One Sunday afternoon while in Chiang Mai on a buying trip, we went for lunch to one of our favorite restaurants which we had heard was now part of a spectacular new hotel in the Oriental chain. After lunch, we set off to explore the new hotel, still under construction. Except for a few shops, a great-looking Chinese restaurant, and an enlarged parking lot populated by vintage Mercedes limousines, we saw no sign of a hotel.
In the distance we glimpsed the gilded roofs of several Thai and Burmese temples. We didn’t remember seeing these temples on past visits. The land-clearing for the new hotel probably now made them visible, we thought, and their fine state of repair must be due to a restoration effort by the new hotel.
We approached for a closer look. A uniformed guard stepped forward. “No, no. Not come in”.
Ah, well…. We got back in our tuk-tuk and left.
That evening, still puzzling over the temples, we asked our Thai friends about them. “Those aren’t temples”, they laughed. “It’s the new Oriental Hotel!” We were incredulous. “We’re friends of the owner,” they added. “We’ll take you for a tour.”
A few nights later, in quite a different mode of transport from our tuk-tuk – namely a vintage Rolls Royce – we returned to the new hotel. The gates parted. A beautiful young woman in a classic Thai silk costume invited us aboard her chauffeured golf cart for our tour.
The paths leading to our glimpsed temples were lined with enormous rain and tamarind trees, all easily over a hundred years old. We complemented our guide on how well the hotel had preserved the local habitat. “Oh, no,” she said. “This land was rice paddy. We dug up the trees somewhere else and transplanted them here.”
“What about the temples?” we asked, incredulous. Did you restore them?”
“We built the temples,” she replied.
“You mean you found old temples, restored them and moved them here – like the trees?”
“No,” she replied. “The temples are totally new.”
We were completely convinced that these trees and temples had been on this site for centuries. Not on your life. This was Williamsburg and Disneyland – Thai-style. (For insight on how this is done, we recommend Bob’s first book, Stone Gods, Wooden Elephants.)