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.