Our bike ride to Pak Beng was a wet one. The rain was coming down hard and all we had for protection were some small raincoats to cover our torsos. Towards the end of the ride, Cat received a phone call (which is always an exciting event) so we huddled under an overhanging tree on the side of the highway while she took the call.
Pak Beng was a quaint border town. It's situated on the eastern shore of the Mekong River which acts as the border between much of Thailand and Laos. But since there isn't a border crossing at Pak Beng we had to spend the night and take a ten hour boat ride up the Mekong to the Laos border town of Huay Xai where we would be able to cross the following day.
The boat ended up being far more comfortable than prior experiences. There was loads of room aboard and we sat in the kind of removable seats you find in old minivans and suburbans. Pure luxury. Even so, ten ours on a boat is a very long time.
Huay Xai wasn't anything special but because of the border crossing hours, we had to stay the night and cross the next day.
Crossing the river to Chiang Kong in Thailand was incredibly quick and painless. We were so excited to be in Thailand and all I could think of was laying my hands on the first plate of Phad Thai I found.
After a short spell of tinkering with my ever fickle bike, we set off for the relatively short ride to Phaya Meng Rai (only about fifty km). We were immediately aware of the change from Laos roads to Thai roads. After the potholed and muddy roads of Laos, the roads in Thailand seemed immaculate. Not only that, but there were no hills so we could make excellent time (that day we averaged about 23 km/hr compared to Laos where we averaged about 8-12 km/hr).
The day was a hot one and when we arrived in PMR, we realized we'd forgotten to applysunscreen. This just turned our bike shorts tans and farmer's tans into burns. That night we weren't able to make it into town for dinner because of an intense lightning storm so we ate some mediocre take out brought by the hostel owners.
The next day on our way to Chiang Rai, we stopped for breakfast to enjoy our first true Thai meal. And so began Cat's love affair with noodle soup (called gooay deeo in Thai). When they first served it, I was thinking it looked awfully similar to the medicre Vietnamese pho and the slightly less mediocre Laos foe. I couldn't have been more wrong. The noodle soups in Thailand are so much more flavourful, with their myriad ingredients and complex broths. You also have a wide variety of toppings you can add at your table, like garlic, peppers and peanuts. Feeling appropriately rejuvenated, we easily covered the distance to Chiang Rai.
During the ride we couldn't help commenting on how different Thailand felt compared to Laos. There's a lot more money in Thailand which is apparent everywhere you look. There's also a much larger importance placed on education. In Laos, we saw a couple of run down schools along our rides but they were always empty and abandoned. Consequently the towns and villages would be practically overrun with kids (Laos is a very young country). In stark contrast, we were astounded at how many Thai schools we passed in those first two days. The schools were very nicely kept with mowed soccer fields and taut volleyball nets. Each school was in session as well.
After a month in cycling through rural Laos, Chiang Rai's 60,000 people felt like a metropolis. We got a nice room at a hostel in the backpacker section and headed out for a bite. There are a fair amount of westerners in Chiang Rai because it acts as a gateway to the northernmost provinces.
After much debate, we decided to sell our bikes in Chiang Rai and continue on motorbike having biked about 400 miles across Laos and northern Thailand. Let me add here that we have not once looked back on that decision.
We decided to wait until Chiang Mai to rent the bike because we knew we'd have to return it and we didn't want to be forced to commute the full length of Thailand back up to Chiang Rai when we finished. We spent a couple days in CR enjoying the delicious food, catching up on lost sleep and letting our bruised butts heal.
Chiang Mai is a great city and definitely a must see in northern Thailand. It's fairly large with a population of about 120,000. Due in part to the large university and and pervading backpacker scene, the city has a very young feel and there are lots of different things to do for entertainment. It also has a great selection of restaurants exhibiting foods from Thailand and all over the world.
We stayed in a section known as the Old City. It's a perfect square with sides of perhaps one km or so. In the past it was completely walled in and surrounded by a moat. Nowadays, almost all of the wall is gone except for the front gate and a couple sporadic ruins. The moat remains though, making the Old City feel like an island within the larger city.
There's a large backpacker section in the eastern part of the Old City with many affordable hostels and a plethra of restaurants. After finding a lovely place to stay, our first order of business was to procure a motor bike.
