The Last Tour Part 2: the end of the tour

Yesterday, Erin and I rode 190 kilometres.

Note that I didn't say we rode our bikes 190 km; we only did about 130 km on the bikes. We did the other 60 or so in the back of a truck. It can actually be quite convenient to ride a bike in a country that uses trucks for public transportation.

We left Chaing Rai shortly after sunrise with the vague idea that we might just try to ride the whole 190 km back to Chiang Mai. Erin's ankle was a little sore, though, and grey clouds on the horizon hinted that they might not let us finish the ride, but we started off with optimism in our hearts.

We had an excellent start to the day. We'd ridden 90 km by noon, which was when the misting drizzle we'd been riding in for the last couple of hours turned into bonafide rain. I don't want you to think we're sissies; we're not made of sugar and we wouldn't melt in the rain. I've ridden in downpours before that would make you shit your pants and run for cover. The rain was being complicated by two things, however.

First, we didn't have the proper gear with us. We didn't bring fenders on our ride, which is something we've regretted on more than one occasion. Without fenders, your own tires shower you with muck from below while the sky showers you from above, and if you're riding behind someone without fenders, you get completely blinded by muck from their back tire, so you can't even consider riding in a paceline.

For you non-cyclists, a paceline is when cyclists draft off of one another by following closely behind. A paceline can save you about 20% of the effort that it takes to pedal, and when you're thinking about riding 190 km, that's a big deal.

The other piece of gear we were lacking was raincoats. We have good raincoats with us in Thailand, but we didn't bring them on this most recent tour because we've got a very limited amount of luggage space, in keeping with the moronic fast-and-light touring concept I came up with. Listen: fast-and-light is great if you're going for a weekend credit card tour. Fast-and-light is retarded when you're going for a whole week because you spend half your time either doing laundry in the sink, or worrying about how your freshly laundered clothes will have time to dry before you need them.

Raincoats, I argued, would be unnecessary, because when it rains on you in hot weather, you just take it like a man and get wet, because you'd get even wetter with sweat if you wore a raincoat. Here's the catch, which is also my second complicating factor: it was cold. I'm serious, it was cold in Thailand. I've never seen it get that cold in Thailand. It was well below 20 degrees, which might not sound so cold to you jerks shivering away in the Canadian winter, but when you're barely wearing any clothes, you're soaking wet and you're out in the wind on a bike, it's cold enough.

So we decided we were through with cycling for the day. Our options were to get a hotel room in the little flyspeck of a town we were in and try to kill all of the hours between noon and 7 the next morning without going insane, or we could try to catch a ride back to Chiang Mai, where we had clean clothes and a nice hotel room already paid for.

So we caught a ride and a short way into the ride home, it stopped raining. Naturally. It took some time to convince ourselves that the rain had really stopped, but after 60 km the road wasn't even remotely wet anymore, so we got out of the truck and got back on the bikes.

The rain was ambushing us, though. The rain was waiting about 10 km down the road, like a mugger in an alley, and when we got to it, it clubbed us over the head and soaked us thoroughly. Then it abruptly stopped. It didn't actually feel like raining; it just wanted us to know that we couldn't pull one over on it with our little getting-a-ride trick.

And now we're back and we're enjoying Chiang Mai for a last couple of days before coming home. It'd be a lot harder to leave here for the rain of Vancouver if the weather here wasn't so lousy. It's cool enough that I actually wore a jacket out tonight, and we haven't seen the sun in two days. This time of year is supposed to be cloudless and rainless, incidentally. We never should have been rained on in the first place. Stupid global weirdness.

How was the rest of our tour, besides that last day of cycling and my ruminations about speaking Thai while standing at a urinal?

How kind of you to ask. Quite nice, thank you. I might write another post about it later on.

Speaking Thai at a Urinal

We were in a Thai tourist bar overlooking the Mekong river two nights ago, listening to a Thai band play western and Thai cover songs and watching Thai tourists from the south getting drunk as though it was a team sport, when suddenly I had to pee. I didn't exactly find this condition alarming -- it's a normal reaction of my bladder to either beer or cover bands, I can't quite figure out which -- but I knew from past experience that it would be best if I did something about it.

I walked to the men's room and found a long row of urinals, each of which were specially designed to receive and dispose of a man's urine. There was only one person using these technological wonders, and when he noticed my presence, he tensed up and looked down, apparently concentrating intensely on the task at hand.

I pulled up to a spot two urinals down from him, commenced peeing, and I started thinking about something friendly I could say to my pissing partner to set him at ease. As I've said previously on this weblog, I've been learning Thai, but my pronunciation is very imperfect and my vocabulary limited, so I'm not exactly able to throw off stupid urinal jokes like I can in English, such as "so, this is where all the dicks hang out."

Looking up at the night sky through the open window of the well-ventilated men's room, I decided I wanted to say something like "nice night." I don't know how to say, "nice", but I can say "beautiful", which I thought would work well enough, and I do know the word for "night". I began formulating this two-word sentence when I realized I might have a problem.

