Metal Menagerie - Chiang Mai, Thailand

…There is welding equipment all over the place, and the artists are all clad in protective overalls and home made masks that protect their faces from sparks.
Noi shows us around proudly. There are steel horses, elephants, monsters and mutants…

My original Thai tourist visa has expired. To get a new visa, I need to leave the country and go to a foreign Thai embassy. From Chiang Mai, the best option is Vientiane, in Laos.

(Top and below: Noi’s massive metal animals.)

The hitchhike to Vientiane is a really nice journey. As usual I meet lots of very friendly, helpful Thai people on the way.

Noi picks me up on the first day, just outside Chiang Mai and drives me almost all the way to the Laotian border.
Noi is a cheery, jocular woman, and she speaks very good English, so we have some great chats. She has her young son with her too, but he is too engrossed in his iPhone games to be bothered with boring grown-up bla-bla.

Noi tells me that she has a large sculpture studio in Chiang Mai. Her team of artists make enormous animals and monsters out of recycled scrap metal. The business is well established and Noi has numerous foreign customers who buy her sculptures and export them all over the world, for private collections, and also for resale.
Often, Noi’s clients have specific requests, and her team design unique creations for them.
“A while ago, an American customer who has a chain of restaurants, ordered a five metre tall dinosaur. That one was a very big job for us,” Noi tells me, laughing, “but we like a challenge!”

When she drops me off, Noi gives me her card, and invites me to visit her studio when I get back to Chiang Mai from my visa run.

(Above: ‘Nois Place‘.)

Anna and I drive out to Nois Place. The studio is out in the suburbs, and it looks more like a garage than an art space. There is welding equipment all over the place, and the artists are all clad in protective overalls and home made masks that protect their faces from sparks.
Noi shows us around proudly. There are steel horses, elephants, monsters and mutants. The sculptures range in size from table-top size to massive, and each one is unique.
I can see Noi’s quirky sense of humour in the work.

I really want to get a scary looking killer robot as a gift for my boy, J-man – but the rational part of my brain reminds me that steel sculptures are not good souvenirs for gram conscious backpackers.
Maybe if I had a big suitcase, or maybe a private jet..?
For now I’ll have to stick to postcards and t-shirts though, I guess…