Thursday, October 7, 2021
10 a.m. Unknown Hotel
Sam Ngao, Thailand
As evidenced from the byline, I did manage to get on the scooter and leave Mae Sot. And from the time, it’s a good guess that the day was challenging, and I had to force myself to stay in bed longer this morning in order to recover.
The Coles Notes version of the trip would say that it was fantastic. I had such a good day. I enjoyed (nearly) every minute of it. I even enjoyed the two and a half hours of rain. I got very lucky there. I was still high in the mountains when it began to rain. But I just happened to be pulling up at a little drinks shack where I’d stopped before to enjoy an Italian soda. The drinks shack was closed, so I wasn’t able to get my Italian soda or any snacks. However, I was able to relax under their verandah roof and in their reclining chair and wait out the rain in comfort. I’m pretty sure I even fell asleep in the chair. And I had company. Out of nowhere, a friendly dog showed up and shoved her head into my hands and in my lap. This was terribly unusual. I tend not to run into any dogs in Thailand that enjoy human company in that way. They certainly don’t enjoy my company. But this dog was different. She was so happy when I pet her that she just about exploded. She was a mid-sized muddy, stinky dog and had no business being a lapdog, but this did not deter her in the slightest, and she wriggled and squirmed and climbed until she had forced her entire body onto my lap and under my arms, and then she refused to move. This was her spot now, and she stayed with me until the rainstorm ended.
While I rode, I had the Relive app running on two different smartphones. On one smartphone, I took a bunch of photographs. On the other phone, I did nothing. I just let Relive operate and record the journey without any input from me. The only thing I did on both phones was pause the app from time to time. I stopped early in the day at a coffee shop, and while I was there, I paused Relive on both phones. And I paused it on both of them during the two and a half hours of rain. There was no point recording my movements when I wasn’t moving at all.
I was nervous about how Relive would operate. I was eager to have the finished map from both phones. However, I had no confidence that it would actually work. All my previous tests had consisted of trips that were fifteen minutes long at most. This trip to Sam Ngao clocked in at ten and a half hours, and I assumed the app would crash at some point. This feeling was greatly increased by how the app behaved. There were long stretches of time during which the phones simply stayed in my pocket or in my knapsack untouched. And the idea is that Relive continues to operate in the background. But when I woke the phone back up, the record of my journey would often be completely gone. I would be presented with just the Relive home page. It looked like all the data had been lost. But it appears that is just how the app works. And if I waited for a few seconds, the home page would fade away and the map of my journey would reappear. Apparently, when the app goes dormant, this is what it does. It is still recording deep in the phone’s systems, but it is no longer wasting processing power and battery life on maintaining the front display. When I woke it up, it simply reloaded the app systems and showed the home page first. Then it called up the deeper part of the program that was connected to GPS and it recreated the graphic image of the map.
This seemed to happen more dramatically on my Xiaomi phone than on my Samsung. And that made sense. The Xiaomi operating system is not as polished as Samsung’s. It often glitches and does strange things. I was particularly nervous when I arrived at the hotel in Sam Ngao and I tried to stop recording on both phones. On the Xiaomi, I found myself staring at the Relive home page and nothing else for a very long time. It felt like the entire ten and a half hours of data was gone. It appeared I had pushed it too far. However, to my delight, it suddenly kicked in, and the map of my journey reappeared, and I was able to save it and produce the final 3D movie. The Samsung operated more smoothly. And the Samsung had a lot more to do because I had taken quite a number of photos and videos throughout the day, and it had to deal with those as well.
The final 3D movie of my journey is great fun to watch. I love it. It’s actually better than I expected and more enjoyable. Out of the seventy or eighty pictures that I took, I could choose only ten to insert at key moments in the movie. I spent some time thinking about which ones to stick in. Since this movie was meant as a kind of personal vlog and for other people, I leaned heavily into selfie-style pictures over my usual scenery-only pictures. In fact, just taking the selfies was unusual for me. I never do that. But I did that quite a few times yesterday to make the final movie more personal. Rather than just take a picture of the interesting scene in front of me, I would stick my big face into the frame along with it and smile like a dope.
As for recording the journey as a vlog, I really struggled with that. I have no idea what I’m going to end up with. I started off with the idea I talked about at the beginning, of taking video in a traditional vlogging cinematic style with lots of quick jump cuts of physical action. But that didn’t last long. That simply isn’t my style. I soon found myself just talking at length as I rode along, with the camera pointing either ahead of me on the scooter or back at me as I rode. Plus, I couldn’t help but talk about the technology I was using. After all, in my mind, this trip was all about testing the Relive app and about testing the Pocket 2 camera and using it in combination with a GoPro. And since THAT is what I was thinking about, THAT is what I ended up talking about. And the video kind of turned into a tech video even though it was supposed to be a type of travel vlog.
On top of that (as if my day wasn’t complicated enough already), I made a snap decision to film a Learning Curve video at the same time. I decided to make a Learning Curve Cheat Sheet video consisting of step-by-step instructions for using Relive. Before I left in the morning, I reviewed the process of using Relive, and I reduced it to what I thought were fifteen steps. And I made a rough plan to stop fifteen times during the day and record those steps in front of various scenic vistas. And I would choose those steps to coincide with me really doing those things on the Relive app.
This is the rough script I started with:
Step 1 – Go to the Google Play store or the Apple App store and download the Relive app to your smartphone.
