Thursday, November 18, 2021
7:21 a.m. Green Guest House
Mae Sot, Thailand
I’m back at the Green Guest House. I wasn’t gone that long, truth be told, but it feels like it was a long time. It was long enough that, in the dark during the night, I couldn’t even remember which button on the remote turned the air conditioner off and on. I’d been using other remotes for so many days that I lost the muscle memory for operating this one.
I had an amazing day at the SOHO Boutique Hotel. I decided to abandon any thoughts of small adventures when I left Sukhothai. I simply got on the main highway and drove at a good pace. I felt good during that trip. I’d had a good final day. It was a relaxing day. And that led into a good night. I felt rested in the morning, and I enjoyed my last breakfast at the Orchid Hibiscus. I packed up and checked out and hit the road fairly early, but not uncomfortably early. And with the relatively short distance I needed to cover, I got to the SOHO before noon. I thought about hanging out in a coffee shop somewhere until the check-in time of 2 p.m. However, I decided to take a chance on getting an early check-in, and I was so glad I did.
When I got to the SOHO, there was a convenient parking spot for my scooter right at the entrance. That was a good omen. And then when I walked into the lobby, the woman at the registration desk didn’t even need to speak to me. At first, I thought she had some other work to do, and I just stood there and waited patiently for her to finish her work and then turn to me. And then I was fully prepared to be told that it was too early to check in and that I’d have to come back in two hours. But when the woman eventually looked up at me, she simply handed me the key to my room. She had recognized me as I walked into the lobby from my previous visits, and she immediately started registering me. As she explained to me, they already had all my information in their computer, so I didn’t need to show my passport or fill out any forms. And that made so much sense. I wish more businesses had that kind of common sense. And she not only allowed me to check in two hours early, she upgraded my room to a much nicer room with a corner balcony. Once again, I kept thinking that I must be living someone else’s life. Good things keep happening lately, and I’m not accustomed to life’s small events flowing this smoothly or happily.
I was singing a song and dancing as I went to my room and started unpacking. The room wasn’t drastically different to my other rooms at the SOHO, but it clearly was a step up. The furnishings were nicer. It had certain items that the other rooms lacked. The fridge was twice as big, for example. And there was a nice floor lamp beside the bed. And this floor lamp had a foot-activated button for turning it on and off. Foot-activated buttons make so much sense. It is one of those things that I’m astonished isn’t found everywhere. Everything in the world should have foot-activated switches as far as I am concerned. They’re so convenient. It’s a small thing, but it makes a big difference in the user experience.
Because I had kind of taken the previous day off and recharged my batteries, and because I had ridden straight to the SOHO, I was full of energy and feeling extremely happy. After I’d unpacked, I set up a chair in a nice spot, and I started recording the next set of journal entries. I’d put that task on my to-do list, and it was the first thing I wanted to do. I recorded using the Pocket 2, since it has a better sensor than the GoPro, and the Mimo app works so well. I like being able to monitor everything on the phone. However, I ran into a problem with battery life. The battery ran out long before I was done. And I thought I could just plug in a power source and keep recording, but the Pocket 2 won’t allow that. So I had no choice but to plug in the camera and wait for the battery to fully recharge before I could finish what I was doing. That was annoying.
But I eventually got it done. And then I moved on to start editing videos. I finished a couple of Relive videos. And then I started working on the video about my visit to the Forest District of the Historical Park in Kamphaeng Phet. That experience took place a long time ago, and it is embarrassing that I’m only getting around to editing the video now. But that isn’t out of laziness. I’ve been working as hard as I possibly can, but I still haven’t been able to find the time to finish the video.
I ended up working until around eleven at night. And then, for some reason, I didn’t get the good night of sleep that I was expecting. I love the beds at the SOHO. And the room was so comfortable that I thought I would sleep like an angel. But that didn’t happen. Not only did I not sleep well, I had dreams about zombies all night long. That was so weird. I hadn’t seen any zombie movies. I’m not watching any zombie TV shows. So, why was I dreaming about zombies for an entire night? I kept waking up from these dreams and then when I fell back to sleep, another zombie dream would start. I don’t know that they were particularly scary dreams. They felt somewhat ordinary to me. They were just dreams that happened to be about zombies trying to eat me. But I wasn’t scared in the dreams. They were more stressful than scary. But the end result was that I was exhausted in the morning.
That was unfortunate because I was looking forward to a great day on the road. All I had to do was pack up, have breakfast at the SOHO, and then ride my scooter along that gorgeous mountain road to Mae Sot. If I got to Mae Sot early enough, I was going to ride straight to immigration and get my visa stamp. The only break I was planning was to stop at the coffee shop at the Muser Market. And I wasn’t going to record the trip on my GoPro at all. I wasn’t going to vlog the day. I was just going to relax and enjoy it. And I did end up enjoying the day. Just not as much as I could have. I was just too tired to really have a song in my heart.
