Monday, November 8, 2021
7:00 a.m. Green Guest House
Mae Sot, Thailand
I am back in Mae Sot. Back at the Green Guest House. Back on my familiar bed with a cup of early-morning instant coffee at my side. And it has been over a week since I last accounted for any of my time and activities. A lot has happened in those eight days, and I will try to race through all of it.
The past eight days began with an epic scooter ride from the P. Resort Hotel in Kamphaeng Phet to the Dome Thong Residence Hotel in Tak City. I wasn’t supposed to do that. In fact, my plan was to ride all the way back to Mae Sot on that Sunday. But circumstances and mistakes caused me to change my mind. When I woke up that morning, my brain was full of thoughts of Google Maps. I had spent a lot of time looking at Google Maps to plan my route back to Mae Sot. For the section from Tak City to Mae Sot, I didn’t really have a choice. The only route is the main highway, Highway 12. But there were various options for getting from Kamphaeng Phet to Highway 12, and I dove deep into Google Maps to pick out an interesting route along small roads.
I had spent so much time doing this that I decided to include these thoughts in my vlog about the day. As soon as I woke up, I turned on a screen recorder on my phone, and I recorded some thoughts about Google Maps and my system for planning a route to follow. This was done long before dawn. I had woken up quite early so that I could record this and pack up and be on the road just as the sun was rising. I didn’t quite manage that, but it was still pretty early. I think I was riding away from the P. at six-thirty or seven.
The route I chose took me into the countryside to the west of the Ping River. For this trip, I did one thing more intensely than ever before. While I was choosing the route on Google Maps, I dropped a pin in advance at every single intersection where I had to change from one road to another. This ended up being quite helpful because it made it easier and faster to calculate distances. I simply had to click on one of the pins and then ask for directions to the next pin. This might tell me that the next turning point was eighteen kilometers ahead. I would then look at the odometer on my scooter and mentally add eighteen to the number. And then, as I rode along, I could casually keep an eye on the odometer, and I would know exactly when I was getting close to the turning point. I found this to be quite relaxing because it meant that I didn’t have to pull over to the side of the road and stop and get out my phone and keep checking on my position.
In an odd twist, however, this new system led to a major mistake. I became so relaxed and so casual and confident that I wasn’t checking my progress as carefully as I normally do, and I ended up racing past a turning point without realizing it. Technically, it wasn’t my fault. This happened because the nature of the roads wasn’t accurately portrayed on Google Maps. I was actually supposed to turn, but on Google Maps, it didn’t look like that. Previous to my new system, I would have caught this mistake before it was too late. But with my new system, I sailed along for a long distance, completely oblivious to the fact that I was on the wrong road entirely. I didn’t figure out my mistake until this road ended at a highway, and it was the wrong highway. Instead of arriving at Highway 12, where I would turn west towards Mae Sot, I ended up at Highway 1 (AH2) alongside the Ping River and heading into Tak City. At that point, it felt a bit like a sign that I wasn’t supposed to be going to Mae Sot at all. All the signs seemed to be indicating that I should go to Tak City instead and spend the night there. That would break my journey back to Mae Sot into two sections. And I liked this idea because I was already quite tired.
And the reason I was so tired was actually a small adventure that was the highlight of my day. At a certain point on my route, the road I was following looped all the way back to the Ping River. And then I had to follow the Ping River for a kilometer or two before I could get back on the next countryside road. However, when I zoomed in farther on Google Maps, I spotted an even smaller road that appeared to connect the two countryside roads. It was basically a shortcut that made it unnecessary to go all the way back to the Ping River. And I included that shortcut in my route planning.
Things went along swimmingly for a while on that shortcut. The road was a bit rough, but it was paved and the countryside was lush and beautiful. But, slowly but surely, the pavement started to disappear and the road got rougher and rougher. At one point, a man in a pickup truck going in the other direction stopped and waved me down. He then got out of his truck and told me in sign language that I should turn around. I couldn’t be absolutely sure of what he was telling me, but he was saying that either the road ended and I couldn’t go that way, or he was saying that the road was so rough that it would be impossible for me to do it on a scooter.