In SE Asia, the motorbike is supreme. It is absolutely ubiquitous and you come across them more than any other form of vehicular travel (except maybe bicycles). You can get bikes of different makes but by far the most common are Honda bikes. After talking with several different shops Cat and I decided to rent the Honda Dream, a 125 cc semiautomatic scooter "hybrid". Her name is the black mamba (formerly known as the black dream). We were ready to set off on the next stage of our trip.
We spent a couple of days in Chiang MAi, trying different restaurants, sleeping in and of course visiting the local night market. This was our favorite market up to this point. We filled up on all sorts of local foods and sweets. Since everything is sold in such small quantities it's possible to try many different foods. We each had our first (and so far only) experience eating fried crickets. We decided they weren't that bad, tasting like most anything that's fried and crunchy.
After a couple wobbly days biking around Chiang Mai, I improbed drastically and we decided to head out on a 600 km loop of the area surrounding Chiang Mai.
Our first day took us about 70 km west to the "hippie" town of Pai (pronounced bye). The drive was gorgeous and very mountainous. I couldn't have imagined trying to bring an automatic bike on those roads. There were several roads that were probably close to a 15% grade and we had the bike in first gear screaming up the hill.
Pai was a fun and laid back town. There was a very definitive backpacker and expat vibe but we also came across many dreadlocked locals who were just as into the lifestyle. A Thai Jack Sparrow we saw at the market comes to mind. It was in Pai that we received our first Thai massage and became addicted. We've had about one a day since. The massage costs ony $5 for an hour and is very good. The little Thai ladies are a lot stronger than they look.
On our way back to Chiang Mai, we stopped for a night in the border town of Mae Hong Son and then on to Mae Chaem where we stayed at a dirt-cheap resort with a top quality swimming pool. The roads on these days got increasingly mountainous and winding and our butts got more and more tender.
We returned to Chiang Mai for one night to get the bike checked on before heading south towards Lampang. While in town, we decided to get another massage and read in the Lonely Planet book about a center that employed only blind masseuses. We though that their lost sight would have finely tuned their sense of touch so that the massage would be unparalleled. We were quite wrong. It turned out the massueses were not very into their work and definitely had no real training. The man working on me was continuously belching and picking his nose (2 knuckles deep I might add) before wiping it on the bed as if I couldn't see him. When he started his practice, he literally just leaned heavily on me and randomly changed positions along my body. It was all rather ridiculous and I glanced over at Cat to see her masseuse talking on his cell phone with one hand while poking her with his other. Oh well it was definitely worth a good laugh afterwards.
For the trip to Lampang, we had to drive on a major highway which wasn't pleasant because of the concrete scenery and the innumerable trucks whizzing past us. Luckily there is an especially wide shoulder designed for bikers such as ourselves.
Along the way we decided to stop at the Lampang Elephant Conservation camp. We were a little put off at first when the entire museum turned out to be in Thai. The tour got much bettter though when we got to meet the elephants. The trainers were taking them all down to the pond for bathing and they stopped to let us interact with them. We took turns posing with a smaller one and playing with her trunk.
Afterwards, the trainers and elephants put on a show exhibiting the elephants' impressive intelligence. They are incredibly trainable and could do all sorts of tricks most impressive of which was to paint convincing portraits of themselves (I am not kidding)! Afterwards Cat tried to calmly pose while feeding one of the elephants but it kept ripping the food out of her hand before we could get a picture. It was good fun.
In Lampang we visited another colorful night market and got pampered at the massage parlor again (I'm getting way too used to this!).
The next day we headed farther south to the city of Sukhotai. Outside of the town is the national park containing an expansive area of ruined wats from the ancient Sukhotai Kingdom. Lasting for around 200 years, Sukhotai was once the capital of all Siam (present day Thailand). We spent the whole day motoring around the site from wat to wat under the brutal Thai sun. Some of the wats were truly impressive, expecially the Khmer style ruins.
Our next stop was Mae Sot where we are now. It's right on the border of Burma. Since we arrived in Thailand by land, we only receoved a fifteen day visa so we're going to exit into Burma tomorrow and reenter to get another visa. Mae Sot has a huge population of Burmese people and the blend of culture is very apparent when walking through the main market place. For dinner we ate at a local Burmese restaurant where the owner admitted to fleeing Burma in 1988 and participating in revolutionary groups for the next 23 years. He explained how tense the situation remains.
