The Mae Salong Loop, Thailand

The Mae Salong Loop was recommended to me by an old colleague, Mark. He’d lived in Thailand for a few years, and had the chance to explore some of the lesser-known areas of the country. He’d recommended this, and also conveniently written up some notes on his blog.

We picked up our rental car in Chiang Mai, took about 2,500 photos of any minor scratches, and headed north along the fairly nondescript route 107. This wasn’t meant to be the scenic part of the journey. Our first stop was the tiny village of Chiang Dao, where we’d be staying at Chiang Dao Nest 2. We arrived at our little lodge in the early afternoon and asked the man at reception what he suggested we do with the afternoon. He gestured to a nearby poster, which advertised a one-off astronomy event in a nearby village. Perfect.

After a drive along dirt tracks and over a rickety bamboo bridge, we arrived in a field, parked up in the dark alongside some other cars, and stumbled our way towards a cluster of lights by a nearby house, which we presumed was the stargazing night. 

It was brilliant in every way. We were the only non-Thai people there. The food stand was being run from cool boxes and we used sign language to order some superb empanadas that seemed to have been made by a seven-year-old. From what we could work out, the evening was mainly to watch the Geminids meteor shower. The local astronomy club had set up some laser-guided telescopes, and we had a good look at Saturn, Jupiter and various constellations – and all with a convenient personalised fluent translation into English by an astronomer from Chiang Mai University. Once the sky was fully dark they switched off all the lights in the house and we lay back on some hay bales. As we looked up at the night sky, shooting stars swooping across the sky, a woman read poems in Thai and a choir performed some beautiful folk songs. Every so often the whole crowd would join in, gently murmuring along. The whole evening was beautiful.

The next morning we continued the Mae Salong loop, headed for the little village of Mae Salong itself. The town is pretty small, and is mainly home to Chinese and Burmese people, and its main claim seems to be that it used to be one of the largest heroin refineries in Southeast Asia. Right on the border with Myanmar, this land has been fought over since the 1940s, and it’s only as recently as the late 1990s that outsiders were welcomed.

Each morning I rose at dawn and walked over to the little market, where all of the local people would go to collect their food for the day. Nothing is refrigerated, everything is freshly picked, or in the case of the pig they were carving up, freshly killed. Watching them butcher the pig was fascinating, and they were making the most of every bit, with people crowding around keen to get the prime cuts. It was the same when I visited the next morning; same crowd, different pig. It makes a lot more sense to eat this way, rather than everything being packaged up in plastic and sitting on the shelf in Tesco for weeks. When we went out for dinner in Mae Salong, I’d have put reasonable money on the pork in our broth being the same fella I saw that morning.

From Mae Salong you can drive out to visit the many tea plantations that sit in the hills of northern Thailand. Most of these plantations are operating entirely commercially, with people picking the leaves by hand, then dragging the bags of leaves to huge covered warehouses to spread them out to dry in the warm air. As tourism slowly increases, some plantations have now opened little tea rooms and tea tasting sessions, which we dutifully joined at Tea Plantation 101, tasting some teas and pretending to notice the difference. Nicola bought a pack of tea bags which started an iced tea habit which she’s not since kicked. 

The final stop on the Mae Salong Loop was the town of Chiang Rai. There didn’t seem to be a lot going on in the centre of Chiang Rai itself. A couple of streets of bars, a few good street food options, and not a lot else of note. Most of the good stuff is on the edges of town and out in the surrounding area. We were staying just on the edge of town in the basic-but-excellent Moon and Sun Hotel, which came in at about £9 a night. It included a ‘grab and go’ breakfast, which we very much enjoyed every morning, along with a very comfortable seating area where we sat and watched the moths and lizards gather on the outside of the windows every night. The comfy seats and good wifi meant we took the opportunity to sit among the lizards and book some more sections of the rest of the trip, making reservations on trains, looking into flights and that sort of thing.

From Chiang Rai we did a little day trip to the outskirts to see two unusual temples – the White Temple and the Blue Temple. They’re both exactly as they sound, and to be honest I didn’t particularly like either of them. The White Temple, Wat Rong Khun, was built in 1997 by a Thai artist, and covered entirely in mirrors, white plaster and bits of glass. I thought it was quite brash and tacky. On the inside, the walls are covered in murals from film, TV and the news. There are Minions, Spiderman, Keanu Reeves and even the 9/11 attacks gracing the walls of this supposedly holy building.

The Blue Temple, Wat Rong Suea Ten, is just across town, and is even more recent having been finished in 2016. This one was designed by a protégé of the guy who built the White Temple. It’s a bit more of a traditional style Buddhist temple, but painted entirely in blue. To be honest I’m not really sure what’s going on with the temples in Chiang Rai, but they’re certainly not my cup of tea.

To get over the temples, we headed for lunch at the fantastic Chivit Thamma Da, a Swedish-Thai owned place alongside the Kok River. We had a platter of northern Thai pork with a nice big salad, and spent a very enjoyable afternoon playing pool just next to the quite incongruous Christmas tree. Sure, it was mid-December, but it felt decidedly un-Christmassy everywhere else in Thailand. 

The next day we packed up and left Chiang Rai, driving a couple of hours to Chiang Mai to close the Mae Salong Loop, and to catch the sleeper train south. We dropped off the car, took a further 2,500 photos of minor scratches, and headed to the station. Our train was already waiting on the platform, so we climbed aboard, found our cosy little seats, and tucked into our 7-Eleven dinner.

After a couple of hours of chats and snacks, the guard came down the carriage to turn all the seats into beds. We donned our eye masks, plugged in our ear plugs, and slept soundly as the train rolled through Thailand down to Bangkok.