The grammar in Thai is super easy. For example, you don't need to put a "to be" verb in between a noun and an adjective. You just need to say the noun and say the adjective, like "night beautiful". The hard part of Thai for westerners is the pronunciation. The language has 5 tones, each of which can change the meaning of a word. The word "suay" (pronounced more or less like "sway") said with a rising tone means beautiful, but if you mess up the tone and say it flat, or mid-toned, it means "bad luck". I was pretty confident I could pull off the tone, though, so I wasn't worried about accidentally saying that the night was bad luck.

The other difficulty with pronouncing Thai is the vowels. The Thai alphabet has 32 vowels, many of which are only subtly different from one another. Our Thai teacher has a system of writing these vowels in our alphabet, doubling up letters to make a longer vowel sound, or by using upsidedown e's to indicate that they should sound like you're throwing up, and not like a normal e.

The word for night is spelled by our Thai teacher "kuun", except that he crosses both u's with horizontal lines about halfway up, to indicate that they are a different vowel from the normal u sound. I can't explain the difference between this u and a normal u, and I can only approximate the sound when I try to say it. Usually I rely on context and not accurate pronunciation to get me through linguistic ambiguities.

The real difficulty of my situation was that the word "kun", with one u, uncrossed, means "you"; talking about the night being beautiful would put me into a linguistic minefield from which the context of a men's room unoccupied by any other men couldn't save me. The very best misunderstanding I could hope for is that I'd botch both the vowel on the first word and the tone on the second word, and he'd think that I was calling him unlucky, possibly because of something I'd caught a glimpse of while he was urinating. Given my present ability in speaking Thai, however, it was much more likely that I'd nail that tone on "suay" and I'd totally botch the subtlety of the vowel on "kuun" (crossed u's) and he'd think I was saying "kun suay": "you're beautiful".

I decided not to say anything at all. Let him be uncomfortable about my presence while he pisses; it's better than him thinking that I think him either beautiful or unluckily endowed.

Sometimes when you travel you can have grand adventures without anything happening outside of your own head.

The Last Tour

10 days from now Erin and I will be on a plane home. Erin is certainly not ready to come home. I have mixed feelings. I'm sure my feelings will swiftly become unmixed when I get off the plane in Vancouver and find that the atmosphere has been replaced by a steadily descending stream of icy cold water.

But that's 10 days from now; we still have enough time to go for one last tour.

Where to this time, Ben?

A fine question. Actually, we're not totally sure. Day 1 will see us go about 90 km due north, back to Chiang Dao. Day 2 might see us go to a place called Tha Ton. Then maybe Chiang Saen? And after that, who in hell knows? In the end, the trip might look something like this:

View Untitled in a larger map

Okay, I might not be totally serious about the last part of that route. We're definitely going to end up back in Chiang Mai, not off on the top of a mountain somewhere. I just really don't know how far we're going to go. It'll depend a lot on how we're feeling after the first few days. Maybe we'll be feeling great and we'll be eager to put in a lot more distance, and we'll do something really cool. Or maybe we'll just go to Chiang Rai and then take the main road back.

Either way, this is our last chance for a big trip, so we're going to get out there and put a few hundred kilometres of asphalt under our wheels.

Starting tomorrow morning... I should probably get some sleep now.

The Big Tour Part 3: Last day and the sad trip home

Not discovering the secret to Suvarnabhumi Airport

$9 for an hour of internet! $6 for simple meal of Thai food? $3.50 for a coffee? Who do these Bangkok airport guys think they are? What, they think they have a monopoly?

Hell, I have a 6-hour layover; I’ll just take the 50-cent airport train into the city and I’ll show them. The train goes straight to the central shopping district… not much is open here… except for this mall… where the prices are actually higher than they are in the airport.

Shit.

I guess I’ll just go back to the airport.

We’re not in simple, cheap Chaing Mai anymore.

Back to the tour!

In the Cave Lodge outside of Pang Mapha I was on the verge of collapse. We just hadn’t been eating enough for the amount we were riding; I wasn’t in any risk of becoming skinny or anything, I just felt like hell. Fortunately, the food at Cave Lodge is awesome, the rooms are comfortable, the staff is friendly.

There’s also a ton of stuff to do there, but I didn’t feel like doing any of it. Erin went kayaking down a river that goes through an enormous cave. She went black water kayaking for several hundred meters and then normal- (brown?) water kayaking for a few more. I stayed back at the guesthouse and read my book and ate. When she came back, we went back to the big cave together and paid a guide to take us through the cave on a bamboo raft, stopping a few times to explore the side branches of the cave on foot.

The cave was lightly developed, meaning that there were stairs here and there where we needed them and there were a few informative plaques, but there weren’t any lights or railings and there definitely weren’t any coloured lights and cheesy sound effects, like I’ve seen in some over-developed caves. The caves were cool. There was a lot of guano and birdshit. There was a sign warning us away from one chamber, saying that oxygen levels there were low.

It sort of freaked me out after awhile; a cave is one of the least hospitable places on earth. I think that the people who go exploring unmapped caves and worm their way through little holes in the ground for hours on end are mentally ill. Why would someone want to do that?

By the time we reached the far end of the cave, it was dusk. We got to watch literally hundreds of thousands of swifts circling in a holding patten over the cave mouth while waiting for their turn to fly into the cave and bed down for the night. At the same time, thousands upon thousands of bats were leaving the cave for a night of hunting. They were hot-swapping beds, I guess. The bugs in that valley get no respite, day or night.

