Chiang Rai: The Day I Traded My Laptop for a Mango and Regretted Everything

woke up to that 18.18°C creeping into my tiny hostel room. the thermometer outside my window reads 18.18°c but it feels like 16.6-like some weird magic trick. couldn’t sleep so i decided to go hunt mangoes. yeah, that’s how it went.

outside the market in Chong Khao Chai, i heard someone shout, ‘don’t trust the green ones unless you’ve got a local vouching for them.’ turned out they were right. one of the ‘green’ ones was basically a plastic ball filled with sand. waste of time. learned to trust my taste buds. bought a yellow one from a vendor who looked like he’d been chewing on it for hours. tasted like regret and sunshine.

if you’re staying here and get bored, chiang mai is just a short drive away. but honestly, the real nearby thing is this tiny street called klong ngam. you won’t find it on any map. just ask the guy selling sticky rice in a bucket. he’ll point you there.

i heard that some mornings, the barista at the old temple café serves coffee with a side of live crickets. idk if that’s true. i drank black coffee while pretending i wasn’t judging. should’ve joined the cricket choir.

someone at the 7-Eleven near the market told me the price of a decent hostel in chiang mai went up 30% last week. don’t believe me? check tripadvisor. someone else said the same thing. i scrolled through 12 reviews and half of them mentioned ‘mosquitoes the size of your thumb.’ take that as a warning.

对了, i took a photo of a mango tree uprooted by a typhoon. imagine that. the wind just said, ‘nope, not today.’ the tree fell into a pile of banana leaves and a discarded skateboard. nature’s weird. i ended up using the skateboard as a makeshift stand for my laptop. it worked.

p.s. if you check unsplash, search ‘chang rai mango chaos’-there’s a photo of a cat eating a mango mid-fall. it’s glorious.

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