Fish Spas

A minor miracle occurred immediately after my last blog post. Erin came back to our room after her interview and suggested that we pretend to sleep. It worked. We slept for another four or five hours and it was after 9AM when we woke up! It was like we were normal people from this time zone. We'd finally left Kamchatka.

Then a minor catastrophe occurred in our professional lives, which will prevent us from doing any bike tours for the next few days. I don't want to talk about it.

Instead, let's talk about fish spas.

Erin and I have noticed two major changes in Chiang Mai since we were each last here more than 7 years ago. First, you can now easily find a decent cup of coffee here. You used to have a choice between instant coffee and no coffee. The U.N. must have air lifted several dozen espresso machines in a humanitarian mission to save these poor, coffee-starved people, because now there are coffee shops everywhere.

Second, there are now fish spas all over the place. I know what you're thinking, because that's what I thought too: a fish spa is somewhere a fish goes to get a back rub and then sit in a sauna for awhile, right?

Well, it turns out that's not quite it. A fish spa is somewhere humans go to soak their feet in an aquarium full of fish. And they pay money to do it.

We saw several of these beauties before we actually saw someone using one. But people do use them, like this guy, who was laughing as hard as we were.

I guess the fishies tickle your toes for you.

I am only scared of three things: fish, dogs and entropy. I find the idea of a fish spa simultaneously horrifying and terrifying. It's twhorrifying. The whole reason I'm reluctant to swim in a lake is that there are fish down there who might brush against my feet. And these people pay money to put their feet in a bucket of water because they're guaranteed that fish will touch their feet? It just doesn't make any sense. It's like deliberately owning a dog as a pet, or dancing just for the sake of dancing, even though you know you're decreasing the amount of order in the system and hastening the universe's inevitable heat death.

Western civilization has reached a new level of decadence. We now fly halfway around the world to eat banana pancakes, complain that the "English breakfast" isn't like it is back in England, and stick our feet into a pail containing the slimy sworn enemy of decency and progress: the fish.

141 years from the first American transcontinental railroad to this. 107 years from the first manned flight to fish spas. 122 years from the invention of pneumatic bicycle tires to fishy foot baths.

1911: Amundsen reaches the south pole.

2010: Norwegian tourist pays more money than it costs to get a nice meal and a beer to stick his feet in a bucket of fish.

1943: Jacques Cousteau pioneers the use of the aqua-lung, the first scuba gear.

2010: some French tourist decides to simplify the process by bringing the fish up here instead of battling them in the briny depths like Cousteau did.

This isn't just a case of fraternization with our fishy enemies; this is social entropy.

Photos

Mekong is a Thai whisky that isn't quite as good as Canadian Club, but is also not quite as good as V.O. or Royal Reserve or Black Velvet or... what do they have on the gun down at the Legion? Whatever it is, it's a little better than Mekong whisky.

Erin and I were having a beer at a bar at the night market last night, fighting off our urge to go to bed immediately and speculating about what impossibly late time it might already be. Was it 7PM yet? It must have been. (It wasn't.) It was getting so dark and sleepy in that market.

We looked over and saw the bartender and her helper pouring four shots of Mekong whisky. We thought this odd, as we were the only ones at the bar and we sure hadn't ordered it. Maybe somebody in a nearby market stall had ordered shots of whisky for delivery.

The bartender put the shots on little plates, and then she dished about two mouthfuls of fried rice into each of four tiny bowls and put them on the plates with the whisky. A drink and a little snack? What, was this some kind of exotic Thai drink, where you shoot the rice and then shoot the whisky? Or do you mix the two together in your mouth before you swallow them?

"What's that?" I asked.

"For Buddha," she said. "We put in little --" she mimed a little roof.

"A small wat," I suggested. (A wat is a temple.)

She nodded.

My exquisitely delicate cultural sensitivity was the only thing that prevented me from asking the follow up question: "Does Buddha like Mekong?"

I am very curious to know the answer to that question. Jesus' blood tastes a lot like wine, so you know that guy must tipple. Maybe he and Buddha hang out at the bar together, slugging back shots of Mekong. Vishnu would make a great bartender. Muhammed would be a total drag to have around, though. Twelve wives and not a drop of booze in the house, followed by an afterlife with 40 women who don't know what they're doing in bed and not a drop of booze in all of paradise. Talk about a grim worldview.

Erin and I dragged our asses through the night market for some half-hearted shopping and then took a tuk-tuk back to the hotel. We were proud of having stayed up so late. Then we found out it was 8:30.

Naturally, I was up at 3:30 again this morning. This isn't really jet lag. It's not like I'm a walking zombie during the day; I'm a well-rested, normally functioning cyclist and tourist during the day. I just happen to like to go to bed at 8:00 and then wake up at 3:30 in the morning. If I was in Kamchatka, I would be totally normal.

Erin and I went for a ride back up that fun mountain yesterday. I've posted photos below.

Right now Erin is interviewing someone in Canada for a story she needs to finish up. She also woke up at 11:00 last night for another interview. She's probably going to be totally wrecked, because she doesn't deal with sleep deprivation too well. However, we've decided that if she's feeling up to it, we're going to bike a two-day loop through Samoeng, west of here. We'll bring the camera so we can post more awesome full-colour photos like these ones.

