Restaurants along the Mae Ping River in Chiang Mai

We’ve just uploaded 4 new photo albums of Chiang Mai by Day, Chiang Mai by Night, our one day cooking class and the beautiful 3 Sis Gusthouse where we stayed for 3 nights.

With the big influx of tourists coming to see places such as Siem Reap and Phnom Penh, a lot of Cambodians relay on foreigners for their daily bread. Every single Wat, temple and museum is surrounded by numerous stands selling everything from silk scarves to pineapple in a bag. In addition to the stands, dozens of people just stand around waiting for the groups of tourist to arrive so they could try and sell them something. Their guerilla marketing technique is very “pro active”. The whole scene reminds me of the “Verizon” commercial on TV in the States where the guy always has his network physically there with him everywhere he goes. I have been feeling like I have a “network” of my own the past few days which consists of 3 women selling pineapple, 2 tuk-tuk drivers and 5 kids all selling the same postcards. It is sometimes very hard to refuse to buy something since the sellers are all very persistent and you can tell how badly they need the money. Some tourist have trouble dealing with the nonstop pressure to buy souvenirs/food. We witnessed a heartbreaking scene of an older American tourist yelling and stiff-arming a little girl, 1/3 his size to a point of humiliating her for trying to sell his wife some bracelets for a dollar.