So I find myself back in Chiang Mai again on other business.  This trip I'm staying at one of my old favorites, Pornping Tower.  I like the Pornping because of the location, between the night bazaar and the river.  It's not fancy, but it's cheap.  My deluxe room is just around US$40 a night, all in.

One of the challenges most locally run hotels like the Pornping have is that they can't (or won't) invest in the kind of upkeep that's necessary to keep a hotel at its best.  Since it has been many years since I last stayed there, I had rather low expectations.  So I was pleasantly surprised to find they had at least made some attempts at keeping things fresh.  The most obvious sign of this was my room, which appeared to have been recently rennovated.  Of course, the rennovation consisted primarily of spray-painting all the walls as well as all the furniture and cabinets with a speckled white paint.  It was 'quirky' for a short stay, but might have been maddening for a longer trip. 

I had time during this trip to check out a couple of other hotels I've been hearing about.  Yaang Come Village has been creating a bit of a buzz since it opened last February, and no wonder.  The small 42 room hotel is just a block or so from the night bazaar, and designed as a low rise, Thai Lue inspired 'village'.  Although it's on a busy street, the hotel is set well back from the road, in amongst some old banyan trees, making it quite an oasis from the surrounding area.

Another new hotel is the Puripunn Baby Grand Boutique Hotel (and isn't that quite a mouthful).  The Puripunn was opened quite recently and is tucked away in the small alleys east of the Ping River, near to the riverside restaurants and boutiques along Charoen Rat Road.  With just 30 rooms, it's quite a small hotel, but with a lot of facilities for a place this size.  The Puripunn Deluxe rooms are quite distinctive, with huge bathrooms featuring sunken tubs and large seperate showers.  The room rates are a bit pricey for Chiang Mai, but based on what you get, it may be worth it.  You can also expect low season discounts to be quite deep.

Yesterday I had the distinct pleasure to listen to a talk by Bill Heinecke reflecting on his long years of doing business in Thailand. You may not know Bill’s name, but if you’ve visited Thailand, you’ve most likely either stayed in one of his hotels or eaten in one of his restaurant. Heinecke is the founder of the Minor Group, one of Thailand’s largest companies and the largest hospitality group in Asia. Minor Group’s hotel interests include the Bangkok and Pattaya Marriotts, the JW Marriott in Phuket, all of the Four Seasons hotels in Thailand as well as their own Anantara resorts. Restaurants include the Pizza Company, Swensens, Sizzler, Dairy Queen and many more. They also distribute consumer products such as Esprit and Red Earth.

It’s always nice to hear Bill talk about his experiences. Although he is very active in the communities where he does business, he rarely puts himself in the spotlight. So, as he is perhaps Thailand’s most successful entrepreneur, I always take advantage of any opportunity to hear him talk. There are a couple of stories I thought worth jotting down here:

In what I thought was perhaps one of his most heartwarming stories, he recounted the deep depression he went through during the 1997 economic crisis. Like most people, he lost millions when the Thai Baht lost half it’s value. He was literally bankrupt, and he recalled how, one weekend at his Four Seasons Resort in Chiang Mai, his wife asked him why he was so depressed.

Bill tried to explain to his wife the complex economics of exchange rates, and how almost everything they had worked for was now gone. His wife still didn’t understand why he was depressed, so he told her, “Honey, we’re as broke as we were 30 years ago when we got married.”

To which his wife replied, “Well, that may be true, but 30 years ago we weren’t spending our weekends at the Four Seasons.”

See? It’s all about context.

The other story speaks a bit to the divide between east and west. In Heinecke’s early days, he once headed up the local office of Oglivy & Mather, which is still one of the world’s premiere advertising companies. At the time, in the 1970s, Ogilvy still ran the company himself and Bill had the job of organizing the boss’s first trip to Thailand to see his operation. Apparently, Ogilvy didn’t like to fly, or rather, he didn’t like turbulence so he avoided flying unless it was by Concorde. Accordingly, he planned to fly the supersonic jet to Australia, make his way to Singapore by boat and then travel up to Bangkok by train. This was long before the Eastern Oriental Express came to Asia, so Heinecke had to try and explain his VIP guest’s requirements to the State Railways of Thailand.

After a long explanation to the good gentlemen at Hualompong Station (which Bill says hasn’t changed at all in 30 years) regarding his boss’s requirements for which cabin was acceptable and even which scotch whiskey had to be available on the train, the ticket agents had only one question: “If this guy is so important, why is he coming by train?”

The guide to East Java has been updated with greatly expanded information on Surabaya, as well as the addition of a new section on the spectacular destination of Mount Bromo.  Get off the beaten track and see some of the amazing things Indonesia has to offer!

The online guide to Bali has been updated.  Included in this update is an all-new guide to the Sanur beach area.  If you've been following my journal entries, you know that Sanur offers a completely different experience than the crowded Kuta scene.

On my recent trip to Indonesia, I decided to spend a few days on my return leg in a different part of Bali. Business usually requires that I stay in the Kuta area, so with no meetings scheduled I decided to check out the east coast area of Sanur.

The difference was quite striking, to say the least. Truth be told, Kuta isn't a very good beach. Much of it is quite narrow even at low tide, and the wider stretch around Legian is quite steep. The beach at Seminyak is quite nice, but like the rest of this stretch of Bali, the surf is quite heavy. That's great for the surfers, who are probably responsible for making Kuta the tourist mecca it is today, but it's not that great for any other water sports. In fact, there's surprisingly little to do on the beach in Kuta if you're not a surfer. There aren't even that many restaurants on the beach, out side of hotels, and the number of hotels with direct access to the beach is actually rather small.

Sanur is almost a polar opposite. Here the beach is wide and flat. There's a reef about a 100 yards off shore that breaks the waves, generally resulting in a gentle lapping of the water on the shore. Between the shore and the reef the water is quite shallow, so at low tide a large area of sea grass and tide pools is exposed. When the tide is high, the waters are great for swimming, wind surfing and paddle boating. The marjority of the hotels and resorts in Sanur are right on the beach. A paved walkway runs down the length of the beach, past shops, restaurants and the resorts. In Sanur, you could easily sleep, shop and eat without ever losing sight of the sea.

Sanur has a well deserved reputation for being the quiet beach, and it certainly does lack the clubs and other excitements of Kuta, but if you can do without that you'll find a great beach, delicious restaurants and some very relaxing small scale resorts.

To see some photographs of Sanur, see the photo gallery.