Thursday, December 2, 2021
5:10 a.m. Room 1102 Phannu House
Mae Sot, Thailand
Man, oh man. What a day yesterday. I worked extremely hard in the last week to be ready to leave the Green Guest House and Mae Sot. The idea was to have a completely stress-free last day or two, and then be fully rested and excited on the day of departure. But, for whatever reasons, that didn’t happen at all. In fact, I don’t know that I’ve ever been so tired and lost in my life. I did ride my scooter to the small town of Mae Kasa, but as I was riding, I was almost non-functional. It was too much effort to twist the gas throttle. I wasn’t physically too tired to do it. It was my brain that was the problem. It couldn’t process information or even tell my body to do things. Over and over, I found myself slowing down gradually as I let off on the throttle. And it felt like if I allowed myself to coast to a stop at the side of the road, I would never move again. It was the strangest feeling. It was like my brain wasn’t even there. Imagine all those scenes in movies that take place in old-fashioned lunatic asylums. There is always a character that is simply sitting in a chair and staring ahead at nothing, unmoving. They’re catatonic. And that was how I was for the entire day. I could barely speak. And yet, I had a lot of demanding things I needed to do.
My pre-packing test also appears to have failed. When I did my pre-packing a few days ago, I was very careful to make it fully realistic. I didn’t want to cheat and pretend I was taking fewer items than I actually was. I cleaned out the entire room (I thought), and I put everything into the backpack and daypack. And the result was acceptable. Everything fit nicely, and the bags didn’t seem too heavy. Yet, yesterday morning, the whole system fell apart. I had trouble fitting everything in the backpack, and it ended up being far heavier. It was so heavy in fact, that I had difficulty strapping it to the scooter. It was unwieldy. And this was after deciding to leave behind the full Panasonic G85 camera system. At the last minute, I took a hard look at that camera and decided that I didn’t really need to bring it with me. And once you put together the camera, the extra lens, the necessary tripod and the other accessories, it is quite bulky and heavy. It adds five pounds to my load. And I thought that by removing it from the pile and leaving it behind in Mae Sot, I would make my backpack much lighter and easier to work with. Yet, despite removing all of that gear, the backpack almost defeated me.
What changed? A couple of things, I guess. One thing that changed was my catatonic state. I spent a lot of time packing and carefully organizing in the morning, but nothing was accomplished. I packed so poorly that everything took up more space than it needed to. And I forgot all kinds of steps. One of the worst things is to pack up your backpack, seal it inside its waterproof cover, wrap it up in all the straps and ropes, and THEN realize that you have four more items that need to go inside it. Things you forgot. That’s one thing I did. And I was equally unskilled when it came to my daypack and camera gear. I had no idea what I was doing. And it was worse than that. My brain simply stopped. And then my body stopped. And I found myself simply sitting or standing and staring off into space.
Another change and another problem was that I was shifting from household living to road living. And I guess I hadn’t fully grasped that concept during my pre-packing tests. For example, during my packing preparations, I hadn’t thought about food. I’m bringing my cooking pot, of course, so during my actual packing yesterday, I included whatever food I had in the fridge and cupboard. I hadn’t done that during the test. And that made a surprisingly big difference as I added a big package of pasta, two jars of spaghetti sauce, two large packages of instant coffee, and two packages of coffee creamer to the backpack. It’s surprising how much space food requires and how much weight it adds, particularly when you add it at the last minute. I had also neglected to include my travel kettle in my packing tests. I was making coffee and drinking coffee all during my packing test, so I left the travel kettle out of the experiment. I was using it at the time. And I had it in my head that it was a small and lightweight travel kettle, so it wouldn’t matter. How much space can it occupy? But it turns out that though such a kettle takes up little space in a household, it takes up a LOT of space in a backpack, and that threw off all my careful planning. I also had not included my full toiletries kit when I pre-packed. I’d included it in the organization, and I thought I had made space for it. But I left it out when I sealed my backpack, again because I was using the items in the toiletries kit during the day. And then on the actual day of departure, it turned out to contribute to the final load being far too much.