The next morning we woke up early, pigged out on muffins and bread baked in the Cave Lodge’s stone oven and hit the road at about 7:00. Mist was still clinging to the trees as we descended into the valley down the winding, narrow, perfectly-paved road that connects Cave Lodge and the Tham Lot cave to the highway. The ride down was absolutely magical; it was largely downhill, with just enough uphill stretches to keep us warm on a relatively chilly morning. My bike and my tires were built for taking corners like that at high speed. I’ve seldom ever enjoyed myself more on my bike.

The rest of the day’s ride was almost as good. We stopped in Pang Mapha to hit an ATM and have another coffee and then carried on to Mae Hong Son. The ride was about 70 km in length with quite a bit of climbing, but the climb was divided up into three major hills, so we were able to alternate climbing and descending for a change.

The road surface was good, by and large, and we had quite a few cheerleaders along the way, including a young Australian couple on a motorbike; the woman thought I was beautiful enough to photograph, but the man just shook his head, and when I asked him how he was doing, he said “better than you, mate.” To be fair, this was in the middle of the biggest climb of the day, when we were pounding up a steep grade at around noon in the full sun. I probably looked like hell, but I was having fun. On the outside I might’ve looked like I was on the verge of collapse, but inside my head it was all stars and fireworks and neon and trumpets blowing celebratory fanfares. You don’t need to go to a pusher to get good drugs; your body is full of really great drugs, it just takes a bit of work to get them out.

On our way up the last little hill before Mae Hong Son, an extremely large-bellied middle-aged American man on a motorbike stopped to talk to us. He asked us his few questions, and then went on to tell us about how the rest of the world is messed up, workers are rioting in France, but Thailand is just how it should be: a paradise. Most of the people we’d see in Mae Hong Son were involved in fighting in Burma, he said; there are two private armies in northern Burma; drugs out, guns in, and business is good, he said. He was ex-military; he bragged about being a gun runner without quite saying he was a gun runner. I looked at his gut and I could tell that he hadn’t run more than five steps in the last 20 years, and that was to get a Philly cheesesteak. If anything, he was a gun-bureaucrat who thought that paradise involved drug trafficking and gun smuggling, and that labour unrest was a sign of the fall of civilization.

It’s a common theme among the seedier sort of expatriates in Thailand: this place is perfect and has absolutely no problems, whereas the country they’re from (or the entire western world) is a complete shithole and they can’t stand being there. One late-twenties english teacher from Vancouver Island spent half an hour telling me what a horrible place Canada was; when I asked him why, his main reason seemed to be that he isn’t allowed to drink and drive in Canada, where in Thailand he can get as pissed as he wants and jump on his motorbike and drive to the next bar.

Mae Hong Son is a surprisingly attractive town. I’d sort of expected a dusty Burmese border town, but the tourist part of town is centred on a little lake, with a couple of nice Burmese-style temples on its shore. Mae Hong Son is also a little boring, which is to be expected from such a small town.

We didn’t have much time to be bored. We ate a few times, slept, and got up early in the morning for the ignominy of loading our bikes onto a bus. A bus! A fucking bus! We, powerful cyclists, loaded our beautiful bikes on a bus. The shame.

But we had received the email we were waiting for; we had to go back to Chiang Mai and do our indexing, and we couldn’t afford the 4-5 days it’d take to cycle back, so we got on a bus and sat in squalid, sweaty misery for 9 hours and found ourselves back in Chiang Mai.

The indexing is done, incidentally. In spite of our lack of enthusiasm, I think we did a reasonably good job. And now we’re off to Cambodia to look at that cool temple and learn enough about bears that Erin can write an article about them.

Yeah, bears. Weird world, eh?

The Big Tour Part 2: the tour, days 1-3

Alright, we're dashing off to Cambodia in about a dozen hours, and if I don't puke this story out now, I never will.

Where was I? Right, 3 in the afternoon, cycling slowly. We wouldn't have bothered to leave town with so little daylight left, but we knew we'd be short days and we wanted to get about 50 km of flats out of the way, so that we didn't waste the cool part of the next morning crossing the flats and then hit the big mountain we had to go over during the heat of the day.

View Big tour day 1 in a larger map

We rode pretty slowly down little country roads, crossed the highway and started down the road to Pai. The sun was setting, we saw a sign for a "resort" so we got off the road to go have a look. The word "resort" can mean a lot of things in northern Thailand -- anything from a "resort" consisting of a somewhat run-down hotel that happens to have a pool, to a Resort consisting of a brand new hotel with a spa, masseur and swimming pool. Much to our dismay, the resort was a Resort and not a "resort". They asked us for more money than we've ever spent on a hotel in Thailand. We balked, they cut their price by 20%, which was still more than we've ever spent on a hotel in Thailand. We looked at the sun setting and felt how tired we were, and we ponied up.

The food was too expensive and not that good. On the bright side, Erin was in the pool within half an hour of our decision to stay, so she was happy.

The next day we started to climb. Over the course of the tour, I developed a personal relationship with a group of people called "Thai engineers", who I credited or blamed for all of the roads we cycled on. When we were on a particularly bad road, I generally blamed it on an individual, referring to the person as "him", or "this guy", like "this guy is a fucking moron! Who builds a road like this?"

