It has never seemed right.

And so even though the days here are significantly shorter that they were in Portland when we left, and the skies have been cloudy and rainy quite a bit... I DON'T NEED COFFEE,

Who'd have guessed? 

Lady Liberty

 Seen on a wall in a Chiang Mai coffeeshop:

 Oh, the irony I cannot put into words. But it's good to see you, Great-grandmother.

We're back!

 First day. I went back to Wat Chai Mongkhon to make an offering. It was supposed to be in gratitude for our safe return... and it was... but also I found myself praying for peace. And that we become useful members of the community.

 Mostly, the silence of a brken heart.

Then I sat for a while in the park near the footbridge. This is a feature of the park that I didn't point out last time:

 

Lavender, with bumblebee

 My backyard.

 

Wy'East, from OHSU

 Seen from the 7th floor of Kohler Pavilion. In the foreground, the arm that suspends the tram; OHSU's South Waterfront buildings in the middle distance. This mountain was one of the very first things I saw when I got off the airplane on my arrival in Portland, back in 1982.

 At higher magnification, the peak seems to hover over SE Portland...

Take care, old friend.
 

Cannon Beach, Ecola Creek

 

The Oregon Coast: beautiful to look at, difficult to photograph.

 This is the headland at the north end of Cannon Beach. The water in the foreground is Ecola Creek. We just learned, this last weekend, that Ecola is a Chinook Wawa word for whale.

 I am leaving behind a lot of history that I never properly learned. It wasn't my history, but then what is? so that's no excuse. Resolve to do better in Thailand, which will be a good incentive to learn the language as quickly as I can. I'm already frustrated by the lack of English-language sources around things like the canals of Chiang Mai.

Willamette Falls

 Willamette Falls from the Arch Bridge

 

What, no crows?

 Like... ummm...

A little scary, yes? Don't worry, it's just this:

Artwork around the corner from my house.

 As far as I can tell, there are no crows in Chiang Mai. There are crows in Thailand, a few species in fact, but evidently they have not taken over the urban environment the way Pacific NW crows have. No giant murders roosting in the downtown buildings and streaming across the sky at dawn and evening... 

I don't have any pictures of Chiang Mai birds (birds are hard to photograph!) but I did a little exploring with the help of the Merlin Bird ID app. One of Merlin's nice features is it can identify birds by sound. Sadly, the database is not very complete: it said it could only sound ID about 30% of the birds in the Chiang Mai area.

Anyway. Boring birds first: rock dove (pigeon), common myna, red jungle fowl. No, seriously. People all over Chaing Mai keep chickens in (and out of) their yards, and a lot of them look just like this: 

(image from Wikipedia)

Very close to wild type.

Spotted dove: this is a SE Asian endemic, very common in the city, and seems to coexist easily with the pigeons. This was the first bird I got by sound ID, the very first morning in the city. Picture from Wikipedia.

 

 Red-whiskered bulbul

 

 Also ID'd this one by sound: it seems to be quite common. I did get a good look at one but this image is also from Wikipedia.

Common kingfisher. I actually ID'd this one by sight. Can't mistake that flash of brilliant blue. Wikipedia image

 

Oriental magpie-robin (this is a very strange name for a bird, in many ways): also ID'd by sound but I did get to see one. Wikipedia image.

Miscellaneous swifts and swallows, all along the river: couldn't get a good enough look to tell what kind, and sound ID was not helpful.

And this:

 

This purports to be an Asian Koel. These birds are apparently everywhere in Chiang Mai: any place, any daylight hour, you're likely to hear them. But they're fiendishly hard to see! Merlin and other sources describe them as preferring the interiors of large trees with thick foliage - you don't see them sitting out on telephone wires, or anything like this.

This led me to declare, about three weeks in, that there is actually No Such Bird. I complained about a recurring auditory hallucination and muttered darkly "Birds aren't real..."

We did finally see one on our last full day in the city. 

Back in Portland, I saw an old friend today whom I'm really going to miss...

This fella lives at 18th and Alberta and has watched over the neighborhood for many years.

Take care, buddy...

Canals, rivers, floods

 Mentioned earlier that I had no idea about the canals, and generally there being water everywhere. I have to remember Thailand is in the wet tropics, not the dry tropics.

Case in point: The Mae Ping River flows through Chiang Mai from north to south. It doesn't look like much: significantly smaller than the Willamette, for example. But this river flooded in October 2024, and put a huge swath of Chiang Mai underwater.

Once we knew to look, the damage was visible everywhere. Sidewalks were heaved, storm drains filled in with silt and debris. The Mae Ping, unlike Pacific NW rivers, carries a huge amount of silt, and once the water receded there was a thick layer of dirt everywhere.  In places you can see big mounds of it shoveled up out of the street and out of people's homes, and just left .

In the park where I took the picture of the flame tree, there's a small canal with fountains. The first few times we went there, the canal was dry and the bottom was full of dried mud, which was being dug out (bucket by bucket). The last time we stopped by there, the canal was full of water and the fountain was running again.

Here's a thing: Chiang Mai is flat. It's the flattest place I've ever lived, except maybe Minneapolis. We walked a lot (a lot even for me), and google maps walking directions inevitably said "Mostly flat." Topo maps of the city show basically no relief. So when the river came over its banks, which are diked up above the surrounding streets, it spread out... and spread out, and spread out.