And overall, in terms of the weight, this shift from household living to road living added bits of weight here and there. Each bit of weight seemed inconsequential, but add it all up, and it made a big difference. For example, I had a full can of shaving cream. I would normally not bring shaving cream in a backpack. It’s a luxury item. I just shave with hand soap. But I had a can on the go inside my room at the Green Guest House, so I figured I might as well bring it with me until it runs out. And I had a fair bit of duplication in terms of camera gear, particularly GoPro stuff. And that doesn’t matter when you are living a stable life. And I didn’t think it mattered much for the backpack, but it added weight and bulk. The end result was that my backpack was stuffed full and far too heavy. I had trouble mounting it on my scooter. My catatonic state contributed to this greatly because I completely forgot all the careful steps I had developed during my previous trips. There is a precise way to do it so that the backpack is in the right spot on the scooter and tied down safely and securely. I’d worked out this system methodically. But yesterday morning, I forgot all of it. A contributing factor was that my landlady was hovering at the time. And having an audience made me self-conscious about the size and weight of my backpack, and I couldn’t focus. My landlady was trying to be helpful by bringing me rope and asking me if I needed water and making suggestions, but all of this distracted my already beleaguered brain, and I did a very poor job of strapping down the backpack. And the extra weight and bulk made the scooter feel unwieldy in a way that it never had done on my previous trips.
During all of this, I was also trying to shoot some video clips with my GoPro. This was a big event in my life, after all. And I thought I should document it for a YouTube video. And I tried. I really tried hard. But I had no idea what I was doing. Part of the problem is that I’ve lost all confidence in my video style. I wanted to change my video style, and I’d become obsessed with the idea of making my videos more visual and less verbal. I was trying to think cinematically, like that Swedish vlogger I’ve been watching. Instead of talking about my packing up process and my plans for the day, I wanted to just film stuff – B-roll stuff – with the idea that I would edit it all together in quick cuts later on. And I tried to do this, but I had no idea what I was doing or why I was even doing it. I just fumbled around. And then I tried to do an actual on-camera vlog talking about this big moment of leaving the Green Guest House. But my catatonic brain wouldn’t cooperate. I just stared at the GoPro lens, and my mouth simply wouldn’t speak. There just weren’t any words.
It got worse when I went outside, because of the hovering landlady. I thought I could set up the GoPro to document the process of getting the scooter ready. But with my landlady buzzing around, I just wanted to finish and get out of there. I couldn’t deal with her, the packing, and shooting video all at the same time.
And in the back of my mind, I was being confounded by this idea of all the videos from Sukhothai that I still had to finish. That was a big part of why my brain was catatonic. In theory, this was a special day for the vlog. I was leaving the Green Guest House and embarking on a scooter ride to the north of Thailand. It should be epic. It should be recorded. I should make a big deal out of it. But I was so tired that I couldn’t move, think, or speak. Plus, I had zero interest in new experiences. I hadn’t even finished with the most recent experiences. I didn’t have the time to take more video and edit it. I hadn’t even come to grips with the old video yet. It was all just far too much.
As I was packing, I kept expecting a knock on my door. The previous day, my landlady had said that she would finalize all the details of my deposit and the final charges and present me with the results in the morning. And so I waited for her. And she never showed up. I admit I felt some resentment over this growing inside me. But as the hours of the morning went by, it became more and more clear that she wasn’t coming. And that it would be my responsibility to go track her down. And I felt like that was her job. Maybe I’m wrong about this, but since she had the money and all the information and all the control, I thought it was her job to come to me. She knows exactly where I am. She knows what I’m doing. We’d talked about this at length. It would be a simple matter for her to knock on my door and present me with the final bill. I don’t know where she is. I never know. The guest house doesn’t have a front office. There is no desk. There is no door to knock on. Her life and the life of her family are completely mysterious to me, and I have no way of ever knowing what they are doing or where they might be. There’s no way for me to track her down while it is easy for her to track me down.