View Big tour day 2 in a larger map

On our first day of climbing, I was very pleased with the Thai engineers. The climb over the pass to get to Pai is a big one; somewhere in the ballpark of 1500 meters, which is about 15% bigger than the climb from Hope to the Coquihalla summit in BC, for example. It made us tired, but it really didn't kill us. The road was built with ample switchbacks and all of the corners were built properly, so we never felt like we were riding up the roof of an alpine chateau.

The ride down from the summit was good fun, but unfortunately the quality of the road surface deteriorated a little, so I had to be "responsible" and try not to make Erin a "widow at age 28".

Fah.

I think Pai was suffering from a tourist follow-through from the lantern festival in Chiang Mai. Everyone talks about how laid back Pai is. I found it to be a bit like Khao San Road in Bangkok set in a beautiful valley instead of an insane city. If you've never been to Khao San Road, imagine a zoo where all the animals are monkeys, there are no cages, and inexplicably the few zookeepers around seem bent on supplying the monkeys with as many t-shirts, massages, french braids, and as much beer as the monkeys can handle.

We had originally thought about spending a rest-day in Pai, but the people returning to our guesthouse from their super laid-back all-night drunken dance parties changed our minds for us, so the next day we went to a town called Soppong by guidebooks and tourists. When those tourists call the town "Soppong" when speaking to any Thai person not involved in the tourist trade, they receive a quizzical squint. Thai people universally call the place Pang Mapha; I'm pretty sure that the Lonely Planet unilaterally renamed the town for reasons we can only guess at.

The ride to Pang Mapha was short -- only 40 km -- but it involved a serious climb, something like 2/3 the size of the previous day's. The difference was, this time I spent most of my time shouting abuse at the anonymous (and in my opinion, mentally defective) engineer who surveyed the road. Most of the grade is absolutely fine for cycling. Completely reasonable. But every now and then, that asshole engineer got himself stuck where he shouldn't have been, and he drove that road up the side of a cliff to get himself up on the ridge where he wanted to be. To make things worse, the guy was the worst builder of switchback-corners of all times. He graded the outside of the corner so it was a steady and reasonable climb, so the inside of the hairpin corner was ridiculously steep -- so steep that Erin would frequently get off her bike and push.

As we approached the top of the pass, every second car that passed us slowed down to shout encouragement (often just: "good!") or give us a thumbs up. In the valleys and on the flats, most Thais pay just enough attention to us not to run us over, but whenever we get near the top of a big hill, we turn into rock stars. Near the top of the summit the previous day we stopped to get some water and a Thai tourist from the south called me a "superman" when I told him we planned to ride to Mae Hong Son. People took photographs of us; later on the tour, one car who passed us did a u-turn so they could come back and take photos of us out the front windshield.

We're not doing this ride for the admiration, but let me tell you, when you're on the 800th meter of a climb and you're starting to bonk because nothing was open for breakfast when you left town and you ate nothing for breakfast but the loaves of bread you bought off of a French-hippie-baker selling bread from a motorbike the day before and you've eaten nothing since but the packages of cookies you had stashed on your bike, and the air is getting a bit cooler with altitude but you're still sweating your sack off because the hill you're climbing is in full sun, that little chuckle you get out of the ridiculous enthusiasm of the Thais who are encouraging you sure doesn't hurt.

The descent from the summit into Pang Mapha was just awesome. The pavement was good and the grade went from being not-too-steep-to-enjoy at the beginning to perfect-for-feeling-like-a-racecar toward the end. Sure, some of those ridiculously built corners were there to ambush us with a sudden cliff on the inside of a turn, but they were reasonably easy to see coming, so we could get on the brakes in time.

The lower part of the descent was some of the best fun I've had on a bike. It was largely downhill, with just enough rolling uphill from time to time to remind me that I was still responsible for my locomotion. The road wound around the amazing scenery of jungle, occasional farms, and cliff faces as the valley opened, just barely, out to Pang Mapha.

We were there. We were tired from the climb and the climb of the day before, but we were in reasonable shape and it was only noon. At the recommendation of Tucker, who was in Pang Mapha five years ago, we decided to stay at the Cave Lodge. What we didn't realize was that the Cave Lodge was 8 km off the highway on a tiny but well-paved road that rolled mostly uphill, halfway back up the side of the valley.

I was tired and I was bonking. I cursed Tucker, I cursed the assholes who built the Cave Lodge so far from the road, I cursed whatever asshole decided to put all those hills there.

But then we got there and the Cave Lodge turned out to be the perfect place to spend a rest day.

This is getting ridiculous. How can I ramble on about cycling like this? I'll tell you what: I've got three more days of tour to tell you about and I've got a 6-hour layover in Bangkok tomorrow. I'll see what I can do about finishing this story before I forget everything we did.

The Big Tour Part 1: pre-departure

Obviously, we've been back in Chiang Mai for several days. But why haven't I written about our exciting big tour? Well, we've been up to our nipples in indexing, which is also the reason why our big tour was only about half as long as I wanted it to be.

What is this mysterious substance "indexing" you ask? Indexing is an activity, not a liquid, as I implied in that nipple-filled analogy in the previous paragraph. Indexing is coming up with a list of subjects in the book we're editing, and then finding all of the pages each of the subjects is referred to on.

