Monday, December 6, 2021
4:56 a.m. Room 3
Retro Twin Home
Mae Sot, Thailand
Despite my amazing room at the Retro, I’m not sure that yesterday was the day I was hoping for. My goal for remaining in Mae Sot another couple of days was to get caught up on my Planet Doug videos from my trip to Sukhothai. But I got distracted by the video I shot about the Mor Prom app. As always happens, editing and uploading that video took far longer than I’d planned, and much of the day was dedicated to that project, and with mixed results. I thought as a subject that Mor Prom would spark some interest in the land of the Internet, but if the number of views is any indication, it is not a hot topic. I just checked, and the video received 557 views. That’s disappointing. I also recorded another journal entry. I didn’t do any editing of any journal entries, but I did complete the thumbnails and post two previous entries that I recorded. That took more time than I expected, as well.
I had a couple of errands lined up for the day, but I didn’t expect them to take a lot of time. And in the end, they didn’t. However, it still took some time. My main errand was to do something about the visor on my helmet. It must have happened gradually, but it actually feels like out of nowhere, the visor on my helmet suddenly became difficult to see through. The plastic is foggy and scratched. I noticed that in particular on the day that I rode to Mae Kasa and back. I found myself unable to see the world anymore, and I kept having to raise the visor up to be able to see anything around me clearly. I tried washing the visor several times, but it never got any better. I thought that I’d have to buy a new helmet completely. And I probably would have done that except that it seemed like a lot of trouble, particularly since I’d then have to also return the old helmet to Steve. It would turn into a major expedition, and I wasn’t in the mood for helmet shopping. In a rush, I would probably end up buying the wrong type of helmet and end up just making my situation worse.
An alternative occurred to me. Actually, I’d thought of that several days earlier when I was shopping for little doodads at Mr. DIY a while back. I happened to walk down an aisle containing all the safety glasses in the tools section. And some of those looked exactly like regular glasses. And they only cost 21 baht. I thought I could buy a pair of those and use them like motorcycle goggles. They would protect my eyes from the wind and from bugs hitting my face, and they would be completely clear. The problem they introduce is that I’d have to ride with the visor raised up. And that visor catches the wind like a sail and pushes the helmet backwards and off my head in an uncomfortable fashion. I find myself constantly fighting with the visor to raise it up just high enough that I can see underneath it but not so high that it catches the wind. And if I happen to raise my head up a half an inch too far, the wind catches the visor, and the whole thing slams backwards. It’s a pain. But I ended up with a possible solution. It turns out that the visor is held in place by two large but simple plastic screws. I bought a pair of safety glasses at Mr. DIY, and then I used my Swiss Army Knife to remove the two screws and take the visor off the helmet completely. It occurs to me that since it was so simple to remove the visor, it might even be possible to buy a replacement. I guess that depends on whether this helmet is a popular brand and replacement visors are available. My sense was that the helmet is such a cheap thing that replacing parts wouldn’t make sense anyway. You might as well just buy a new helmet. I certainly don’t want to waste most of a day riding from shop to shop and trying to find a new visor. My solution of using clear safety glasses seems reasonable. I thought about using my sunglasses of course. That makes even more sense, since the sunglasses are polarized and provide a much nicer view of the world. However, on recent trips when I tried to use them, I found that the shadows created underneath trees on the road were distracting. I wasn’t seeing potholes and other dangers as easily. I’d think a dark patch on the road was a shadow and it would turn out to be a dangerous pothole. It felt safer to not use the sunglasses. They are fine on a bicycle because of the slower speed.
I feel pretty good about this solution to my problem. I think the clear safety glasses will work out well. And now that the visor is off the helmet, I don’t think there will be a problem with wind anymore. I haven’t tested that theory, but it makes sense. When I removed the visor, I noticed that there is a second section screwed into the helmet. There is a small plastic edge connected to the system that holds the visor in place. And it looks like that small edge might also catch the wind. But if it does, I think I can remove it as well. It is held in place by two more screws, and then the whole assembly could come off. I have left it on for now because I had a sense that this edge is useful for blocking a bit of rain or sun coming straight down from overhead. Unfortunately, I now have this visor to carry around for the whole trip. But I guess I will just wrap it up in a plastic bag and stick it in the helmet compartment and leave it there. It shouldn’t get in the way too much.
While I was out looking for a solution to my helmet problem, I stopped by a water dispenser and filled up my Dromedary Bag. I’m so happy that I figured out that the cap on the bag was leaking and that my extra shower cap doesn’t leak. Ever since I switched the caps, the bag hasn’t leaked even a tiny bit, and it is so convenient. The Dromedary Bag is one of those items that is somewhat unique to my packing system, and yet I find it so useful as to be nearly indispensable. I love having it with me. I guess that is mainly because I do so much cooking in my own hotel rooms. And I need a lot of water for all the coffee I drink and the pasta I make. I keep wondering if I could just use tap water to boil pasta. Surely, boiling the water for pasta would make it safe for consumption. But I feel better using purified water or filtered water. Of course, it is an open question how pure the water is that comes out of those streetside water dispensers. I suspect that the filters don’t really do much of anything. But it ends up feeling better to use that water instead of water that comes straight out of the tap. And while I was at the water dispenser, I was near my popcorn seller, and I dropped by to pick up a couple of bags. I had one bag yesterday afternoon, and I saved the second bag for today.