Anyway, I felt this resentment building. To be honest, I just wanted to get the final bill over with. I suspected that she would add fees and other things to the bill just so she could keep as much of my deposit as possible. And I knew this would bother me a little bit. And I just wanted to ignore the whole process. I didn’t want to focus on it. It’s not a lot of money, of course. I had given them 2,000 baht as a deposit when I moved into the room. And I had just assumed I would never see that money again. And that was fine. It’s not much money. But it still bugged me, especially when the fees don’t really apply to me. What I mean is that there was a cleaning fee of 300 baht in the original contract. And I knew that when I left the room, there would be no need to clean it. I had given the room a complete cleaning from top to bottom even when I had moved in. And I had been cleaning it all week as I prepared to leave. It was going to be spotless as I carried out my backpack and left. I can understand that a guest house would develop the procedure of charging a cleaning fee. Perhaps the average person leaves their room in a mess. But I don’t. Plus, I had been there for a year and a half, and I had never once had them clean the room. I treated it as my own home and did all my own cleaning and laundry. And, to be honest, to charge a cleaning fee is a bit ironic when the guest house grounds as a whole is pretty much on the level of a junkyard or a garbage dump. It’s not like there were standards of cleanliness to live up to me. The whole place has become a dump. My room was a glistening, pristine place compared to the surroundings.
I waited quite a long time, but my landlady never showed up. So I figured I would just pack up and leave. I grabbed the final bag of garbage to take out to the street to put into the garbage bins, and I saw that there was no one around. All the doors to the house were closed and locked. The car was gone. To be honest, I actually kind of liked that. It meant that I could just quietly go about the business of packing up and leaving without any fuss. I wouldn’t get my deposit back, but I didn’t think I would get any money anyway. For all I knew, she would add so many fees that she would claim that I owed them money on top of the deposit. That could easily happen, and I didn’t look forward to how that would make me feel. And I had made sure to say my goodbyes the previous day. I had thanked everyone and said goodbye formally. I like to do things like that officially the day before departure just to make sure it gets done, and saying goodbye on the actual day is less of a big deal.
However, as I went back to my room to get my backpack and daypack and leave, I spotted a foot around the corner of a back building. I peaked around the corner, and I saw my landlady sitting there on a platform with her legs crossed, her hands poised on her legs and knees, and meditating with her eyes closed. I almost just turned and left. I didn’t want to bother her. I didn’t want to interrupt her meditation. And it was an appealing thought to just grab my backpack, go back to my scooter, and go. As I said, I had said my goodbyes the day before. We had had a nice lunch together. I would be coming back to Mae Sot at the end of the trip anyway. And I was so tired that I was practically non-functional. I liked the idea of just quietly leaving. No fuss. She had never come to my room. I had no idea where she was. So it made sense to just leave. It was just an accident that I stumbled across her little meditation corner. I could pretend I had never seen her.
But I decided not to do that and I said something to get her attention and I interrupted her meditation. To be honest, my resentment kind of built up a little bit, because I resented her putting me in the position of having to interrupt her meditation. I hate interrupting people. It feels rude. But I did it. And she slowly roused herself, and then she brought out a notebook with some numbers on it, and I saw that she had a little ziplock bag with some money twisted up tightly inside it. She showed me the list of numbers. This was the bill for air conditioning and water for the preceding month. And, luckily, there wasn’t a long list of unexpected charges. There was just the 300-baht charge I had expected. But it was labelled as “air conditioning”. That confused me. She said it was an extra charge for air conditioning.
I still don’t really know what it means. Perhaps she is charging me separately for the final day. A weird thing is that right from the beginning, she always calculated rent as including the final day, but NOT the final night. For example, I had paid rent for the month of November. And normally, that means that my rent is paid up from the night of November 1st to the night of November 30th, which means checking out on the morning of December 1st. But she has always done it differently. In her mind, rent doesn’t include the final night. Yet, at the beginning of the rental period, she doesn’t include the previous night either. Using this technique, she shaves off a night at the beginning and a night at the end and can charge more because of this. It’s a tricky technique. She double charges for two nights a month using this technique.