As you might imagine, poring in minute detail over a book we ourselves wrote and consequently have already read every part of at least a dozen times in the last few months is extremely stimulating and enjoyable work; I think I've found my new life's calling: writing non-fiction books on not-particularly-interesting topics and then reducing the immense wisdom they contain to an alphabetized list and a series of numbers.

But who's complaining? It's a job I can do in Chiang Mai in November, therefore it is by definition a good job.

The tour; but before you can understand the tour, you must understand the condition in which we left on the tour, and for that you must be told about the day and night before we left for the tour.

The date was November 22nd, 2010; those were heady days. A little rebellion called the Tea Party was washing across the United States in a wave of confused hysteria; the Calgary Flames had just lost a historic game to the Detroit Red Wings and were about to lose a historic game to the New York Rangers.

And in Chiang Mai it was the second-last day of Loi Krathong, their crazy flying-lantern-and-fireworks festival. The festival is described as happening "on the second-last full moon of the year", but that's nonsense. It might end around then, but the festival fever builds for weeks as Thais set off more and more fireworks, light more and more lanterns and get drunker and drunker.

For weeks, the city outside of the hotel room where we worked (Erin earnestly, I intermittently) had sounded like a war-zone. We had toured the lantern displays and unsuccessfully tried to set off a couple of flying lantern-balloon thingies, but we hadn't had much to do with the festivities so far. But on the second-last night of the festival, we decided to fully take part. And we did, in a big way.

First of all, Erin made a couple of floating candle-raft thingies with the nice lady who runs our guesthouse. The idea is to send the raft down the river along with all of your troubles. The raft is made out of a chunk of banana tree covered in banana leaves and flowers.

Then we went down to the river with a few Americans we met and released our little floating candle raft thingies into their natural habitat, the Mae Nam Ping river.

And we set off a few flying lantern-balloon things as well.

The below photo can only give you the tiniest idea of just how magical and truly dangerous the festival is. There are thousands of people setting off these lanterns all the time. They twinkle in the sky like moving clouds of stars. And sometimes things go wrong.

Almost all of the lantern-balloon thingies take off successfully and burn themselves out before fluttering gently to the ground, where they become litter in the treetops and farmers' fields. However, with a large number of tourists who don't know what they're doing taking part, and a large number of crooked locals selling inferior or defective lantern-balloon thingies to the tourists, you're bound to get a few faulty launches, which sometimes result in a lantern-balloon thingy gently falling flaming-ring foremost into an extremely crowded street.

Then you add in a crosswind that catches the lantern-balloon thingies of locals and tourists alike and pushes some of them into nearby treetops where they begin small conflagrations, and causes others of them to partially collapse and start descending flaming-ring first into the very crowded street. Fortunately, even in the dry season, the foliage in the area is very damp. All of the treetop fires we saw were very minor. People's heads are less damp than the foliage, but they come down pretty slowly and they're easy to catch by the non-flaming rim, so we didn't see anyone get hit by a falling flaming lantern-balloon thingy. I imagine it did happen to someone, though.

We launched our lantern-balloon thingies (successfully, all) and got the hell out of there before any flaming rings descended on our heads while we weren't looking. Our yankee friends all bowed out and Erin and I went to a bar very near our hotel, where the locals and tourists, staff and patrons, were all going a little crazy. Firecrackers were being thrown around willy-nilly and people were getting very drunk. Actually, at first most of the firecracker-throwing was being done by Erin and me because everyone else at the bar had worked out most of their firecracker enthusiasm in the big firecracker fight that had broken out a day or two before, but they soon recovered their enthusiasm.

The staff of the bar, all of whom were Thai and most of whom were very drunk, decided that they would close the bar and we would all, staff and patrons together, walk back down to the river and launch floating candle-raft thingies and drink much more beer. So we each took a beer to go and drank it while slowly progressing down the street and throwing firecrackers everywhere we thought needed a firecracker. Then we stopped to get more beer, and I think more firecrackers as well, and resumed our progress to the river.

Things get a little hazy from there. I lost Erin for a time, and spent awhile walking with a middle-aged American gay man who had a bad limp and couldn't easily keep up with the party. We found everyone, we drank another beer on the river bank, and then I thought I lost Erin again but she'd only gone to find somewhere to pee. Then five of us were in a tuk-tuk and the driver asked for too much money and one of the bar patrons paid it anyway, and a waitress who was with us got mad at him for paying. I'm not sure where we were going, though. I remember more firecrackers and probably another beer...

Then it was past 3 AM and we went to bed.

What does this have to do with the big tour, you ask? Well, this is why I slept until 1 PM the next day, why we didn't start our first day's riding until 3 PM, and why we rode so slowly that day.

So how was the tour, you ask? Wait until tomorrow. My typers are tired. I'll find a way to drag myself from my indexing to write the rest of this story.

Mae Kuang Dam Loop

Erin and I did a fun one-day ride yesterday:

We left Chiang Mai following our little rural river road that lets us avoid the highway, and then went up into the hills, where we found a very attractive and reasonably-priced (free) waterfall:

Then we proceeded to the lake, where we were going to get a boat to the other side. We should have known this wasn't exactly a high traffic route with regularly scheduled ferry service. The jungle was eating the road and nobody seemed to care.