I tried to tell him thank you, but I was still going to continue forward and see for myself. If the road ended, I wanted to ride all the way to that point and see it for myself. And if the road got rougher and rougher, I wanted to also see that for myself. My plan was to continue riding, and if the road turned out to be impassable on a scooter, I would turn around then. In my attempt to explain this to the man, I indicated my GoPro, and I tried to explain that I wanted to take video and pictures of the countryside. But I’m not sure that made any sense to him. He came over to my scooter and peered at the GoPro to try to understand what I was talking about. But he didn’t seem to get it. I eventually just did a lot of smiling and bowing and thanking and continued on my way.
That encounter certainly added some spice to the journey, because now I had questions to answer. What was the man saying? What would I find out? Would I reach a point where the road ended and I had to turn back? When I reached my first rough section, would it be as rough as this man indicated it was? Would it turn out that this man was right and I was attempting something foolhardy?
When I reached the first really rough section, the reality was right on the edge. For a normal person, yes, it was far too difficult on a scooter. The road was badly rutted and filled with what looked like deep mud. It looked very difficult to cross, maybe even impossible. There was a chance my scooter would just get stuck in the middle, even fall over, and I would never be able to get it out without help. But for someone like me, on the type of trip I was on, it seemed just on this side of what was possible. It looked like something I could attempt. The question really was whether this was as bad as it got. Was this what the man was warning me about? Or was this just the beginning, and it got much, much worse later?
The only way to find out was to attempt it, and I carefully worked my way through this first muddy section. And I felt a bit silly, a bit nutty, attempting it, but I made it across. Then the road got rougher and rougher. It got so rough at times that it seemed much wiser to turn around. But I kept going. I went slowly and carefully, often at a walking pace. And then I encountered several more sections where the road turned into a deep and muddy swamp. Just as at the first section, it wasn’t clear that I’d even be able to make it across. But I attempted each one, and I successfully made it across.
Eventually, I reached a point where the road was so rough that it felt a bit silly to keep going. But by that point, I’d already covered so much rough road and gone over so many difficult sections that it felt equally challenging to turn around and go back. Going back seemed just as difficult as going forward. And in these situations, you always feel like you don’t want to stop too soon. For all I knew, I was already at the very end of the rough section. Maybe the road smoothed out and became perfect just a hundred meters ahead, around the next corner. It would be such a shame to turn back now after so much effort to get this far. I had to keep going.
But then, something unexpected happened. The road simply disappeared. On Google Maps, the road, such as it was, went in one direction back towards where it linked up with the regular countryside road. But I found myself going in the wrong direction completely. The road I needed didn’t exist. It just wasn’t there. I continued as far as I could, and the road got worse and worse and seemed to be threatening to stop entirely. I was making slow progress, but I could check my position on Google Maps, and I was far away from where I was supposed to be. Even if I was able to keep going, it wouldn’t matter. I was heading deep into the mountains into nowhere, heading in the wrong direction entirely.
I decided that I must have missed something. I must have missed a turn-off. It didn’t seem possible, since the road I was on was barely a road. It’s not like I would have missed an entirely new road branching off from it. But that was the only explanation, and as tough as it was, I turned the scooter around and bumped and crashed and banged my way back. I eventually got to the point where I was supposed to go in a certain direction, but there was nothing there. There was no road anywhere in sight.
I was coming to the sad realization that I had no choice but to go all the way back over the entire length of this rough road and go back to the beginning. This route was a dead end. But just then, a man and a woman showed up driving a crazy kind of farming vehicle. It was straight out of a Mad Max movie. They stopped to check on me, and with sign language, I asked them for any kind of directions they could offer. I made a sweeping, curving motion with my hand to indicate where I wanted to go. And to my surprise, they nodded eagerly. They pointed down the road I had just returned along and made the same wide sweeping motion to indicate that this road went that way. I knew from my experience that it didn’t. This road turned south and kept going south while I needed to go north. But they insisted, and their sweeping hand motions were so positive and so glorious that I decided to take them at their word.