This happened because I moved into the room mid-month at the very beginning. My idea was to pay for the remainder of that month. And then we could get onto a full month by month basis. Just pay for each month in full whatever the month. But she insisted on calculating the month from the day I moved in. I can’t remember the exact day, but it might have been something like June 17th. And then when I paid for one month, she would calculate ahead to July 14th or 15th or something and call that a full month. But her calculations always meant that she was making the month only 28 days or 29 days long. It was never a full 30 days or 31 days depending on the month. And this allowed her to double charge for two or three nights every single month and make more money. I tried talking to her about this and showing her how her calculations were wrong, but she never understood me. Or maybe she pretended not to understand.
Eventually that stopped happening because we adjusted things at one point so that I was paying for the calendar month and not from date to date. But I could tell she was always thinking about this. I had told her that November was my last month and I would be leaving. And she kept saying that therefore, I would be leaving on November 30th. And I would counter that, no, November 30th was my last night. I would be leaving the next morning. I had paid for November 30th in my rent. But in her mind, with her double-charging system, the rent covered the day of November 30th but not the night. In her mind, if I left in the morning, I would be getting a day for free. Even after we had this discussion a couple of times, she kept coming back with this idea that I was leaving on November 30th. And I kept having to gently remind her that, no, I wasn’t leaving on November 30th. I would be sleeping in the room that night, and I would leave the next morning. And she clearly thought I should pay for one extra night then. And you’d think that after a year and a half, even the question of a single day or night one way or the other wouldn’t amount to much, but it was something that she thought about. My guess is that she simply added the cost of a night’s room rental into the electricity bill. She’s never actually followed the numbers of the electricity meter when she gives me the bill. She just writes a number down, and I suspect she just invents it every month depending on her mood and how much money she wants. The bill certainly never matches the numbers on the electricity meter.
There were a couple other funny moments surrounding my departure. One time, I really confused her, because I handed her an extra key to the room. When I stay somewhere for any length of time, I often make a duplicate copy of the room key. I put it in my wallet and keep it there for emergencies in case I accidentally lock the original key in the room. By having a duplicate, I don’t have to then go track down the owners and get them to open the door. In a lot of the places I’ve stayed, they don’t even have extra copies of the room key anyway, and it ends up being a big problem. So I make my own copy. As I was leaving, I dug out my extra key and I gave it to her, and she had a lot of trouble processing what was going on. I know that if I had lost the original key, she would have charged me a considerable amount for a new one. So I think my just handing her a key and NOT asking for compensation confused her. And I guess the concept of a guest making his own copy of the key didn’t make sense to her, and she was trying to figure out how I could have two keys.
And another funny moment occurred when it was time for me to walk away completely. And she told me to wait for one minute. She said she wanted to go into the room and look around to make sure that I hadn’t forgotten anything. She repeated this a couple of times and explained that people often think they have everything when they actually left something behind. And she wanted to double check for me. Of course, she wasn’t really doing that. The fact that she explained it so many times made it clear that her real purpose was something else entirely. And she just wanted to check the room to make sure I hadn’t damaged or taken anything.
And that was kind of weird. I don’t know why she had to pretend and make up a story. I had asked her repeatedly to come into the room and look it over to make sure that everything was okay. When I had done my packing test, everything was inside my backpacks, and the room was completely empty. And I made sure that it was spotless. I had cleaned the bathroom and the fridge. I had swept and mopped the floors. I had dusted. I had emptied the refrigerator and taken out the garbage. And I thought that this was a good time for my landlady to do a room inspection. For a year and a half, I had been staring at the sheet of paper on the wall telling me how much I would have to pay if I damaged various items in the room. I wanted her to come in and inspect the room and give it her seal of approval for my departure. But no matter how many times I threw the door wide open and asked her to come in and inspect the room, she wouldn’t do it. But on the morning I was leaving, she made up this story and went inside to inspect, pretending that that wasn’t what she was doing.