Breakfast was different from last time. In fact, breakfast at the SOHO keeps evolving. On my first visit, I was directed to the Awake Owl cafe, and I had my breakfast inside this nice coffee shop. On my second visit, they had opened up a large dining area adjacent to the hotel lobby. I assumed they had more guests, and they needed the extra space to accommodate them all. And the breakfast was a combination of table service and self service. I could choose the main dishes from a menu, and then I could help myself to drinks and toast and a couple of other items from a buffet. But on this visit, they had gone full buffet. There was no more table service or menus at all. All guests served themselves from a wide selection of food and drinks available at various tables and counters. To be honest, I actually preferred the table service. It was nice to sit down and have a meal brought to me. The experts always choose better food and arrange it better than I do on my own. And getting my own food was a little bit more complicated and required a bit more energy. I found myself getting the wrong things, forgetting things, and getting up and down from my table a lot. Part of it was probably because I was so tired and forgetful and clumsy because of that. The situation wasn’t helped by the new policy that all guests had to put on plastic gloves. They gave me a pair of these gloves at the entrance. I assume this was because we now all had to serve ourselves, and people would be nervous about other people handling the cutlery and other items. Now that I think about it, though, I’m not sure that it was mandatory. At the time, I just assumed it was. I guess I just instinctively treat all these safety precautions as mandates. But the blox of gloves was simply offered to me. It wasn’t like three armed men held me down and forced me to put them on. But I thought it was required, and I put them on. It wasn’t easy, that’s for sure. My fingers just stuck to the plastic, and I couldn’t get them to go all the way into the finger parts. And the plastic was slippery on the outside. I had to be very careful to hold cups and plates from the bottom. If I tried to hold them on the side, they just slipped out of my hands. That made breakfast even more of a challenge in my fatigued zombie-dream state.
I felt tired as I climbed onto the scooter, too. I just wanted to lean over the handlebars and take a nap. But I’m happy to say that the joy of being on the road and in the mountains took over after a short time, and I enjoyed the ride very much. The kilometers just flew by. I didn’t enjoy my coffee at the Muser Market quite as much as I’d hoped, but it was still welcome. It had been surprisingly cold in the early morning again. And the skies were heavily overcast. The air was moist and chilly. There was even a bit of rain. And I was shivering with the cold when I pulled in at the Muser Market. The hot latte warmed me up.
The same friendly woman was working at the counter, and I told her about how I’d gone to her village, but I hadn’t been able to see any coffee plants or coffee farms anywhere. She told me that her family’s coffee farm was a bit hidden. It was near the temple, but you couldn’t really see it from the road. She offered to take me there herself someday if I ever come back. That was nice of her.
I appreciate the beauty and the fun of that mountain road more and more each time I ride it. I used to think that it was a no-brainer that taking the small mountain road from Mae Ramat was the better choice. But this main highway has a lot of appeal. I’ve enjoyed all my trips on that highway quite a bit. There were still the remains of a few landslides here and there. And I saw one bad accident. A transport truck had taken a corner too fast, and it had clearly scraped along the cement barrier that separates the two halves of the divided highway, and then the whole trailer part had flipped over the divider. The trailer ended up on its side on the wrong side of the highway, and the truck itself had gone into the ditch on the other side. I can clearly imagine what the driver must have gone through as he realized he had come down the hill too fast and wasn’t going to make it around the curve. And he was probably hoping and praying that the truck would just scrape along the divider but stay upright. And then he would have felt horror as he knew the truck was going to flip over. That must have been such an awful day.
Lately, I keep thinking about those runaway emergency truck ramps. I took a close look at a bunch of them on my previous trips, and they always seemed to be in poor condition. I don’t know much about them or how they are supposed to work, but I imagined the idea was for a truck to be able to slow down gradually on a gradual incline without damaging itself. But the inclines always looked so steep and the terrain so rough that running a truck into it didn’t seem much different to me from simply slamming it into the ditch or into a normal mountainside.
But on this trip, I noticed that they had been cleaned up. There had been some maintenance. And the slopes seemed less steep, and the surface of the sand or gravel was smooth. I guess the idea is that trucks don’t actually coast to a stop. They stop fast. But they do so by going into deep sand. And this stops the truck while minimizing the damage. But then they require a large crane to come and lift the truck out. I learned that by watching YouTube videos. I imagined that some individual out there got the credit for inventing this safety ramp for runaway trucks, but I haven’t been able to find out how they were invented. And it turns out that there are quite a few different types. The ones on this highway use sand or gravel. It seems like there must be an interesting history to these things. I can imagine a certain number of truck crashes would have occurred on a particularly steep mountain road as the brakes failed on a variety of trucks. And then someone there must have come up with this idea to build some kind of ramp in the worst spots to prevent serious accidents. But there must have been a detailed cost-benefit analysis done. These ramps would be expensive, and they must have decided that enough accidents took place at this or that spot in order to justify the expense. But how many accidents would have to happen first before the decision is made? And then what kind of thought process goes into deciding exactly where to put the ramp? I’m willing to bet there is an interesting story there if you could track down all this information. There could even be one of those accidental discovery stories. Perhaps a truck driver was going through some steep mountain roads and his brakes failed. But as he was barrelling down a steep incline, he spotted a side road leading off the highway, and he turned off the highway and managed to coast to a stop on that side road. And the idea of the emergency ramp would have been born. This could easily be how it happened.