I smiled and thanked them and fired up my scooter, and they indicated that I should follow them. I fell in behind them, and I rode back along what I was thinking of as a goat track. As before, we were nowhere near the road as marked on Google Maps. And just as before, we were heading south and in the opposite direction of where I needed to go. Their sweeping hand gestures were to the north, and it puzzled me that we were still heading south, but I kept following them. I thought that even if the road just kept going south, their sweeping hand gestures were so positive, I figured it had to lead somewhere.
We eventually reached the spot where I had initially turned around. And we kept going past it. My Mad Max guides turned around in their seats from time to time to make sure that I was still following and that I was still upright. They smiled and made gestures with their hands to encourage me to keep following them. And I did so. This went on for a while, and I let them get a fair distance ahead of me. Then I saw that they had come to a stop, and they were waiting for me to catch up. I kept bumping along, and when I reached them, I saw that we had reached a kind of fork in the road. They had pointed their Mad Max vehicle down a steep and extremely rough trail to the left. It was a safe bet that they were going down to their fields, and that road would end there. Even I would not have tried to take that road on my scooter. But the path we were on actually curved to the right and gave just a hint that it was, at this point, going to change direction and start working its way back to the north. And my guides smiled at me eagerly, and they repeated their sweeping hand gestures that I should go in that direction and the road would take me out of this mountainous region. I made sure that I understood them. I pointed down the rough trail they were going to take and looked for confirmation that I wasn’t supposed to go that way. And then I made my sweeping motion to the north along the other path to confirm that I was supposed to go that way. And they smiled and nodded.
What I was looking at on Google Maps didn’t really match my situation or anything they were telling me, but I had no choice at this point but to take a chance that this pathway would work out, and waved my thanks and goodbyes and continued on my way while they went crashing and banging down that steep slope. To make this long story short, they were right. And after quite a bit more rough road, the nose of my scooter started to swing back towards the north, and I became confident that I was heading in the right direction. The road even widened and got a bit better. And I started to be overtaken by military Humvees. I have no idea where these guys had come from or where they were going, but three separate Humvees filled with soldiers came up from behind me at different times. I could hear them bashing and roaring along the road behind me, and I turned off to the side each time to give them room to pass. I thought they would stop and ask to see my passport or otherwise check up on me. After all, it made no sense that some random white dude would be out there on a scooter. What possible reason could he have for being there that wasn’t nefarious? But the soldiers ignored me and just drove past.
There were several points when I thought the road had made the switch from goat track back to a real road. But then it would revert back to goat track for a while. And then it would go back to a more regular road. But after much longer than I expected, the goat track sections became less and less frequent, and I finally emerged out the other side, back on regular countryside roads, all clearly marked on Google Maps and making perfect geographical and directional sense.
In the end, I’m not sure who was right, the pickup truck driver or me. For any halfway normal person on the planet, I’d say the pickup truck driver was right. It was dumb to ride a scooter along the road. It was dumb. The road could be called impassable by any normal standards. But for me, with my interest in doing slightly unusual things, being in no hurry to get to my destination, wanting to see some backcountry areas, willing to put up with a bit of hardship, the road was actually a lot of fun and quite interesting. To be honest, if I’d known exactly what the condition of the road was, I wouldn’t have attempted it. It didn’t really make any sense to ride that road on a scooter. Scooters weren’t designed for that kind of terrain. And I wasn’t prepared for that kind of terrain. It’s not like I could have fixed a flat tire or addressed any mechanical problem. And if the scooter had broken down out there, I would have been well and truly stuck. I had no business being out there by myself with no way to communicate with the outside world. It’s not like I was riding a powerful dirt bike loaded down with survival gear. I was just a bumbling white dude with a GoPro and a backpack. But I got lucky, and I made it out the other side safely and relatively easily. And I had had a very entertaining experience.