But that wasn’t the funny thing. The funny thing is what happened next. She went over the room and checked everything over. And on top of the fridge, there was a little collection of kitchen items that were in the room when I moved in. I had never used any of them because I have my own utensils and bowls and cups. These were the items that came with the room. There was a plate and two bowls and two glasses. And inside the glasses were two kitchen knives, a fork, and two spoons. And she picked up one of the spoons and brought it outside and asked me if it was mine. Hadn’t I forgotten my spoon? Why she focused on that spoon, I can’t even imagine. It wasn’t my spoon, for one thing. But how would she have even the slightest clue after all this time whether that spoon came with the room or whether I had brought it? And why would she care? And why would she think that I cared? It was a bit insulting, to be honest. It’s not like it was a spoon of precious silver. It was bent and twisted and cheaply made, like any one of the millions of spoons you can find in secondhand shops around the world. Why come trotting out of the room to ask if this was my spoon? Am I so strange that she thinks I would be especially worried about a spoon? And why the spoon while ignoring the two forks and two knives? Did she have such an encylopoedic knowledge of the room’s contents that she knew the two forks and the two knives belonged to the guest house but the spoon was a stranger to her?
And then came my official departure. The two of us walked together to the front area of the guest house, and I started to put on my helmet and check over the scooter one last time to make sure the backpack was secure. This was it. I was leaving, perhaps forever. And at that exact moment, the husband, my landlord, returned on his scooter. I thought that was good timing. He didn’t know I was leaving at that moment. But he had arrived at the exact minute that I was leaving, and that made it possible to say a final goodbye and thank you. And this man parked his scooter and removed his helmet and walked past and never looked at me and never said a word. He would have just walked into the house, but my landlady stopped him. And I thought she was going to tell him to mind his manners and say goodbye to their long-term foreign guest. But she just handed him a piece of mail. It was some kind of official bill that had just arrived, and the two of them talked about this bill intensely as he ripped open the envelope and examined the contents. And that was my official goodbye from my landlord. He hadn’t even bothered to look at me let alone say goodbye. I’m not sure he knew that I was there or that I was even leaving that day.
Right up until that moment, I still didn’t know what I was going to do after I rode away from the Green Guest House. I was still largely catatonic, and it taken everything I had just to get to this point. And all I really wanted to do was leave the guest house. That was my goal for the day. That was my only ambition. And as I rode away, I just happened to turn the wheel to the north and begin the ride outside of Mae Sot towards Mae Kasa. I could just have easily turned in a different direction and just checked into a hotel down the street and collapsed. But I turned north.
It was kind of a miracle that I made it to Mae Kasa at all. In my fatigued and overwhelmed state, I could easily have just stopped the scooter at the side of the road, and I’d just sit there unmoving. I had a feeling that if I did actually stop, I’d never get moving again. So I made sure to keep riding and riding. If I stopped, I’d be stuck. I’d be a statue at the side of the road unable to speak, let alone move.
Mae Kasa isn’t that far away. And the ride there is quite pleasant once you get off the main road. I arrived there in about an hour, and I first rode my scooter to the hot springs. That is where the homestay was located. On the way, I kept my eyes open for any other kind of hotel that looked on the low budget end of things. But I didn’t see anything. There might have been some lodging options. The Mae Kasa area does have a fair amount of tourism. But all the signs were just in Thai, and I wouldn’t recognize a sign for a hotel even if I saw one.
Not surprisingly, the Mae Kasa homestay looked deserted and empty. There wasn’t a single car or scooter in the parking area. They had some bicycles that they rented to guests, but the bicycles were covered in a tarp. All the doors were closed. And there were no people anywhere. And there wasn’t any kind of office or front desk that I could see. I ended up looking around for a while, and then I just rode away. I wasn’t ready for rejection yet, so I just rode my scooter to the hot springs and then I rode my scooter a few kilometers down a nearby road just to see where it went. But then I turned around and came back to this hotel. This time, I got off the scooter, and while I was taking off my helmet, a friendly dog emerged from underneath the tarp over the bicycles. I pet the dog for a while and said friendly things to him. And I guess someone somewhere heard my voice because a woman showed up. And I did my best to look like a typical visitor, basically like someone looking for a room. And after some discussion, I found out that their rooms were more expensive than I’d expected. I hadn’t seen a price online anywhere. But everyone kept saying it was affordable. And given the location, I thought the price had to be low. I was kind of assuming it would be a typical place that charged around 350 baht a night. But apparently, the fact that they have a couple of wooden tubs where you can soak in hot spring water raises the price. And they charged 1,200 baht per night. It looked like I wouldn’t be able to find a home in Mae Kasa.