I arrived in Mae Sot early enough to go to immigration before they closed for lunch. I rode straight there without stopping at the guest house. I was a bit worried because I had applied for this visa extension much earlier than normal. And I was concerned that they would have adjusted the start date of the extension to match. And then I wouldn’t get the full benefit of the sixty days. But everything worked out nicely. The women at the immigration office know me by sight, and they knew exactly why I was there. I simply had to hand over my passport and they quickly stamped it and registered the changes in their computer. And I got my passport back. It was simple and fast. And I quickly checked the date, and I was relieved to see that this new visa extension expired on January 24th, which means that the extension dated from the original expiry date of my previous extension. I asked about the possibility of one more extension, and the clerk said that they didn’t know yet. She said that there might be an announcement next week about whether the program will be continued or cancelled.
I continue to be in kind of a weird situation, because I’m running out of money, and I have no idea what I’m going to do next. People that I know send me links to encouraging news stories about countries opening up and borders reopening. But when you read the articles, your enthusiasm and optimism quickly gets dampened. The opening is always very limited and comes with extreme restrictions. It’s not like on this or that date, things just go back to normal. For example, there are stories that Malaysia will open to foreign tourists as of January 1st, 2022. But I think visitors will be limited in the amount of time they can stay and where they can go. They will have to be tracked everywhere. And they will have to book their trip through approved and registered travel agents. And they will have to have proof of insurance policies that cover treatment for covid-19. And all of these can be major stumbling blocks for me.
However, I seem to have developed a new philosophy on life. And I really like this philosophy. And looking back, I can see how NOT having this philosophy really caused problems. This new philosophy is a kind of relaxed one in which I simply enjoy the moment without worrying about what comes next. Just let the big picture stuff go and just live the life that is in front of you right now. I wish I’d done that in the past. I can see that I had the bad habit of always living for the future rather than living in the present. I suppose the source of this new philosophy can be seen as having a negative tone. What I mean is that at the age of 58, it’s pretty clear to see that the clock is ticking. It’s not like being 20 years old and imagining that you have fifty or sixty years of life ahead of you, and you have to make decisions about how to best spend those years. Heck, in ten years I’ll be nearly seventy years old. And that’s assuming I make it even close to that age, and I highly doubt that I will. Therefore, it’s not like I stopped worrying about the future. It’s more like I instinctively realized that I don’t really even have a future anymore. My life is winding down. There is no point worrying about what the future holds when there practically is no future left. So I find that my brain is thinking more about today and the next two months much more than the next two years. The next two years can take care of themselves. And this new mood is related to this idea that it’s simply too late to make certain decisions, so you don’t have to even think about them anymore. When you are forty years old, you might be thinking about or worrying about the classic “saving for retirement” problem. But at this age, it’s too late anyway. I don’t have any money. I haven’t saved for retirement. So that problem is taken care of. I don’t have to worry about it anymore. And you can say the same thing about all the other issues that humans usually think about: Should I get married? Should I have children? What career should I choose? Should I buy a house? Where should I live? I don’t think I’m a particularly normal human, because I never worried much about those things anyway. I never really wanted to get married. I certainly never wanted anything to do with children. I’ve never been interested in owning a house or a nice car or anything like that. I never really wanted to live anywhere in particular. But at the same time, those are all normal things for a person to think about and perhaps worry about and wonder whether they made a mistake or not. At the age of 58, there are no more options like that anyway. So you don’t even have to think about them, let alone stress out about them. If I wanted to own a house, I’d have had to start saving money for that forty years ago. If I wanted a nice car, same thing. It’s too late for anything like that. It’s kind of a comfort when your life starts winding down. As I’ve often reflected, I can’t think of anything more horrifying than the idea of living forever. The normal human thing is to be scared of dying and to wish for immortality. I’ve always been the opposite. The idea of life ending has always been a comfort for me more than anything else. It’s a relief that I have no choice in the matter. This whole crazy business is going to end no matter what I do. And I love that.
But to get back to the present moment, I spent the rest of yesterday working on the video about the Forest District in Kamphaeng Phet. I’m not finished it yet. I’ll get back to work on it in a few minutes. I also edited the video journal that I shot in Kamphaeng Phet a while back. I wanted to finish that so I could delete the old files and make some room on my phone. I don’t want to make these journal videos into a big deal. The only way they make sense to make and post is if it takes very little time to do them. No editing at all. Just record them and then post them in real time.