However, this road had also taken much more time than I had planned for, and required much more energy. Therefore, by the time I had rejoined civilization at the main roads, I was already thinking that I might be better off going just to Tak City and abandoning my thoughts of riding all the way to Mae Sot. I had had enough small adventures for one day. And then I made the mistake I mentioned earlier and took the wrong road and ended up back at Highway 1 at the Ping River instead of at Highway 12. That was so funny. My entire day and all of my careful planning had been designed precisely to avoid Highway 1. That’s how I ended up in the middle of nowhere on a goat track to begin with. And yet, through my own mistake, and after a lot of travel in the deep countryside, I was right back at Highway 1. I could have ridden to that point in just a few minutes from Kamphaeng Phet had I taken the highway from the beginning.
Luckily, I was able to stay off Highway 1 for the last eighteen kilometers into Tak City. I followed a small road that stayed right on the shores of the Ping River the entire way. It was a great ride. Very scenic. And once in the city, I headed straight for the Dome Thong Residence Hotel. The Dome is the only somewhat low-budget hotel I was aware of in Tak City. It was still far nicer than most hotels I’ve ever stayed in in my life, but it was low budget for Thailand at 400 baht a night. That’s about $12 US. A very nice place, I thought. It was also very casual and informal in terms of paying for the room and getting the key. One funny moment occurred when it dawned on me that the rooms had the numbers on them in Thai characters. My room key was for room 210. But I had no idea which room was number 210, because I couldn’t read the Thai characters. But the woman in the office anticipated this problem, and she followed me up the stairs and pointed out the right door.
The room was very nice. Nice bed. Nice sheets and pillows and comforter. As I noted at the time, the bed was probably a bit harder than most people from the West would be comfortable with, but I don’t mind hard beds. Most hotels I’ve stayed in in Thailand (or in Asia in general) tend to have hard mattresses. And in an interesting twist, they don’t have top sheets on the bed either. They have just a fitted sheet and then a comforter. And the comforter is often far too small, and in cheap hotels, they are made of an unpleasant synthetic nylon. I deal with that by packing my own cotton sheet. I find having my own cotton sheet is essential.
The room came with good WiFi, a mini-fridge, furniture, air conditioning, a balcony, and a nice bathroom. It was a world of comfort and luxury. They also served a simple breakfast with coffee in the morning, but I wasn’t aware of that, and I didn’t take advantage of that in the morning.
Since I was staying in Tak City on Sunday night, and I wanted to go to the vaccination clinic at the hospital in Mae Sot on Monday, I made plans to leave early in the morning. I didn’t want to miss this clinic. And after a good night, I found myself back on the road and racing out of Tak City at seven the next morning. It had rained heavily during the night, and the skies were still overcast. It was also quite chilly, and I shivered a bit as the road climbed up into the mountains outside of Tak. The heavy rains had caused a bunch more landslides, and I had to ride carefully to avoid them, as well as the occasional large rock that sat on the highway waiting to greet my front tire. I can’t express enough how much I enjoyed this day. I was fully rested from a good night at the Dome. The air was cool and fresh. There was a sense of the dramatic and the wild in the air from the heavy rains and the resulting landslides and raging rivers I passed.
Before I left the hotel, I’d made up my mind not to attempt to record the journey itself on video. Instead, I was going to fire up my GoPro only when I made stops. And my first stop was going to be the Doi Muser Coffee shop at the Muser Hill Tribes Market. The scooter trip there was glorious with the sun eventually breaking through the clouds behind me and lighting up the mountains and the road ahead. And to my delight, the coffee shop was open. With my early departure and fast pace, I was sitting inside the coffee shop and enjoying a strong and hot latte before eight in the morning.