There was the remote possibility of just riding to the north and keep on riding until I happened to stumble across a suitable low budget hotel. On a different day, on a regular day, that’s what I would have done. But that didn’t seem wise. And I made the snap decision to just turn around and ride the 30 kilometers back to Mae Sot and find a hotel there, which is what I should have done in the first place. While I was at the homestay in Mae Kasa considering my options, I got out my phone and I thought I would check with Agoda to see what it had to say. While I was still in Mae Sot, I had done this, and I found myself tempted by the offerings of the Centra hotel. It’s a very nice hotel, and it just happened to be offering what looked like a special deal. Who knows if these deals are real? But they look amazing. What I mean is that they will list the original price as 1,200 baht, but they will say that they are offering a special deal of 400 baht. And so you think you are getting an amazing bargain. But I often wonder if this is real. Anyone can just invent a high price. I can offer to sell someone my camera. And I can tell them that the real price is $3,000 but I will sell it to them for $300. And it looks like I’m selling it at a deep discount. But that discount is real only if the original quoted price is real. Maybe the camera is worth only $200, and rather than saving $2,700, you are overpaying by $100. Maybe that’s the same thing with these hotel deals.
But the Centra looks like a luxurious place. And 400 baht would be a good price for a night there. The Centra is clearly beyond my usual lifestyle, but I was in such rough shape that the idea of a nice place was appealing. My main option was to go to the Phannu, as I had originally intended. And it cost 350 baht. And then for just 50 baht more, I could get a room at the Centra. That’s an easy decision to make. You would get a lot for that extra 50 baht. However, you can’t forget about the fees and taxes. I wanted to see what the real final price would be, so I selected a room at the Centra. That’s the only way to see the real price. You actually have to start the booking process. That’s one of their many online marketing tricks and strategies. And once I selected the room, the price jumped up to nearly 600 baht. And for a normal person on a holiday, 600 baht for that room would be a bargain. They’d jump at it. But 600 baht was starting to push outside my budget. Plus, I start comparing it mentally with a place like the Phannu. If you think of 600 baht as the standard, then staying at the Phannu means 350 baht for the room with 250 baht left to spend on anything else.
So, what do I value more? Just a room at the Centra? Or a room at the Phannu plus a 250-baht meal? And then it becomes an easy decision for me. I’d rather have the 250 baht to spend on food and drinks and snacks and gas and whatever else.
But as I rode my scooter back into Mae Sot, I kept pondering my options. I hadn’t been pleased by the Phannu when I had checked it out the day before. It seemed overpriced at 350 baht per night, and it seemed to be only half operational. I kept wondering if I shouldn’t splurge on a night at the Centra or some other nice hotel. When I finally got back into town, I pulled over into some shade and spent a few minutes looking at some options on Agoda. And I was kind of tempted. But it all seemed like it was too much. Booking online and paying by credit card and risking that transaction failing. And hotels always look much better in pictures than they are in real life. It was a risk. And the Phannu, whatever its faults, was a known quantity. The price is exactly 350 baht with no hidden charges, taxes, or fees. There is no formality. You just pay in cash and you’re left alone.
In the end, I settled on a room at the Phannu. I’m typing this right now while sitting on the bed in my room at the Phannu, and I have to say that things have worked out rather well. When I got off my scooter here, I just happened to arrive at the moment when a woman appeared in a nearby building. I called out to her, and she quickly rented me a room. She took a picture of my passport and checked the date on my visa. I still find it interesting that hotels have the responsibility of checking a guest’s immigration status. I wonder what would have happened if my visa was expired. Would she have refused to rent me a room? Would she have been required to call the police? I don’t know. But I didn’t have to do anything myself. She wrote a receipt for me when I gave her the money. And she brought me over to the room and showed me where it was and plugged in and turned on the air conditioner and the fridge. And it was done. I had a home for the night.
