A Year in Thailand
By Helen
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Like most people, our past few years have been filled with turmoil, stress and uncertainty… a pandemic sure makes you reconsider life choices. Spending time in Canada allowed us to see family and friends, get some things sorted and the van sold. Our last few days in Calgary were filled with visits with my Mom, cleaning the apartment, a trip to the storage unit with John C. and packing for Thailand. We know, Thailand, again!? 🙂
We knew that coming back made sense… and when Paul found us such great plane tickets it seemed fitting. We chose Chiang Mai for numerous reasons: we are comfortable and have good friends here, we like the city, oh, and it’s CHEAP! We feel we have a good understanding of the basics that we need for day to day living and, for now, the retirement extensions make the visa situation easy. So it seemed like the best place to hunker down and regroup and consider what’s next. The flights were YYC-YVR-TPE-BKK-CNX in business class, using our dwindling Star Alliance mileage rewards. We had decent stopovers in case of any delays. Luckily for us, Taiwan opened up for transit passengers and none of our flights were canceled!
We had decided that we’d bring a box with a few basic household items this time along with some more clothing and the air purifier. We had the luggage allowance for an additional item each so it was doable. The timing was not great because Canadian airports were still imploding and there were horror stories of lost luggage. We had decided to go directly to CNX without staying the night in BKK. Having a separate Thai Smile BKK to CNX ticket in our itinerary created another aspect to the luggage conundrum.
We determined the best idea was to collect our luggage in YVR and get it checked through with EVA Air all the way to CNX. We tried calling EVA to see if this was an option, but had no luck connecting with anyone. On Thai Smile’s website (under baggage) they mentioned that they had a special baggage transfer agreement with EVA Air so we decided to “wing” it. We landed in YVR, collected our 2 boxes at the luggage carousel and headed off to EVA Air check in to see what we could do. As usual, EVA was great. We were able to book our flight to CNX at the counter on our phones and then they checked our boxes all the way through. EVA kept to the usual standard of free pj’s, great food and service. I was even able to use my awkward powers with the water machine in the lounge in Taipei. It was a great feeling when we landed in Chiang Mai and we saw that our 2 checked boxes also made it with us. Yay! 😂
Paul had gotten in touch with our juristic person Jen, aka the property manager, at the Siri Condominium where we have stayed the past couple of years in Chiang Mai. Jen let us know she had a condo for us. It turns out it’s the same unit we originally had back in January 2021 with the extra window! We really like the building, the condos are comfortable, clean and the location is good. Jen makes it easy as she is awesome, super friendly and efficient. We landed in Chiang Mai, collected the luggage and headed to our home for the next while.
So what have we been doing? We met with friends, were able to see some people that we hadn’t seen since pre covid, ate at our favorite restaurants and discovered some new ones while getting back into the groove of being in Chiang Mai. The closest grocery store closed but we have another one 15 minutes walk away and numerous others within a short drive. We’ve even figured out how to order groceries online! There is a local market about 30 minutes walk away that has loads of produce, fruit, meals and meat.
We took the local bus out to Mae Tang to spend a weekend with God & Yves. We haven’t been out there for a while so it was great to see all the changes they’ve made. They now have a pond, garage, fire pit and smoker. We spent some time at “sticky falls”. Paul and Yves climbed it while God and I took the stairs and got soaked in the rain. We had delicious food and had a great time!
Ian and I spent a day baking. After a trip to the kitchen supply store, where I could have spent several hours, we made gluten free hummingbird cake, muffins and granola. We’ve spent time with Ness & Ian and their 4 legged Husky “ladies”, as well as hitting numerous sushi restaurants to satisfy the sushi stomach! We’ve also been lucky enough to spend more time with Bo, which is nice. We’ve met lots of new people who we are looking forward to getting to know better, had some late nights and found new places to go. We got to watch the New Years Eve fireworks and lanterns from the 13th floor balcony of our new friends, Peter and Luigi’s, apartment building. It was a great time.
We made the decision to get set up so we can cook more meals at home instead of ordering in all the time. Grab Food makes life easy, it’s cheap and there are so many delicious options but we can’t guarantee GF, there are also a lot of additives like sugar or salt that we are trying to avoid. This resulted in us getting an air fryer… I’m sure everyone is sick about hearing me talk about it already. We use it almost every day and it’s been great. We use it as an oven not a fryer, it takes little to no oil and everything cooks perfectly. Unless it’s user error and I turn it to charcoal, there was a bigger learning curve then I expected. We can even connect and control it through wifi… this had no bearing on the model we choose.
With the Canadian health care system struggling, we weren’t able to get all the things handled during our time in Calgary, so we arranged some appointments here. The private clinics and hospitals here are very quick and affordable, efficient too! Clean bills of health received so now it’s off to the gym and staying active to keep it that way. Helen managed to break her “novid” streak in December, but luckily it was a mild case. Unfortunately the smoke season started early and the air quality started getting bad in February which triggered a sinus infection for Paul. Luckily we were able to get him to a doctor who specializes in ENT within 24 hours and he was able to get it sorted.
Burning Season on Koh Lipe
We spent March on Lipe to escape from the burning season in Northern Thailand and because that’s a great time to go! After two seasons of “covid Lipe”, experiencing full on tourist LIpe was quite a shock, but we adapted. We stayed at the Reef, which was much busier but great, as always! We got to see some usual suspects, saw some people we haven’t seen since pre-covid, met new friends, enjoyed excellent food and had some great times… not surprising really!
Odne, one of our Norwegian friends who we hadn’t seen since 2019, had been able to arrange a visit so we got to catch up and spend time hanging out. He introduced us to his friend, Kristofer who reminded us what it was like when we hit Lipe for our vacation back in the day. Pascal showed up on a boys trip during our last week. We finally got to meet Marwan and Robin, people we had heard loads about but had never managed to be there at the same time. We were able to go back to Chip’s house and hang out on his private beach a couple of times. Went on a snorkeling trip where I managed to hit all the right awkward notes with my life jacket and being in the water… no more to be shared. Did a fishing trip, which was pretty awesome, even though we didn’t catch the big one… we did have a sailfish on the hook though! All in all, it was another great Lipe experience.
At the end of March, we headed back to Chiang Mai. We had decided to extend our apartment lease, so luckily we didn’t have to worry about packing everything up and we were just able to head “home”. The smoke was still bad and lasted until after Songkran (mid April). We are experiencing our first “hot/rainy” season and we can say they weren’t kidding about it being hot. The humidity level hasn’t reached “wet bulb” level but some days I feel it’s pretty close. Luckily for us, we have air conditioning and it’s easy to avoid being out in the heat of the day. So that’s Chiang Mai and we are here until September. What’s next? No clue… we are just enjoying being here and haven’t figured it out yet!
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