My next planned stop after that was the Chao Por Phawo Shrine. I had stopped there on my ride out and lit a string of one hundred firecrackers. I wanted to stop there again, but this time light off a box of five hundred or maybe even a thousand firecrackers. My timing was unusually good, because it turned out that that day or perhaps that weekend was a special one at the shrine. The place was buzzing with activity. It had been largely shut down on my first visit, but this time, all the little shops around the parking lot were open, and there were lots of vehicles and people. And, best of all, lots of other people were setting off firecrackers as well. I enjoyed that very much, because these people were setting off much larger strings of up to a thousand firecrackers and often two or three of those at a time. I also got to watch how they did it, and I learned how to unwrap my string of five hundred, hang it up and light it, and then retrieve my fortune after the final loud explosion. Without the other people around me, I would have had no idea that every string of firecrackers came with a fortune and lucky numbers. I couldn’t read my fortune, of course, but it was nice to get one. A funny moment occurred when I approached some people to ask them to translate it for me. The first woman I approached took out her phone and took a picture of my fortune. But then she never even tried to translate it. I’m sure she wasn’t, but it felt a bit like she was stealing my fortune and my lucky numbers.
I arrived back in Mae Sot early enough that I simply dropped off my backpack at the guest house and went straight to the vaccination clinic. I wanted to get there before they closed for lunch. To my surprise, the clinic was largely empty. It was open, but there was almost no one there. Perhaps it had been busier earlier in the morning. When I went there at around nine in the morning for my second dose three weeks ago, it was jammed with hundreds of people. That was also on a Monday morning, and I expected it to be the same on this Monday. But it was quiet and empty. And best of all, not only was my vaccine certificate ready, they had also prepared my international vaccine passport. Both documents were there to be picked up when I was expecting only one of them.
My next task was to try to confirm the possibility that I could get at least one more sixty-day visa extension. This had been announced a month or two ago, but since then, Thailand had been trying to open up more and more to regular tourists. And with that opening, it made less and less sense to offer this special covid-19 tourist visa extension program to people like me already in the country. I keep expecting that particular visa option to be cancelled and disappear. I was thinking that perhaps I would zip off to Mae Hong Son on my scooter for a twenty-day trip and then come back to Mae Sot on exactly November 24th or 25th to apply for my next extension. But if I discovered on that day that the program had been cancelled, I’d be in real trouble. I’d have less than a day to leave Thailand but with nowhere to go. I thought it was prudent to try to at least confirm the possibility first.
Therefore, I hopped on my scooter and rode out to the immigration office. I was a bit nervous about doing that. It’s hard to shake the idea that it’s best not to ask questions or ask for permission first. It’s when you ask that bureaucrats tend to say no. That’s their instinct. So it can be better to just show up and do something without asking for permission first. But this was important, and the immigration clerks at this office seemed quite professional. They didn’t seem to make things up on the spot. I think they would only tell me exactly what the rules were. And I was very happy when the woman there confirmed that this next sixty-day extension was still available. She didn’t know about anything after that, but she told me that I was eligible for at least one more. And then I had a brainstorm. I asked her if it would be possible for me to apply for that extension right now instead of waiting until later in November. And she did some quick calendar math and said that yes it was possible. She said that if I submitted my application that day, they could process it, and my visa stamp would be available by November 15th. Doing that seemed preferable to waiting until November 24th to apply. So I rode back to my guest house to get all my paperwork and documents. I then dropped by the photocopy shop to get the copies I needed. And then I rode back out to immigration in the afternoon and submitted my application. It cost 1,900 baht as usual. That’s about $57 US. Everything went smoothly. The only wrinkle was that she had to do some recalculating, and she said that I could return on November 17th to get my visa stamp, not on November 15th. That was fine with me.
Since that day, I’ve been busy here in Mae Sot living my life and working on YouTube videos and engaging with my usual titanic struggles with technology. The first struggle was with memory. On my trip to Kamphaeng Phet, I had shot a lot of video, and all my memory cards were full. I would normally be producing final YouTube videos and then deleting all the raw video files on-the-go so as to clear up space. But I had been so busy in Kamphaeng Phet and on this trip, that I had had little to no time to edit video. And I hadn’t been able to delete any old files. So if I got back on the road right away or had any other small adventures, I would be unable to shoot any video. I had no available memory cards on which to record any of it.