And all the canals. I'm not kidding, there are nearly as many canals as main streets. They all apparently connect back to the Mae Ping, but with so little slope I am not sure how they maintain flow. There are pumping stations on at least some of the canals, for example around the old city and in the little park, so I guess the whole network keeps itself moving somehow.

Chiang Mai’s Canals

Little dragons, sleeping in the sun

you seem so tame. What works of hands,

what years of labor shaped this land?

Who knew when to call it done?

Do these sleeping dragons dream

of flowing free across the valleys

where now wind crooked streets and alleys?

Do canals remember they were streams?

Little dragons, sleeping in the mud,

caged in canals cut to human shape

do you hold a long longing for escape?

Do you dream thunder and wake in flood?

 

 I cannot find anything about the history of these canals but I'm guessing the local peoples have been digging for irrigation and flood control since the beginning of the agricultural age. Chiang Mai was founded in 1296, and presumably the canal that moats the old city (which was the original city) was started around then and completed some years later. But I'm guessing the canal that brings water to the moat, called Khlong Mae Kha, at least partially predates the city, and was extended and expanded to supply the moat.

The Old City

 If you pull up Chiang Mai on google map and zoom in a little, you'll immediately see a perfect square. In the middle of a city whose streets are emphatically not straight. What's up with that?

It turns out the old city of Chiang Mai was surrounded by a canal that served as a moat, and inside that, was a massive brick wall. The wall is now mostly ruined, but the canal is still there.

Old City. northeast corner:

You can see a bit of the brick wall on the right. Same, but further back:

These trees are along the east side. I worry about the second one, it looks like it's going to fall into the canal if it isn't propped up or something.

 

And about that wall...

 not everyone obeys instructions...

 But you have to admire the camouflage.

Old City, North Gate:

 Ruined, yet stately, ancient monument. With cute cheesy plastic elephant statues - because that's how this city rolls. How could I not love it here?

Lastly - this is a relief map of the old city, with several of the important buildings shown in miniature. A little difficult to make out in the mix of light and shade.

 

Trees in Chiang Mai

Something in my bones feels at home in the tropics. And some trees greet me as old friends.

 This is a Madagascar flamboyant. When it blooms, it will be crowned with fire. These trees carpeted the hills in parts of Tanzania.

Indian almond, called mkungu in Swahili. They seem to grow taller here. Noted for being one of the few tropical deciduous trees: you can see here that half the leaves are red, and many have fallen.

 

Frangipani. Lots of it around town, and many of the trees are like the ones I remember from Tanzania and also common ornamentals in Hawai'i. But the kind (species? cultivar?) that is most common here is a little different than I remember: the trunks are thicker, and the bark is a very shiny silver-grey, leaves more oblong and less pointed.

And some new friends...

 This is called Indian flame tree. This is in a park not far from our hotel. The roof belongs to a little pavilion where Todd and I practiced martial arts together.

 Female fig tree: look at all the fruit!

 Male fig tree. On the right is part of the canal around the the Old City: more on this in the next post...

Yesterday We Saw Elephants

 

 

This is at an elephant rescue and sanctuary in the mountains to the west of the city. Getting there was... hair-raising. I have not seen hairpin bends like that since the Rift wall through northern Tanzania.

But the road was paved (at least nominally) the whole way, which is more than I could say for most of the roads in Tanzania. They were doing repair work in places, as it's clear the roads wash out during the rainy season.

So many temples...

 According to Wikipedia, Chiang Mai and the surrounding area are home to more than 300 temples. Certainly we have seen a lot: in the old city, there was one literally every couple of blocks, and they're sprinkled thickly throughout the rest of the city.

Gate to a temple complex, Wat Chai Mongkhon, built to resemble a stupa. Many of the temples we've seen have old (ancient) stupas on the grounds. Here's what that gate looks like from the inside:

 

The amount of land occupied by, and the labor and expense of maintaining, these temples... it's phenomenal. And what's more, they seem to be mostly working temples not just tourist attractions. We've heard sutras being recited and seen people praying. We joked that you could earn a lifetime of merit by visiting and praying in every temple in Chiang Mai - if you did it all on foot, it could take weeks.

Besides the religious functions, temple complexes seem to serve as neighborhood market and gathering places. This is a view of the courtyard at Wat Chai Mongkhon:

Food and merchandise stalls in the background on the left. Parking spaces to the right. Further around to the right there's a shop that sells candles and incense for people to offer in and outside the shrine:

 

You can see there's a constant flow of people lighting candles here. The candle in the front row of the left-hand burner, near the center, is one I lit to pray for our safe and speedy return to this place.
 

 

Religion seems woven into daily life here, in a way I have not seen anywhere else I've traveled. Many houses have little shrines in the front yard, like elaborate birdhouses, lovingly decorated, and often with fresh offerings of food or incense. And there are public shrines dotted around, at major intersections or in the parks and plazas where the night markets happen. Again, you often see offerings there: people use these shrines.

 This shrine happens to be outside the Chiang Mai Marriott:

 

I don't have a lot of temple pictures, because... visually they're, well, kind of overwhelming. Thais have apparently never met a color they didn't like. The proportions of the buildings and statues are exquisite, but the colors are dizzying until you get used to it. This is from the grounds of a temple in the old city:

Temple and Town

Temple courtyard

Village square

Place of commerce

House of prayer.

House of worship

Marketplace

Daily life in

Sacred space.