This humble, little hat embodies nearly everything I love about living in Chiang Mai.
For one thing, it is unbranded, which isn’t a small achievement. Go to any mall and try to buy a hat that doesn’t display a Nike swoosh or Gucci’s name or some other corporate emblem. It’s nearly impossible. And yet this fine chapeau was waiting for me in the Chiang Mai Night Market within minutes of my first setting out to find one.
Of course, finding it for sale doesn’t in itself make this hat uniquely representative of Chiang Mai. For that, you have to know how it miraculously found its way back to me one night, revealing the golden soul of this city in the process.
The miracle occurred around 10 PM as I was taking a tuk-tuk back to my hotel. As the little three-wheeled taxi turned onto Kotchasarn Road, which runs alongside the moat outside the eastern wall of the old city, a sudden gust of wind lifted the cap from my head and carried it away.
I didn’t even flinch. One moment I had the cap, the next it was gone—unrecoverable, or so I thought. As far as I knew, no one had seen it fly off or where it landed, so I simply accepted its loss.
The roads around Chiang Mai’s old city are a complex maze of narrow one-way segments with limited opportunities to turn around. To travel northward, you might first have to journey south, then east, then west, before finally heading in your intended direction. A journey of 10 meters as the crow flies might require several kilometers of driving. It’s both amusing (making Chiang Mai a wonderful pedestrian city) and occasionally frustrating.
Now capless, I was looking forward to reaching my hotel, paying little attention to our route. Suddenly, the driver pulled over to the curb. Expecting we’d arrived at my hotel, I was surprised to find we were still outside the old city walls. At that moment, the driver leaped out of the tuk-tuk, bent down toward the road, and then stood up. Without a word, he handed me my cap!
Evidently, he had spotted it fly off my head, remembered exactly where it landed, and then driven ten minutes out of his way to recover it for me. And no, he wasn’t running up the meter—tuk-tuks operate on flat, negotiated fees regardless of time or distance.
His utterly unnecessary kindness astounded me, and it speaks volumes about the gentle, generous spirit of Chiang Mai’s people. In this simple act of returning an unbranded cap, I glimpsed the authentic heart of a city that values kindness over commerce, and thoughtfulness over time.