I decided to buy some more memory cards, and I did the rounds of the shops in Mae Sot, but, as usual, I couldn’t find anything. Mae Sot is not a well-stocked town as far as technology goes. There’s next to nothing here in the way of camera gear and computer gear. I thought about ordering some memory cards online, but I suspect that many of the memory cards for sale on sites like Lazada are fake. There is no other way to explain why the prices are so weird. A Sandisk Extreme 512GB microSD card can cost as much as 4,000 baht on Lazada or as little as 300 baht. And there is no way that makes any sense. The 300-baht card has to be fake. And there are so many of those fake cards for sale that I end up not trusting any of the cards for sale online.
I didn’t really want to do it, but I decided to deal with my problem by buying a 2-terabyte Seagate external hard drive. I was reluctant to do this because I already have a bunch of these drives. I have three or four of them in storage in Malaysia already. So it’s not like I need more of them to carry around. I even have one here Mae Sot already that is completely full. At some point, you have to stop buying external drives to store your archived files. It’s just not rational. I’d need a completely separate backpack just to carry all of my portable hard drives. But for the short term at least, I really needed some kind of memory solution, so I bought one for, I believe, 1,750 baht.
I formatted the disk through the MacBook, and then I set about copying all the original video files from my memory cards to the Seagate. The MacBook plus Seagate combination does this extremely fast, but I was still dealing with a lot of data, so it took a while to finish this project. By the time I was done, I had copied over 700 gigabytes of video files. I didn’t, however, then empty my memory cards. I’ve learned through hard experience that you never delete old files until you absolutely have to. There is no point in getting ahead of yourself. So, for now, I have two copies of everything: one on the original memory card and one on the Seagate. And when the day comes that I want to shoot new video, then I can delete files from the memory cards. For now, it’s best to leave them where they are just in case I end up needing them. The dream is that by then, I will have produced a ton of final videos for YouTube, and then I can safely delete files from those memory cards.
The other titanic technology struggle involved DaVanci Resolve. This was going to be my new video editing program on the MacBook, and I set about learning how to use the program. And things were going well for a while. The process was slow because I had to learn everything. But I eventually did a rough edit on a full video. However, when I went back to start adding some text here and there, the program stuttered, lagged, and even froze. Just adding one simple photo caption as basic text caused the whole program to become unusable. It was crazy and frustrating. It was the last thing I wanted to do, but I had no choice but go back to the Internet and start visiting all the DaVinci Resolve forums to find out what was causing this problem and how to fix it. I lost an entire day doing that, and I got no closer to fixing the problem. Not only that, when I tried to render the final video, DaVinci Resolve took over four hours to do it. Even my smartphones can do the same job in less than an hour. It made no sense that DaVinci Resolve running on a powerful MacBook should freeze up while editing a simple video and then be four or five times slower than a smartphone. It was starting to seem like DaVinci Resolve was another dead end, and I’d have to look for an alternative.
I looked first at installing KineMaster on the MacBook. Why not? I used it on my phones. I’m very familiar with it. But it turns out that KineMaster won’t run on my particular MacBook. I don’t know why. There is a Mac version of KineMaster, but not for my particular MacBook model. I then thought about using Hitmaster Express. It comes highly recommended. But it was not available in the App store. I had to go to their website to download it, and it wouldn’t work. I lost an hour simply trying to download and install Hitmaster Express, and I eventually had to give up. I couldn’t figure out how to do it. And during the process, I was bombarded with so many annoying advertisements that I was left feeling very suspicious of Hitman Express. I wanted nothing to do with it. It was sus, as the kids say.