At the lake, there was no boat and no sign of any boat, but we waited there like morons. Fortunately, we met a very nice Austrian man on a motorcycle, who helped us pass the time.

Finally, we were finished waiting, and we went back up the extremely steep road we'd just come down and stopped in the village 3 km down the road to get some noodle soup. Using our pathetically limited Thai, we tried to ask the nice lady who made soup for us how one could get a boat to the other side of the lake. This was quite challenging for us, because we didn't know the word for boat, and we hadn't brought our Thai dictionary with us.

A word of advice: if you're ever taking a bicycle trip in rural Thailand that absolutely requires you to catch a boat, unless you want to go 75km back the way you came, learn the Thai word for boat.

The word for bicycle in Thai is jak-ga-yaan. The tones for the three syllables are low, low and mid, respectively. We learned this somewhat difficult word almost immediately on arriving in Thailand.

The word for boat, according to my dictionary is rua. Mid-tone, nice and flat. That's one of the easiest words I've ever learned in Thai, but yesterday, we didn't know it. We did know how to say, "we want to go to Doi Saket", which was the name of the town on the other side of the lake, and we were able to combine this linguistic snippet with smiling ignorance and, after going through three intermediaries, we got someone to telephone the ferry man on the far side of the lake and tell him to come and get us.

So we went back down the hill to the lakeshore and waited for the boat.

Here's Snakeslayer taking his first-ever boat ride; I think he liked it:

And then we road home. Rice harvest is approaching here, and the countryside is beautiful.

And the lantern festival is underway in Chiang Mai.

Which has meant there's been so many fireworks set off that it sounds like there's a war going on every night. The festival is fun, and Erin and I intend to enjoy it tonight, but there's only so many explosions my nerves can handle.

Last night I was at a bar where a few of the patrons at the instigation of one of the Thai employees, decided that it would be hilarious if they started sneaking lit firecrackers under people's tables, or placing them between their feet while they weren't looking. Okay, it was hilarious, but there's only so much hilarity a guy can take.

Either tomorrow or the next day Erin and I are going to set off on our longest tour yet, going north through Pai to Mae Hong Son. We'll see how far we get. We've got some work we have to do in the next week or two that's will be incredibly urgent once we're able to start, but we have no idea when we're going to be able to start.

Ahh... the peaceful, contemplative life of a writer. Fucking deadlines.

The Tallest Mountain in Thailand

I'm warning you: I'm kind of pissed (in the British sense, not the American one).

Our two-day tour got extended to a three day tour. We returned at about 1:30 this afternoon and went out for lunch and a beer. Erin went for a massage and I stayed and had a second beer. I intended to spend the whole afternoon there drinking beer and reading my book, but after two beers I had to leave. I was too drunk.

One of the marvellous things about long-distance cycling is that it quickens your metabolism to the point where you can become a one-beer drunk.

We were nearly at the end of our planned ride for the first day and at the end of some of the most gruelling hill-climbing I've ever done, when we nearly turned back. The hill was ridiculously steep and we had run completely out of water; it'd been hours since we last saw somewhere we could buy some. We'd covered virtually no distance since the last time we stopped and ate, but we'd gained at least 1000 meters in altitude. Our odometers indicated that we should have been at our destination, but there was nothing to be seen. Every corner we rounded showed us nothing but another steep ascent.

We were both bonking -- which means we were hitting that hypoglycaemic wall where you've run out of blood sugar to feed your muscles, and you feel as weak as a kitten and as prone to vomiting as a newborn. Erin ate her ninth little banana of the day, which I gave her, because I couldn't imagine being able to swallow it without water. It was our last banana. I was ready to turn around and go back to the "resort" we'd seen advertised back at the bottom of the mountain.

Erin pointed out that our odometers might easily be out a kilometre, that the town we were riding to might be just around the corner and argued that we should press on; I, suppressing every natural desire I had to divorce her on the spot, agreed on an intellectual level and then forced flesh to accept the mastery of my intellect. After another kilometre, which probably took us more than 10 minutes to climb, we saw an insignificant little advertisement at the side of the road. It promised us that there was an internet place in 200 meters. We weren't interested in the internet, but where there's internet, there's water and food. I felt like we were running down the side of a sand dune into an oasis. Naturally, the ad lied, but after about another kilometre, there we were, in Khun Klang, a town on the side of the tallest mountain in Thailand.

We had some noodle soup and talked about our situation. Khun Klang looked like a bit of a shithole and we didn't really relish the idea of spending the rest of the afternoon there. It was chilly, because it was at something like 1400 metres, and there wasn't a lot to do. There's a road that goes right to the summit of Doi Inthanon, the highest mountain in Thailand, but it was way too steep to ride up, and there didn't seem to be much point to going up there anyway; the mountaintop is permanently surrounded by clouds, so there's no view. Thai people go during the cold season so they can experience such novelties as frost, but we didn't give a shit about seeing frost.

We talked about going back down the mountain to a more comfortable altitude. Then the third bowl of noodle soup of the day raised our blood sugar levels and our spirits and the idea was advanced (I'm not sure by who, but Erin blames me) that we go on; we could climb another 300 meters and then descend the other side of the mountain to Mae Chaem. It'd mean adding a day to the tour and turning it into a loop, where we'd go south through Hot and then back up the valley to Chiang Mai.

So we did it.

