Don’t Tell Anybody About Phrae

November 23, 2025

Dear little friends,

Oh, pals, we have definitely turned a corner here in northern Thailand. The midday sun is still intense but the humidity has plummeted and mornings can be chilly-adjacent. Of course the locals are wearing beanies and down jackets until noon but I’m from Montana and this feels like a lovely June morning. The wet season is barely over so everything is still pure green and lush, it’s really the very best time of year in these parts.

When we have a tv in our room that works, the usual shopping and soap opera channels have been superseded by dramatic footage from the far south of Thailand where it borders with Malaysia. People wade in neck-deep floodwaters in Hat Yai, it’s awful. And the aftermath of flooding in central Vietnam is also tragic and troubling. The north of Thailand saw flooding two or three months ago, you still see sandbags piled up near doorways. It’s astounding how resilient folks are here, but we feel terrible for those who have lost life and/or property.

It was a Sunday-morning-quiet stroll to the coffee shop on the shady side of the street, which after some helpful signage we realized was yet another defunct bicycle lane. The lane is now inhabited by all sorts of food and beverage stalls, if you wanted to brave the bicycle lane now you would get impaled by an awning. There must have been a period about 10-15 years ago when the Thai government wanted to get people off their asses and in better shape, these bike lanes are in similar condition as the rusting exercise equipment one sees in parks or riverfront walkways. We aren’t out much in the evenings so can’t attest whether the extremely energetic public aerobics classes still go on but I have a feeling they do.

Any thought of this being a bike lane vanished long ago.

Our new favorite chip, basically a khao soi-like flavor.

Gazing out at the street from our coffeeshop barstools I found myself counting the percentage of people wearing masks. Three years ago virtually every Thai wore a mask, everywhere, every day. We did too, out of respect for the locals, unless we were out in the open with few people around. Two years ago, nobody was wearing a mask unless they were actually sick, which they’ve always done. This year, masking is back, so I’d say that the current percentage of maskers is 30-40%, even zipping down the street on their motorbikes or miles from anyone else out in the sticks.

This tells me that there are concerns about Covid resurgence so we’d best be mindful of that.

Today was our day to explore the “Old Town” in Phrae. There is an odd-shaped moated area, and several temples and historic wooden houses bedecked with elegant tracery woodwork, tons of tiny lanes, and very little in the way of tourist infrastructure. In other words, like Luang Prabang, Laos, 25 years ago without the rubble and poverty. It’s exciting to be riding around on our little bikes in completely intact neighborhoods of folks just living their lives and watering their plants and sweeping up leaves. They could have a Luang Prabang, sell off their family’s property so a Chinese investment company could build a faux-authentic guesthouse on it, and watch all their neighbors do the same. But they don’t want to. And we saw not ONE foreigner in our three days in Phrae except at the bus station.

We know of course that foreign tourists must come here but we are pretending we just discovered it. Shhh, don’t tell anybody.

It was Sunday and one of the places we wanted to see was closed but there were plenty of other temples to visit, each one unique and interesting. I might as well reiterate that after 23 years of visiting SE Asia I’m kind of over the temples. There is a lot I appreciate about temples, they are important hubs for their communities, they usually have toilets and a shady place to sit and listen to birds. This is what I mostly do while Bruce walks around and takes photos. But like seeing cathedrals in Europe, I know the story by now and unless there is something really unusual or scintillating or charming I usually don’t even go inside temples anymore.

Temple bells tinkling in the lovely breeze? Oh, yeah. Cats/dogs/birds/butterflies? Bring ‘em. The quiet respite they offer from the hot sun? Thailand and all of these countries would be much be-drabbed if they did not have their temples and it would be everybody’s loss. My appreciation of temples is maybe just a little different than most visitors’.

Loy Krathong depicted in a painting at Wat Phra Non.

After having fun riding through Old Town we returned to yesterday’s khao soi emporium because it was so damn good and the women there so damn sweet. In fact I should pipe up now and state that the people in Phrae are amazingly sweet and smiley and nice, and that’s really saying something in Thailand because that is pretty much the default everywhere you go. When we order coffee they always ask us, “Ao wan?” “Do you want sugar/sweetness?” We answer “Nit Noi”, just a little bit. Well Phrae is not nit noi sweet it’s really really sweet, but never cloyingly so.

There are plans to have an adventure crossing into Laos but first we need to get to Nan. There are no back roads to Nan, you take 101 and it would take us three days on the highway because we are slow. Three days on the big highway is not even a consideration, we’ll take a bus to get there. We did a reconnaissance ride to the bus station, got the information needed for tomorrow’s plan, and then headed back to our hotel for the evening. Needless to say, we did not take the bike path.

Today's ride: 10 miles (16 km)
Total: 215 miles (346 km)

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Kristen ArnimSeems so lovely! Perfect spot for you two.
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