I should have come straight here. It would have saved me two hours of driving to Mae Kasa and back. But I didn’t really mind that drive. Even in my exhausted state, I enjoyed it. And it cleared my mind a bit and put some distance between me and the Green Guest House. I wasn’t truly on the road, since I was still here in Mae Sot. But I was feeling a bit energized from the ride, and I was feeling energized just from the sense of being somewhere new, even if it was a hotel just a few blocks away from where I’d started. In fact, the way things are turning out, I should have stayed at the Green Guest House for another week. I wasn’t really ready to begin my trip to the north. I need more time. The main reason I didn’t arrange to stay another week at the guest house was my sense that it would lead to a lot of confusion and discussion about costs with my landlady. It’s best to keep things simple with her. I had committed to November being my last month. And with that train in motion, it was best to not change my plans. But I also have the feeling that if I’d stayed in the guest house for another week, I might not have made much progress in terms of being more ready to leave. I felt I needed a change, and simply going to a new hotel down the street isn’t a big change, but I honestly feel much better now that I’m here.
I was still a bit of a wreck as I moved in and unpacked. I’m usually quite methodical with the whole packing and unpacking business, but I wasn’t functioning well. I just brought in my backpack, opened it up, and dumped the contents on the bed. I set up a few things. I plugged in my power bar and I put my kettle on the table and I put my coffee in the fridge and my toiletries bag in the bathroom. I did the basics. But I wasn’t capable of much more than that.
Over time, though, I started to feel better and better. I fired up my phone, and I started to edit a video. I spent the whole afternoon and night on my phone editing videos and doing other things. My original idea was to spend one night here and then get on the road in the morning for real. But I was enjoying the feeling of getting caught up on my YouTube videos, and I wanted to get a bit more done. So I made the decision to stay in Mae Sot for at least another day and night. Since I was already in this room, I would just pay for another night and stay here. But then, on impulse, I looked at Agoda again. And there just happened to be one of those deals going on at another hotel in Mae Sot. I’d never even heard of the place. It’s called the Mae Sot Siri Hotel, and it is listed on Google Maps as a 3-star hotel. I doubt very much that it rises to that level, but it looks like a great place. It’s many steps above the Phannu, and the room comes with breakfast. And the price, including fees and taxes, came to 350 baht, the same as this room at the Phannu. I decided to take the room. I probably should have snagged it for two nights. But I went for just one night to start. The weird thing is that I had selected the room at the really cheap price. And so I had that price locked in for one night. I was worried that if I backed out of that and then tried to book for two nights, I’d lose that special price. Who knows how these Internet things work? So I have just the one night reserved now. I’ll see how my mood is today and whether I want to stay in Mae Sot even longer. I probably will. And I probably won’t be able to get that price again. But maybe I can get a good price at a different hotel. And it wouldn’t be such a bad thing to switch hotels. I would get the experience of a new place. And packing up would be good for me to get my packing system in order.
This room at the Phannu, by the way, isn’t quite as bad as it had seemed on my first day. They’d actually shown me a different room that day. And I think that room had more junk and garbage in it. This is a different room. And it’s fine. The bed is comfortable. The pillow is comfortable. It has air conditioning and a full bathroom and even a kettle and a fridge There’s actually an abundance of furniture. There is a full wardrobe and a table with a TV on it. There is a sofa with a table beside it. There is a bedside table. There is a counter with a stool and a big mirror. And there is a bizarre kind of ladder leaning against the wall. The towel was draped over the ladder, so I guess it is meant as a clothes hanger. It’s their nod to funky furnishings. When I saw the ladder in the first room, I thought it was an actual ladder, and they were using their hotel rooms as tool sheds.
I slept well last night. In fact, I slept far better than I have at the Green Guest House in a very long time. I think I went to bed at about 11. And I woke up this morning before 5. But I feel absolutely rested. I can really feel the difference as I write this journal entry. I tried to write in my journal yesterday morning when I woke up in the Green Guest House. But I just stared at the computer screen. I was so tired. Nearly catatonic, as I said. I feel so much better this morning.