I can't expect any of you to understand why, though some of you will. The reward is all in our heads, in the enormous doses of endorphins and other chemicals our bodies give us when we're mean to them; in the unexpected vistas and the expected ones; in the amazed looks and smiles and thumbs-up we got from local passengers of vehicles who saw us at the summit of the pass; in the well-earned appetite at every meal; in the small interactions we have with the locals when we stop for water or food or directions; and in the immediate and profound head-buzz you get off of a single beer after spending a day on the bike.

And that was just a three-day tour!

We did a little over 300 km and a fuck-ton more altitude than my ride mapping website will give us credit for. I felt like quitting several times, but there was no way we could quit; what would we have done? Thrown up our arms on the side of the road and waited for our parents to come get us? Besides, Erin was there, not wanting to quit at all. Then, when Erin did want to quit, I felt fine and wanted to carry on, so she kept going.

One of the many songs I invented, to be sung as loudly and raspily as an out-of-breath person can sing it, was:

Forty-eight, Thirty-eight, Twenty-eight

Where is my triple?

Na-na naa naaaaa

If you're confused, I was singing about gears. Those hills are steep. I don't have the right gearing. Erin's gearing is a good 15% better than mine, and she doesn't have the right gearing for these hills either.

Each night Erin ate everything in the world while I choked down as much food as I could make myself swallow, and we went to bed, afraid of what our legs would be screaming at us the next morning. Each morning I had a huge breakfast while Erin ate a reasonable one and watched, and we got on the bike feeling surprisingly good. After a dozen kilometres, though, we found that our legs had very little in the way of reserves after that huge climb on the first day.

But we made it back. And now I'm enjoying my solipsistic triumph by trying to explain it to others. To hell with this: beer is a hugely more rewarding use of my time than writing to the likes of you.

Writing about a good bike ride is like telling someone about a really great orgasm you had. "Oh, is that so? Well, good for you!"

And we're off!

Late yesterday afternoon, Erin and I made a snap decision to take off on an overnight trip. We're going halfway up the side of Doi Inthanon, Thailand's tallest mountain, where we hope to find a homestay, and maybe a ride the rest of the way to the top of the peak.

I'll post the story when we get back. The route we'll follow will look something like this:

Fear of Dogs: Chiang Mai to Chiang Dao, Return

I was too lazy to post yesterday, and now I've got to write two posts in a row because there's so much to say!

First things first: Erin and I did another overnight bike tour, this time to a town at the foot of a beautiful mountain north of here:

View Chiang Mai to Chiang Dao in a larger map

I'm afraid of only three things. I covered fish and entropy a couple of weeks ago. Now it's time to talk about my very rational, completely reasonable fear of dogs.

I know that what I'm about to say makes me a monster in the eyes of most people, but I want to say this up front: I think that the world would be a better, quieter, safer, more pleasant-smelling and more hygienic place if we rounded up every last dog and shot them and then shot them all again, just to be safe. Or better yet, we could invent some kind of gigantic food processor to do the job.

There, that's off my chest. Still reading? You think I'm a horrible man and you're just carrying on reading to see what other shocking thing I'll say so you can have the pleasure of being scandalized? Or is it because you secretly share my opinions?

I'll assume it's the latter.

Fellow dog-haters: the canine menace here is grave, particularly if you're on a bicycle. During the day, most dogs here are sleepily stupid. They can generally muster the energy and intelligence to get out of the way of motorcycles and cars, but because they can't hear cyclists coming, they assume we are nothing to be afraid of, and they'll dart out in front of us at random. In the evenings, they get a little spunkier and more territorial and they'll start barking at or even chasing bikes. One lunged at me with the clear intention of injecting rabies into my tender, unprotected ankle, from his filthy, scat-eating, dogloverface-licking noisehole.

I think we were chased about 5 times in the course of 190 km. Next time, I'm bringing bear spray. Don't think for an instant that I'm kidding. And I won't just spray the dogs who are actively chasing me; I intend to spray every dog I see as a preventative measure, including dogs that are pets, even if their owners are watching. Don't like what I did to Fido? Watch it, or you're next.

If only the Thais would eat dogs, like the Vietnamese and Chinese do. They'd clear this problem right up. Thais would probably love a capsaicin spray-soaked dog: nice and spicy. Maybe I'll start a new culinary trend by leaving pre-seasoned dogs lying helpless on roadsides across Thailand.

Apart from the dogs, we had a fantastic tour. We wound our way through rice fields and jungles, often on tiny but well-paved roads with virtually no traffic on them. It felt like the government of Thailand had built them just for us.

I am suffering from some equipment entropy, though. My tires have over 4,000 km on them and they're not doing such a good job of holding out glass anymore. I've got slow leaks in both tires now. It wasn't so bad when I just had to pump up one tire in the morning, and again halfway through a ride, but now I have to do it to both tires. It might be time to invest in some new tires before we do a longer tour.

Unfortunately, we won't be doing our long tour anytime soon. Work has reared its ugly head.

Late addition: anyone interested in the route we took can find a better map here. This map is one way only; this definitely isn't the exact route we took, and we took a different route back. Some of the minor roads north of Chiang Mai are confusing, and it's hard to tell exactly where we went. It was similar to this route, however.