And speaking of my Dromedary Bag, I’m now feeling like I made a mistake by not taking my mosquito net with me. For some reason, I decided to leave it behind in the box that I left with Steve. I certainly don’t need a mosquito net if I stay in hotel rooms like I have been recently. But I was doing some planning yesterday and looking for places to stay along the highway to Mae Hong Son, and I saw quite a few rougher kinds of bungalows, and in the comments, people mentioned mosquito problems a few times. As soon as I saw that, I started wishing I’d packed my mosquito net just in case. I left it behind because I was struggling with the weight of the gear I’m bringing with me. But a mosquito net really doesn’t weigh much. I’m thinking about contacting Steve today and arranging to drop by his place to pick it up. It would also be nice to meet up with Steve and perhaps have a coffee. And I could drop off the visor and leave it there instead of dragging it around the country with me. I could also grab some memory cards out of the box. I made another packing mistake in that when I left behind my Panasonic G85, I also left behind all my SD cards. I completely forgot that my Panasonic LX10 also uses full-size SD cards. And I have just one 64-GB memory card with me for that camera. I don’t seem to be using the Panasonic very much, but I feel a bit silly that I completely forgot to bring any memory cards for it.
It looks like I am talking myself into contacting Steve today and arranging to do all this stuff. Steve will be surprised to find out that I am still in Mae Sot. I actually invited Steve to come visit me when I was on my way to the Centra Hotel. Based on pictures I saw of the place, I thought it was much more luxurious and fancy than it turned out to be. I thought Steve and I could hang out at a nice cafe poolside or something. But once I got there, I realized that there wasn’t much point to Steve coming to the hotel. There was nothing to do there. We could sit beside the pool, but that was it. And after my experience with the vaccine certificate at check-in, I started to think that the hotel wouldn’t want random visitors wandering around the place anyway. There might be covid-related concerns, so I cancelled those plans.
After all of that activity yesterday, I finally settled in to edit some Planet Doug videos, but I didn’t get very far. The crazy thing is that I still haven’t finished even the video about my scooter ride from Mae Sot to Tak on my way to Sukhothai. This is the ride when I visited the Muser coffee shop and then the village where they grew the coffee and I had that strange experience at the temple with all the big dogs. I want to finish that video. And then I still have five more videos from Sukhothai. It’s insane.
I was thinking over the last few days how I can possibly fix my problem with the Planet Doug videos. I clearly can’t continue to make videos in the same fashion. My trip to northern Thailand is going to be four to six weeks long. And my normal pattern would be to treat every single day as the subject of a video. That would be an hour-long video diary of every single day. But that is not physically possible to accomplish. That has become abundantly clear.
I was just thinking about my first day, for example. I did some planning on Google Maps yesterday, and I realized that there are some hotels in a small town just 86 kilometers north of Mae Sot called Tha Song Yang. That makes it a convenient spot to spend my first night. Not only that, the Mae Usu Cave is just twelve kilometers north of that town. I could ride to Tha Song Yang on the first day and spend the night there. And then the next day, I could visit the cave. But how to take video of this experience? I can’t treat the first day like a normal video diary, because it would then take a full day to edit that video. The cave experience could definitely be a full video. But now the days and days of video editing are already beginning to pile up.
But what is the alternative? How can I take video of a road trip and find the time to edit that video and keep it all to a reasonable length? I guess you do that by just taking short video clips of the important points of a trip. But what is the point of that? What is the appeal of that? It would just be ten- or twenty-second snippets spread out over several days and then all strung together. I don’t see how that would work. I guess it is impossible to know in advance how that would work. The only way to do it is just to do it and work things out.
Just for fun, I think I’m going to finally watch Paddy Doyle’s video from Kamphaeng Phet. As I wrote about before, I find it interesting that Paddy Doyle and I both went to Kamphaeng Phet and recorded our time there on video for YouTube. But I spent around ten days there and ended up with a “Kamphaeng Phet Trip” playlist of twenty-seven videos totalling nearly eleven hours.
Paddy posted one 18-minute video and that’s all. Yet, I’m sure his one video got ten times more views than all twenty-seven of my videos combined. I’m very curious to see what his video is like. I’m going to watch it right now, and I’ll report back how it struck me.
Later:
Well, that was interesting. Paddy Doyle’s video is markedly different from my video efforts. But that is hardly a surprise. He only had eighteen minutes to account for an entire province. And even then, the first two and a half minutes were about fixing a flat tire on his scooter and the last three minutes were dedicated to drone shots of the waterfall with music. Five more minutes were spent talking about and exploring the waterfall. And that left seven a half minutes for his experience of the entire Historical Park. I dedicated twenty full minutes to just one random temple ruin that I happened to come across on my first day outside of the Historical Park itself. I essentially spent three times longer talking about just one small ruin than Paddy did talking about the entire city.
Obviously, with so little time, he wasn’t able to show very much or even say very much. He only went to Khet Aranyik (the Forest District of the Historical Park). He didn’t go to Khet Nai, the Inner District, at all. I’m not sure he was even aware that it existed. And at the Forest District, he visited one minor ruin and the three major temple sites: Wat Chang Rob, Wat Si Iryabot, and Wat Phra Non. However, he said nothing about any of them. He didn’t mention any of them by name. He didn’t even distinguish between them. He simply put all the video from the three main temples together in one video sequence. From his video, you wouldn’t know that they were different temples. He didn’t visit or mention the city walls or the moat or the museum or the Siva Shrine or Wat Boromothat or anything else. He didn’t really talk about any of the history or the significance of the city or the Ping River. But, of course, in terms of popularity and earning money and living a life, his approach was far superior. People just really like waterfalls.
The overall tone was also strikingly different between our efforts. In his video title and video description, he leaned heavily into the idea that Kamphaeng Phet was off the beaten track and a hidden gem and he used expressions like “bucket list” and a bunch of superlatives. That’s also very smart. But, obviously, it’s not something that would come naturally to me.