My Chiang Mai

Every year, the people of Chiang Mai celebrate their artistic and cultural heritage with a special event in the city.

The Chiang Mai Arts and Culture Festival is centred around the Tom Payom Market near the city’s university and is an annual highlight of the social calendar in the region.

This year’s festival runs from April 9th to 13th and is likely

to be on the itinerary of many people using Thailand hotels.

Features of the celebration include musical performances, dance exhibitions and art installations, as well as children’s puppet shows, traditional street food and handicraft displays.

The festival exists to maintain the customs of Lanna, the former Thai state that is now northern Thailand.

First held in 1996, it has been growing in popularity every year and is viewed by many people as a perfect introduction to this area of the country.

Located about 700 kilometres north of Bangkok, Chiang Mai stands on the Ping River and is one the country’s most culturally significant cities.

People staying in Chiang Mai hotels during the festival may also like to enroll on a course at one of the city’s many Thai massage schools.

Former Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra is expected to return, smiling, to Bangkok this September, despite the 2 year jail sentence hanging over his head.

But he won’t be jailed, or even questioned, because the Thaksin you are likely to see at the Siam Discovery complex will be a waxwork effigy of the man in the world’s 10th Madame Tussaud’s exhibition of famous figures.

Siam Discovery, with other investors, is spending US$15 million on Thailand’s first professional exhibition of waxwork images according to issue 2121 of ‘Travel Daily News’. A spokeswoman said that 8,000 visitors per day were confidently expected through the doors.

Madame Tussaud opened her first permanent exhibition of lifelike famous figures in London in the late 1800’s. Centrally located in the British capital, it has for decades been consistently one of the top tourist attractions of the whole nation.

Article contributed by David Hardcastle, Copyright David Hardcastle 2010