Chiang Mai to Samoeng to Chiang Mai

View Chiang Mai to Samoeng in a larger map

Erin and I just got back from our first tour. It was a little one-night practice tour. We learned some things.

We learned that Thai engineers don't grade roads the way that Canadian ones do. These guys aren't afraid of 12% grades. Today we went up the most ridiculous bunch of switchbacks I've ever seen.

I'm pretty organized about these rides we're doing. I plot them out on maps on the internet and I create route sheets with the distances noted so we know where to turn, because even if there is a sign for a road, it's rarely written in letters that are legible to us. My Thailand cycling cockpit contains a route sheet, my bike computer and a fuel tank full of bananas.

I also check out the elevation profile of the route to see just how much climbing we'll do, and where on the route the climbs are located. You can't budget time with a 2-dimensional map in the mountains, because there's a huge difference between 30 km/h on the flats and 9 km/h going uphill, and you need to budget time so you don't end up sweating your way up a mountain in the noonday sun.

We started a moderate ascent and I knew we were only a couple of kilometres from the second and final summit of the day. It was maybe 9 o'clock in the morning and we were nearly done climbing for the day. We were getting cocky. And the road was getting steeper.

And it got steeper and the road started switching back and forth across the side of the mountain. We'd seen some steep roads the day before, steeper than you'd ever see on a highway in Canada, but we hadn't seen anything like this. At home it's a steep hill if I drop down to 8 km/h. Today I was doing 5 km/h at times -- the speed of a brisk walk. When there were no cars around, I zig-zagged up the lane to try to lessen the grade for myself.

Finally, as we were approaching the summit, the mountain got less steep. So how did the Thai road-builders respond? Well, they scrapped the switchbacks and rammed the road straight up the slope, to maintain their ridiculously steep grade.

The second thing we learned is that it rains in Thailand, even in the morning, even at the beginning of the dry season. Fortunately, we had stopped for breakfast when it started, so we didn't get caught in it. If we had been riding, we'd have had to pull over and walk our bikes. It was coming down so hard we wouldn't have been able to see a thing.

If you have never seen a tropical rainfall, I have a statistic for you: last week it was recorded raining here 100 millimetres per hour. 100 mm! In an hour! For more than one hour! Vancouver gets 1150 mm of precipitation per year. That's like an average month's worth of Vancouver rain falling in one hour. No wonder it's flooding downriver from here; they've got to deal with all of our rain and all of their own.

When the rain stopped we got back on our bikes and we got wet and filthy. The skies had finished unloading, but the roads were still wet. We didn't bring fenders with us, because we decided we were going to be lightweight and super fast. Well, we are lightweight and super fast, but we're also soaking wet and super filthy.

The third thing we learned is that my pump is dead. My great little emergency pump, which looks cool, weighs almost nothing and worked pretty well considering its size, is dead. It can't get a tire's pressure above 60 PSI and we need 110 or 120. It was the only pump we brought. We're idiots. These little pumps never seem to last long, and this one's had to do a fair bit of work, re-inflating all four of our tires when we got off the plane, and topping our tires up every day. Then, on our first flat, it stopped working. It was tired, I guess. Fortunately, we were in town when it happened, but now we're pump-less. Time to go shopping.

The tour really was fun. We saw a lot of beautiful countryside, we rode well, and we abundantly rewarded ourselves for our hard work with Beer Chang. Right now I'm tired and I'm concerned about my equipment, though, so I'll leave off singing the praises of cycling for another day.

Late addition: anyone who is interested in the actual route we took, you can find it here. I won't swear that the plotted route north from Chiang Mai is the exact one we took, but it's pretty close.

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.

The Secret to the Airport

I have uncovered the secret to Vancouver International Airport.

I've noticed in past passings-through of this airport that there is absolutely nothing open in international departures after about midnight. Well, nothing that serves alcohol in anything other than a Duty-Free bag, that is.

Oh, I know: poor Benny the drunk can't get any booze until he's on the plane. Cry me a river.

Yeah, yeah. This is actually serious. If I just wanted a drink, not being able to get one wouldn't be that big a deal. This is much more serious a matter than that. We're talking about an airborne sleep strategy that's at stake. I have a scientific program of drinking and not drinking that allows me to cross the pacific and wake up fresh as a daisy and in the proper timezone on the other side. A little thing like not being able to get a drink at midnight while I'm waiting for my flight can screw the whole thing up and bang, I'm up shit creek and jet lagged like all the rest of the poor stiffs on the flight who don't know how to drink strategically.

But I've fixed it. I've finally learned the secret.

I'm sure many of you know the secret, but I've been a religiously cheap traveller for years, so excuse my ignorance of what money can do.

I've learned that for $35, you can get into the China Airways lounge and drink (or not drink) as much as you can (or can not) swallow, at any time of the night. I've learned that if it's late at night, you can get in for $20. And I've learned that if you confuse the nice man at the counter, it gets cheaper than that. And the best thing is, if you only have time for one beer, they'll only charge you for one.

bang!

Oh yeah. What am I weblogging for? Erin and I are on the road again. It's super exciting. I'm super excited. I'd convey it better if it wasn't 2AM and I wasn't strategically drinking. We're going to Chiang Mai in northern Thailand to hang out and write a bit. The best part: we brought our bikes! We're going to cycle all around northern Thailand!

More later.