After we cross back into Thailand, we plan on biking a little farther south to the rural Karen village of Um Phang. It's supposed to be beautiful with many waterfalls including the biggest in all of Thailand. Stay tuned...
Pak Beng was a quaint border town. It's situated on the eastern shore of the Mekong River which acts as the border between much of Thailand and Laos. But since there isn't a border crossing at Pak Beng we had to spend the night and take a ten hour boat ride up the Mekong to the Laos border town of Huay Xai where we would be able to cross the following day.
The boat ended up being far more comfortable than prior experiences. There was loads of room aboard and we sat in the kind of removable seats you find in old minivans and suburbans. Pure luxury. Even so, ten ours on a boat is a very long time.
Huay Xai wasn't anything special but because of the border crossing hours, we had to stay the night and cross the next day.
Crossing the river to Chiang Kong in Thailand was incredibly quick and painless. We were so excited to be in Thailand and all I could think of was laying my hands on the first plate of Phad Thai I found.
After a short spell of tinkering with my ever fickle bike, we set off for the relatively short ride to Phaya Meng Rai (only about fifty km). We were immediately aware of the change from Laos roads to Thai roads. After the potholed and muddy roads of Laos, the roads in Thailand seemed immaculate. Not only that, but there were no hills so we could make excellent time (that day we averaged about 23 km/hr compared to Laos where we averaged about 8-12 km/hr).
The day was a hot one and when we arrived in PMR, we realized we'd forgotten to applysunscreen. This just turned our bike shorts tans and farmer's tans into burns. That night we weren't able to make it into town for dinner because of an intense lightning storm so we ate some mediocre take out brought by the hostel owners.
The next day on our way to Chiang Rai, we stopped for breakfast to enjoy our first true Thai meal. And so began Cat's love affair with noodle soup (called gooay deeo in Thai). When they first served it, I was thinking it looked awfully similar to the medicre Vietnamese pho and the slightly less mediocre Laos foe. I couldn't have been more wrong. The noodle soups in Thailand are so much more flavourful, with their myriad ingredients and complex broths. You also have a wide variety of toppings you can add at your table, like garlic, peppers and peanuts. Feeling appropriately rejuvenated, we easily covered the distance to Chiang Rai.
During the ride we couldn't help commenting on how different Thailand felt compared to Laos. There's a lot more money in Thailand which is apparent everywhere you look. There's also a much larger importance placed on education. In Laos, we saw a couple of run down schools along our rides but they were always empty and abandoned. Consequently the towns and villages would be practically overrun with kids (Laos is a very young country). In stark contrast, we were astounded at how many Thai schools we passed in those first two days. The schools were very nicely kept with mowed soccer fields and taut volleyball nets. Each school was in session as well.
After a month in cycling through rural Laos, Chiang Rai's 60,000 people felt like a metropolis. We got a nice room at a hostel in the backpacker section and headed out for a bite. There are a fair amount of westerners in Chiang Rai because it acts as a gateway to the northernmost provinces.
After much debate, we decided to sell our bikes in Chiang Rai and continue on motorbike having biked about 400 miles across Laos and northern Thailand. Let me add here that we have not once looked back on that decision.
We decided to wait until Chiang Mai to rent the bike because we knew we'd have to return it and we didn't want to be forced to commute the full length of Thailand back up to Chiang Rai when we finished. We spent a couple days in CR enjoying the delicious food, catching up on lost sleep and letting our bruised butts heal.
Chiang Mai is a great city and definitely a must see in northern Thailand. It's fairly large with a population of about 120,000. Due in part to the large university and and pervading backpacker scene, the city has a very young feel and there are lots of different things to do for entertainment. It also has a great selection of restaurants exhibiting foods from Thailand and all over the world.
We stayed in a section known as the Old City. It's a perfect square with sides of perhaps one km or so. In the past it was completely walled in and surrounded by a moat. Nowadays, almost all of the wall is gone except for the front gate and a couple sporadic ruins. The moat remains though, making the Old City feel like an island within the larger city.
There's a large backpacker section in the eastern part of the Old City with many affordable hostels and a plethra of restaurants. After finding a lovely place to stay, our first order of business was to procure a motor bike.
In SE Asia, the motorbike is supreme. It is absolutely ubiquitous and you come across them more than any other form of vehicular travel (except maybe bicycles). You can get bikes of different makes but by far the most common are Honda bikes. After talking with several different shops Cat and I decided to rent the Honda Dream, a 125 cc semiautomatic scooter "hybrid". Her name is the black mamba (formerly known as the black dream). We were ready to set off on the next stage of our trip.
