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Despite being small, Chiang Rai City has many of the amenities you’d usually find only in larger cities. It’s a growing tourist destination, which means more restaurants and shops geared toward Westerners - even small restaurants have English menus. However, the tourists are just passing through and have little impact on the city’s day-to-day life, which remains geared to servicing the surrounding farming and mountain communities. 2. Affordable Living It’s cheap. One person renting a furnished apartment could live well on $480 to $720 a month (you could get by, in fact, on half that). Furnished apartments in complexes go for $72 to $120 a month. Houses can be found unfurnished for around the same money, and you can rent a hilltop villa for as little as $480, but supply is limited. The best option is to buy a plot of land and build on it, and building a house can cost as little as $24,000. That’s including bathrooms tiled in marble. Restaurants
range from French gourmet (the Dusit Thani hotel) to 50-cent plates of
Pad Thai (fried noodles) at roadside stalls. There’s a Kentucky, Pizza
Hut, and a Baskin Robbins. The newest restaurant in the city, The Windmill,
stocks Cuban cigars to complement its excellent Dutch cooking, which being
at the expensive end of Chiang Rai’s dining, will cost you around $7 for
dinner.
3. Local Diversions Apart from eating out, nightlife is restricted to watching rented DVDs, satellite TV, or hanging out in one of the hundreds of open-air bars. That’s the bad news. The good news is that, during daylight hours, the diversions are many. There are two golf courses, one just minutes outside the city, and others are planned. There are several Royal parks and formal gardens in the region, and riverside trails are being expanded. You can also hiking trails to remote villages and take river trips, pony treks, and bicycle rides. Plenty of places to visit and explore, from cave temples to waterfalls (I found 15 within an hour’s drive of our home) and hot springs. Health spas and resorts are everywhere. Chiang Rai has Thailand’s best climate. The winter months, October through March, are perfect. It rarely rains, and the evenings are cool enough for a light jacket; the days warm enough for shorts, but not unbearably hot. Another advantage to this time of year is that there are few bugs or mosquitoes - a pleasant contrast to the rest of the year. April to September is humid and wet, but still less so than the southern plains. Broadband satellite
Internet is available in this part of the country, but at $72 a month it’s
not cheap. Dial-up connections are cheaper and easy to get, but can be
painfully slow.
5. It’s Safe People wander
the streets around the town center until late at night without any concern
for their safety, and nobody lives in guarded enclaves or behind high walls
and electric fences. (Which is the case elsewhere in Thailand.) In three
years here, we’ve never felt in any danger. Until last year, when late
one night two cars stopped outside our gate with the engines running and
the lights off. (We live on a farm and only a track leads beyond our house.
Nobody usually comes this way at night.) After 10 minutes, with our dogs
going crazy, we called the police and within minutes a pick-up full of
heavily armed policemen arrived and disappeared into the fields. It turned
out that the “prowler” was a local farmer who had come to collect a broken-down
tractor. We felt a bit foolish but were reassured that the police had taken
our call seriously and that their response was so prompt.
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