Step 2 – Create a Relive account with your email address and password.
Step 3 – Open the app and click on the record button at the bottom of the page.
Step 4 – Click on the drop-down menu at the top of the page and select your activity type.
Step 5 – Press start. The start button is the big yellow button at the bottom of the page. You can’t miss it.
Step 6 – Put away your phone and start running or hiking or surfing or get on your scooter or motorcycle and enjoy the day. Let the Relive app do all the work in the background.
Step 7 – Stop occasionally to take a photograph or a short video clip. With the free version of Relive you can add 10 photographs to your activity. With premium Relive Plus, you can add both photographs and video clips up to a total of 50. The video clips can be a maximum of 10 seconds long with the total of all video not exceeding 60 seconds per activity.
Step 8 – When you stop for a long break, such as for a meal or a drink, hit the pause button. When your break is over, click on resume. Let Relive continue to do the hard work while you enjoy your day.
Step 9 – When your activity is over, click on pause again, and then select finish. Confirm that your activity is over and you really want Relive to finish recording.
Step 10 – Wait for the app to save your activity, and then select continue to activity.
Step 11 – Follow the prompts on the screen to give your activity a title and select photos. Click on save these to your activity.
Step 12 – Click on create a video.
Step 13 – On the editing screen, add music, photos, photo captions, emojis, and new moments to your movie. Don’t forget to tag your friends.
Step 14 – Click on create. Wait for Relive to create your movie and the full record of your activity. Share your activity across all your favorite social media platforms.
Step 15 – Plan your next activity to be recorded with Relive. And that’s it. Let Relive do all the hard work
I recorded myself reading each of these fifteen steps at a completely different location. And I tried to make each location as interesting or scenic as possible. And I chose those times when, in using the Relive app myself, I was actually doing the thing in the actual step.
I haven’t had a chance to review the video yet, and I’m worried that I sound like a corporate shill with a fake announcer voice, but it might be fun to put it together. I hope to combine those chunks of video with a screen shot of the Relive app itself (how it looks at those moments) plus a couple of photographs of the scenes themselves.
I enjoyed doing this, but it added considerably to the effort that went into the day.
One thing I noticed is that this was a much easier day physically than my previous trip on this same road. My previous trip was in the heart of the hot and dry season, and the sun roasted me alive. I arrived in Sam Ngao an absolute wreck. But it was so much cooler yesterday, and there was enough cloud cover that I remained comfortable almost the entire time. I wasn’t constantly fighting the brute force of the sun. When I arrived in Sam Ngao, I was tired but still okay. That was a nice change.
The day was kept pretty spicy, too, because since my last visit, the rainy season had wreaked havoc. There were landslides everywhere. At one memorable spot, where the road took a sharp curve into the fold of a valley, the entire mountainside had come down, and the road was simply gone. This must have happened months ago, because since then, a couple of rough bridges had been built to allow traffic to cross over. The road itself hasn’t been rebuilt. But traffic can still pass. Travelling along that road would have been impossible from the time of the landslide until they built those temporary bridges. I wonder how long that was.
I don’t know if I should include this last story. It’s a bit disturbing. But it captures a little bit of the extremes that tend to show up on any trips like this that I take. I had come down out of the mountains and rode my scooter to the shore of the Ping River. I had one more Relive Cheat Sheet step to record, and I wanted to do it with the Ping River as a backdrop. I parked the scooter, and I shot the video, and then I returned to my scooter to pack up all my gear and get back on the road. I stood there for a few minutes getting ready, and then I heard what I thought was the peeping of a chick. I assumed there was a chicken nearby with a bunch of chicks busy peeping away.
I looked down on the ground and I started scanning the area to see if I could spot this chick. The peeping was getting louder and louder. When I looked down, I was shocked to see that my right foot was nearly black with ants. Somehow, I had put my foot down right in an ant colony of some kind, and my foot was covered with them. I have no idea how I didn’t feel them until that moment. I was so startled that I instantly picked up my foot and slammed it down hard in order to shake the ants off. I didn’t want them crawling any farther up my leg and getting all over my body. I slammed my foot as hard as I could three times to shake the ants off.
But in slamming down my foot, I had brought it down directly on top of a tiny newborn kitten. I hadn’t seen the kitten at all, of course, and in slamming my foot down, I had killed it instantly. And then the entire picture came into focus for me. The sound I’d heard wasn’t the sound of a peeping chick. It was this lost and abandoned newborn kitten crying. It really was brand new to this world. It was blind. It was still wet. It couldn’t move. It had just been born. How it ended up there by itself I couldn’t begin to tell you. There was no mother cat in evidence anywhere. Even worse, the kitten was in the middle of being eaten alive by the ants. That’s why there were so many ants there. Without realizing it, I had placed my foot right beside this newborn kitten while tens of thousands of ants were eating it alive. And in my panic upon seeing my foot covered in ants, I had brought my foot right down on top of the kitten and crushed it. Of course, you can view this as a mercy for the kitten. It was not going to survive no matter what. Its life was over before it had even begun. Still blind and unable to move on its own, there was no hope for it. To be killed instantly by me was better than a slow death in the hot sun being devoured by ants. But even so, it was a moment of horror to think of what had happened to this little life and what I had just done.
I continued on my journey in a strange mood after that.