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THE CHIANG MAI WINTER FAIR:
Don’t Miss It

If you like Chiang Mai - and at this time of the year, you ought to - you'll love the Winter Fair.

It's a bit like London's Piccadilly Circus, the annual event. Stand in a corner long enough and just about everyone you've ever known or heard of is going to pass you by - Beckham and Posh, Elton John, Dracula, Frankenstein, Diana Princess of Wales, Osama bin Laden…

Hey! Wait a minute! Diana! Osama bin Laden? What are we on about here? The annual Chiang Mai bun fight, or some opiate nightmare?

Well, the fact is that the difference between the two isn't always apparent, particularly if you've been overdoing the seasonal stimulants. Your perception has the uncanny tendency to waver between the two alternatives, so it's not surprising different participants have different opinions about the same experience.

Let's deal with the facts first, as far as they're available. The Chiang Mai Red Cross Winter Fair, to give it its full title, has been going strong now for rather more years than anyone can remember. Some thirty years back it was held at the Municipal Stadium, not far from the White Elephant Gate, but more recently it's been located for its two weeks straddling the Old and New Years, some six kliks out on the Maerim Road, next to the City Hall (Sala Klang). It tends to open rather sleepily around 10 a.m., but warms up as the sun (and the temperature) rises, closing later and later with each successive evening. Finding it in the evening isn't difficult. Steer towards the glow on the northern horizon and the terrible low growl that sounds like the death agony of a large wounded animal. When your eardrums start throbbing, you're definitely getting closer, and when they cut out altogether you've probably arrived. Don't worry about loss of hearing. Despite this terrible white noise, the Fair has nothing special to say to you. It's a visual experience, so all you have to worry about is going blind too, and so far few visitors are registered as having suffered from Winter Fair Loss of Vision.

That noise, though…

Major Roy Hudson, a long time resident of this city and the author of the irresistible Guide to Chiang Mai and the North of some three decades back, puts the negative side rather truculently. "I see little to recommend this fair," he begins. "A better name would be the Noodle Stall Fair, and if you either eat or sell noodles, this is the show for you." He then deals with the principal attraction, "the election of Miss Chiang Mai and Miss Northern Thailand, or some such title. Proceedings are apt to be drawn out far too long. Nightly heats lead up to the final… The winners receive valuable prizes, and a career of infinite possibilities at once opens out before them."

It's the aural aspect that particularly irks him though. "People who enjoy fairs," he ends his description, "together with the dust, noise, crowds, noise, fun and noise might enjoy the Chiang Mai Winter Fair, though each year there seems less and less of interest on display." The nervous and those with sensitive eardrums, he thinks, may make one visit last a lifetime.

On the other hand, there's something to be said for another view of the occasion. Traditionally, major fairs of whatever description have rarely been recommendable to the faint-hearted. All the big European fairs of the past were wonderful opportunities to see life in the raw, with alcohol-enhanced senses. As well as being important trading events with plenty of serious business getting done, the meetings also represented multi-coloured moments of freedom from customary restraint and the humdrum business of the day, and if there was a certain amount of mayhem involved, a disposition to ignore the usual rules - as well as flirt with the opposite sex and get into punch-ups with the wimps from the next village - when and where hasn't that been a part of life? Hardy's Mayor of Casterbridge opens with a description of just such a fair; and the Oktoberfest in Germany - along with the Notting Hill Carnival, and not forgetting Rio - is the modern equivalent.

In any case, even thirty years back, there were not only noodles but also enormous quantities of toilet rolls on sale, along with mountains of brassieres, so that newcomers to the North of Thailand might have imagined the region to be populated by noodle-eating, incontinent matrons. Nowadays the scope has increased hugely, the government as well as the private sector setting up displays and exhibitions that people buzz around like bluebottles woken from their winter sleep. An AIDS display now - fascinating! Haemorrhagic fever - would you believe it? The latest in asbestos apparel - fancy that! There's also no shortage of all the brightly-coloured drinks and sticky tit-bits for the kids to engulf, along with the walls of death and merry-go-rounds to show that what goes down is bound to come up again. For those who enjoy being chilled, meanwhile, there are the ghost-houses and horror-shows, and if you need warming as the temperature plummets, there is of course the Beauty Competition. As for the gardeners, there are plants galore on sale, but you need to be there early and in daylight to get the best of them.

Oh, and one shouldn't forget the toy-like train that circles the fairground at regular intervals, providing the ideal platform for what's on display there

And it's in the daylight that this writer's going to be going yet again, dazed by the noise perhaps but enjoying watching the world and his wife - preachers and prostitutes, hucksters and politicians, tourists and transvestites, hill people, lowlanders and everyone in between (and is that Beckham and Posh strolling through, or just a couple in masks?) - having a good time. Because it's the people who make the occasion, and they're well worth the viewing.

See you there, maybe.

(Text & images © J.M.Cadet 2008)
(The author lives in Chiang Mai. His books - The Ramakien: the Thai epic among them - are on sale in major book shops).