Ghost town

Tourists? What tourists?

At the tail-end of high season, Chiang Mai is strangely quiet. Streets that should be packed with tourists are only sparsely populated even in late afternoon. Often I see shopkeepers resting their head on a countertop, as if it were nap time in preschool. Street vendors and tuk-tuk drivers laze in the shade reading newspapers. And some days Lian's phone never rings -- not a single spa customer. "I talk to my friends and everywhere quiet. Have a few work," she reports.

Smoky day, not a soul around.

It doesn't help that the city is blanketed in orange-gray smoke from slash burning in the mountains near Myanmar, so eye-wateringly thick that no one cares to venture outdoors. So, on this Sunday morning we hunker down in the room with a mindless Dwayne Johnson action/revenge movie, online Sudoku, and only one of us doing anything that could remotely be called "productive."

My exotic life in Thailand.