I then thought about using PowerDirector. The thing is that my videos are technically so simple that I don’t need all the power of the big editing programs. I just need a simple and basic program. I’m actually perfectly happy editing on my phone with the stripped-down versions of KineMaster and PowerDirector I use there. If it wasn’t for how long it takes to copy files to and from my phone, I might never even try to use the MacBook. However, I really didn’t want to pay the subscription fee for PowerDirector. It feels like I pay a lot of money constantly for all the many online subscriptions I already have. It’s so annoying. Every day it feels like I wake up to a ping from my phone announcing that yet another automatic payment has been processed for this or that program online and been charged to my credit card. It amounts to hundreds and hundreds of dollars a year. It just annoyed me to think about adding another hundred and some odd dollars a year for PowerDirector.
And after this long and crazy and exhausting detour, I went back to DaVinci Resolve. I hadn’t deleted it from my laptop yet, and I decided to try again to fix the problem. I wasn’t able to fix the problem with my old video projects. They all stuttered and lagged and froze. But I then started working on a brand new video project, and the problems just vanished. I have no idea why. I created a rough cut of a video that was over an hour long. And then when I started to add text, nothing happened. It just continued to work normally. The program did not stutter or lag or freeze. Not only that, the final render took about an hour instead of taking over four hours like before. I can’t even guess what happened. I don’t know why these problems existed before and I don’t why they disappeared. But I was glad. And I settled in to use DaVinci Resolve. I downloaded a full set of the manuals for the program, and I’ve begun reading through them to learn how to use it.
In the meantime, I’ve been working on a bunch of videos. I haven’t completed as many as I’d like, but I’m starting to make a small dent in the backlog of small adventures from my Kamphaeng Phet road trip. I still haven’t figured out the secret to having a day of small adventures and then completing a video that night or the next day. I end up with a backlog of tons of video.
And all of that brings my story almost up to date. The only things I haven’t written about are my thoughts about future plans. And that’s a bit complicated. But the basic idea is that I’ve begun working my way towards leaving this guest house and even leaving Mae Sot. It’s possible that this visa extension will be my last. And that means I will have to fly out of Thailand at the end of January. And with that reality staring me in the face, it makes some sense to just hop on the scooter for a longer trip to the north, as I’ve been thinking about doing for a long time. And if I’m gone for a full month on a trip like that, there is no point paying rent on this room in Mae Sot. And if I don’t have this room anymore, I will have to sort through my stuff and decide what to take with me in my backpack and what to leave behind. I’ve already started that process, and it really isn’t that complicated. I’m slowly creating two piles of stuff. There is a pile of stuff on the right side of the bed. That is all the stuff that will eventually go into my backpack and come with me. And there is a pile of stuff on top of the wardrobe and elsewhere. All of that will be given away, sold, or simply left behind.
The plan, as of last night, was to leave for Sukhothai on my scooter tomorrow morning. I was going to take an eight- or nine-day trip to Sukhothai and then return to Mae Sot to pick up my visa stamp on the seventeenth. And then I’d do my final packing and leave Mae Sot on my scooter and head north to Mae Song, Pai, Chaing Mai, and perhaps on to Chiang Rai and other areas. I’d still have to return to Mae Sot because I’m renting the scooter from here. I’d have to return the scooter. And by then, I should know whether I can get another visa extension or whether I have to leave Thailand. And if I have to leave Thailand, I have no clue what I will do. Not a single clue. It depends on how much the world’s situation has changed. Ideally, I will be able to cross into Malaysia on a tourist visa. But I have no idea if that will be a possibility.
In terms of long term, it looks like I will be looking for work somewhere. I don’t have the money to travel. So, I will be looking for a job. I wouldn’t mind passing through Canada for a visit on my way to this job, wherever it might be, but all of that is pure speculation at this point. Right now, I have to decide if I’m going to Sukhothai tomorrow or not. The problem is that it is pouring rain outside. If it is going to continue raining for the next few days, then there is no point going on a road trip. I might as well stay here and keep organizing. I can leave for any trip after the seventeenth. That might even make more sense.