Fuelling up for the ride. Spicy basil fried chicken for breakfast? You bet!

The climb. This was one of the rare times Erin was behind me, getting a load of this view. She's a faster hill climber than I am, I suspect largely because she's not carrying the luggage you see here.

The descent. Zoom!

Erin and our beautiful bikes.

First Ride!

Got up at 4:00 in the morning again. I'm glad my body adjusted so accurately and regularly to an Asian time zone; I just wish it was this time zone and not the time zone of the Kamchatka peninsula. Seriously, I had to make an adjustment of 10 hours and I fell about 3 hours short.

I went for my first ride yesterday. I went west out of Chiang Mai and up to Wat Prathat Doi Suthep, which is a temple up on the side of a mountain. It was a big climb -- something like 670 meters. Several Thais who passed me on the way up looked at me like I was crazy. Then on the way down I passed several cars and motor bikes. The road is nearly perfectly paved and it's incredibly windy; not too many vehicles can corner like a road bike. I blew their doors off. The locals were probably looking at me like I was completely psychotic, but I couldn't see their faces on the way down.

I had about as much fun as I've ever had on a bike before, going down that mountain. The best part about the ride is that the temple at the top is a destination for pilgrims and tourists, so it's surrounded by people selling food, drinks and tat. You can get a little bottle of ice-cold freshly squeezed orange juice for about 65 cents. It's like a frozen, sugary little angel pissing on your tongue after a climb like that. Gorgeous. It's the little pleasures that make existence worth enduring, but sometimes you have to suffer for them to get the full effect.

Cycling here isn't nearly as harrowing as you might think it would be. The roads are chaotic, but the flow of traffic is generally pretty slow in the city -- between 30 and 50 km/h on most roads. That means that most people are only going maybe 10 km/h faster than me, so they're not blowing by me at terrifying speeds. Drivers here are also used to driving in mixed traffic, with hundreds of little motorbikes buzzing around at speeds varying between half and twice the speed of traffic, so people tend to be very aware of what's going on around them. Out on the road, I'm basically just another motor bike. The only problem is the clouds of soot some of the older trucks belch out when they change gears or climb hills. I probably won't get run over, but I might get lung cancer from riding here.

Apart from the few people who pedal around the city here, there aren't many other cyclists. I saw a couple of locals climbing Doi Suthep, a few trucks full of mountain bikes and lazy tourists being driven to the top of the mountain, and I spotted two farang (foreigners) in snazzy lycra costumes on road bikes. We found that there's one shop in town that deals in road bikes, which could save our whole trip if we happen to need parts or repairs.

Erin and I are planning a big tour sometime in November and it's going to involve a ridiculous amount of hill climbing, so we need to train a bit. I'm going back up that big hill again today and this time Erin's coming along. When the sun comes up, we'll probably each have two breakfasts of rice soup and then hit the road. Rice soup is reasonably delicious, but one bowl of that stuff isn't going to push a bike any distance.

In other news, we found a better guesthouse, which we're going to move to in a few days, and Erin and I signed up for a Thai language course. We just booked one lesson, so we can try it out and decide whether it's even possible to learn this crazy language.

I promise we'll bring a camera with us today, so I can show you what some of this stuff looks like.

Arrived in Chiangers

Erin and I have safely and successfully arrived in Chiang Mai after what was one of the least painful crossings of the Pacific I have ever pulled off. Hooray for scientific drinking! I never got anywhere near drunk, but I never had any trouble falling asleep when I needed to.

The layover in Bangkok involved very little laying. In fact, it involved a fair bit of running. We couldn't check our luggage through, so we had to clear immigration, wait for our oversized bike boxes (photos to come), clear customs (who were satisfied after asking a one-word question: "Bikes?"), get through the airport with our ridiculous burden of 180 pounds of bikes, bike boxes and luggage, and then check into our flight to Chiang Mai all in a span of 80 minutes. I'm pretty sure our flight was late because they were waiting for our bikes to get onto the plane.

But we made it, and we're in the pink. We've checked into a hotel that offers extremely reasonable weekly and monthly rates (think $250 a month) and we've already got our bikes unpacked and reassembled. They appear to be in excellent shape. Just seeing my beautiful bike in Thailand was enough to give me butterflies. I can't tell you how excited I am to get out there and tear-ass among the rice paddies.

I'm not sure when the cycling is going to start, though. We'd been here in Chiang Mai, in the dry season, for no more than an hour when the sky opened up and unloaded a foot of rain. We were exhausted but we were starving, so we went out in the rain and got completely soaked looking for a restaurant. Our wanderings actually involved a fair bit of wading. The drainage here isn't exactly awesome.

We found some amazing food, had a couple of beers, and at about 6 PM Erin declared that she was feeling fine and she'd be able to stay awake until at least 9 o'clock. She was in bed by 7:30. I lasted maybe another hour.

So Erin's been up since 3 AM. I lasted in bed for maybe another hour. We're both starving, but I'm sure that nowhere we could get breakfast is open yet. It's going to take another day or two to adjust.

Oh, and it's still raining. I won't be surprised if there are gondoliers going up and down the streets when we get out there.