We spent a couple of days in Chiang MAi, trying different restaurants, sleeping in and of course visiting the local night market. This was our favorite market up to this point. We filled up on all sorts of local foods and sweets. Since everything is sold in such small quantities it's possible to try many different foods. We each had our first (and so far only) experience eating fried crickets. We decided they weren't that bad, tasting like most anything that's fried and crunchy.
After a couple wobbly days biking around Chiang Mai, I improbed drastically and we decided to head out on a 600 km loop of the area surrounding Chiang Mai.
Our first day took us about 70 km west to the "hippie" town of Pai (pronounced bye). The drive was gorgeous and very mountainous. I couldn't have imagined trying to bring an automatic bike on those roads. There were several roads that were probably close to a 15% grade and we had the bike in first gear screaming up the hill.
Pai was a fun and laid back town. There was a very definitive backpacker and expat vibe but we also came across many dreadlocked locals who were just as into the lifestyle. A Thai Jack Sparrow we saw at the market comes to mind. It was in Pai that we received our first Thai massage and became addicted. We've had about one a day since. The massage costs ony $5 for an hour and is very good. The little Thai ladies are a lot stronger than they look.
On our way back to Chiang Mai, we stopped for a night in the border town of Mae Hong Son and then on to Mae Chaem where we stayed at a dirt-cheap resort with a top quality swimming pool. The roads on these days got increasingly mountainous and winding and our butts got more and more tender.
We returned to Chiang Mai for one night to get the bike checked on before heading south towards Lampang. While in town, we decided to get another massage and read in the Lonely Planet book about a center that employed only blind masseuses. We though that their lost sight would have finely tuned their sense of touch so that the massage would be unparalleled. We were quite wrong. It turned out the massueses were not very into their work and definitely had no real training. The man working on me was continuously belching and picking his nose (2 knuckles deep I might add) before wiping it on the bed as if I couldn't see him. When he started his practice, he literally just leaned heavily on me and randomly changed positions along my body. It was all rather ridiculous and I glanced over at Cat to see her masseuse talking on his cell phone with one hand while poking her with his other. Oh well it was definitely worth a good laugh afterwards.
For the trip to Lampang, we had to drive on a major highway which wasn't pleasant because of the concrete scenery and the innumerable trucks whizzing past us. Luckily there is an especially wide shoulder designed for bikers such as ourselves.
Along the way we decided to stop at the Lampang Elephant Conservation camp. We were a little put off at first when the entire museum turned out to be in Thai. The tour got much bettter though when we got to meet the elephants. The trainers were taking them all down to the pond for bathing and they stopped to let us interact with them. We took turns posing with a smaller one and playing with her trunk.
Afterwards, the trainers and elephants put on a show exhibiting the elephants' impressive intelligence. They are incredibly trainable and could do all sorts of tricks most impressive of which was to paint convincing portraits of themselves (I am not kidding)! Afterwards Cat tried to calmly pose while feeding one of the elephants but it kept ripping the food out of her hand before we could get a picture. It was good fun.
In Lampang we visited another colorful night market and got pampered at the massage parlor again (I'm getting way too used to this!).
The next day we headed farther south to the city of Sukhotai. Outside of the town is the national park containing an expansive area of ruined wats from the ancient Sukhotai Kingdom. Lasting for around 200 years, Sukhotai was once the capital of all Siam (present day Thailand). We spent the whole day motoring around the site from wat to wat under the brutal Thai sun. Some of the wats were truly impressive, expecially the Khmer style ruins.
Our next stop was Mae Sot where we are now. It's right on the border of Burma. Since we arrived in Thailand by land, we only receoved a fifteen day visa so we're going to exit into Burma tomorrow and reenter to get another visa. Mae Sot has a huge population of Burmese people and the blend of culture is very apparent when walking through the main market place. For dinner we ate at a local Burmese restaurant where the owner admitted to fleeing Burma in 1988 and participating in revolutionary groups for the next 23 years. He explained how tense the situation remains.
After we cross back into Thailand, we plan on biking a little farther south to the rural Karen village of Um Phang. It's supposed to be beautiful with many waterfalls including the biggest in all of Thailand. Stay tuned...
Sounds like great fun! We especially like the blind masseuse experience...
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