Friday, December 10, 2021
7:30 a.m. Room 21, Tha Song Yang Hill Resort Hotel
Tha Song Yang, Thailand
I definitely wasn’t happy in my first room at this resort. I was okay with the rough conditions. I’ve spent a lot of my life in rooms that were much worse. But it felt weird because of the price. By comparison, I paid 387 baht for my room at the RETRO Twin Home in Mae Sot. And that room came with air conditioning, furniture, a beautiful king-sized bed with luxurious bedding, a refrigerator, hot water, a balcony and more. And to pay 300 baht here for what is essentially an empty shell with nothing doesn’t make any sense. And I had to work quite hard to make the room livable. I had to rig up a way to keep the bathroom door closed, first with a strap and then a bungee cord. I did that in order to keep the worst of the mosquito swarm out of the main room. It took a lot of effort to put up my mosquito net to keep from being eaten alive. With just one electrical outlet near the door and far from the bed, it was awkward to plug in and charge my phones, batteries, and laptop. I had to keep all of my expensive electronics on the floor while they charged. The fitted sheet on the bed was one of those sheets that doesn’t really fit. The corners just popped free, and I’d end up sleeping on the cold vinyl of the cheap mattress, so I had to use my safety pins to hold the sheet in place. It was so cold last night that I had to sleep inside my new orange jacket. And with that cold, the blast of frigid water from the shower was a true wake-up call. But the worst thing, and the dealbreaker, was the lack of WiFi.
Therefore, in the morning, I decided to ask about moving to one of their other rooms. Before I did that, I fired up my DJI Pocket 2, and I recorded my thoughts about this hotel room and budget hotels in general and all the little gizmos I use to make them more comfortable. And I talked a lot about what I see as some odd attitudes on the part of hotel owners. For example, it has never made any sense to me that these budget hotel rooms don’t have tables and chairs. That cheap bungalow was actually quite large, and there was tons of space. For next to nothing, the owners of this resort could pick up a simple table and a couple of plastic chairs. And the addition of that table would add tremendous value to the room. It would be a minimal investment for a huge return in terms of customer satisfaction. There are a dozen things like that that a hotel owner could do to improve these budget rooms for next to no financial investment. I don’t understand why they don’t do it. Perhaps they just get complacent over time. Maybe the room once had a table and a chair, and when it broke, they just tossed it and never replaced it. And the guests kept coming and renting the room anyway. So why bother making the room better? Maybe that is what is going on.
I continued my thoughts about hotels in general and this hotel in particular as I went outside to find someone to talk to. I filmed the grounds and some of the other rooms and bungalows. I think I kept calling this place the Sornphet Hill Resort Hotel, but that isn’t the name. The Sornphet is the other place I looked at – the place that appeared to be closed. This place is simply the Tha Song Yang Hill Resort Hotel. I eventually found the same young man at a back building where some kind of kitchen is located. And he showed me one of the rooms for four hundred baht. And I instantly took it. And then I spent the next half hour moving all my gear from my old bungalow to this room. Luckily, they are right beside each other, and I simply had to walk a few steps.
This room makes much more sense. It is one hundred baht more expensive, but the increase in value is far beyond that. For one thing, the room is just generally much nicer. It is newer and cleaner and better furnished. My original bungalow was old and falling apart. The floor consisted of thin wooden slats, and they moved up and down as you walked around. The bathroom was full of cobwebs and bugs and spiders and mosquitoes. The bed in the cheap bungalow consisted of two mattresses pushed together. This room has one big mattress, so you don’t have to deal with that uncomfortable gap between them. There are hooks and hangers on the walls here, when there were none in the bungalow. The one light switch in the bungalow was far from the bed. In this room, the light switch is right above and beside the bed. That’s very convenient. The floor is hard cement with tiles on top, so it feels firm and it is quiet. You don’t sound like a giant as you walk around. In the cheap bungalow, every footstep created a large thumping sound, and the whole place would shake. On top of all that, my new room comes with air conditioning and hot water in the bathroom. And there is a WiFi signal.
Compared to some places I’ve been, even this room is overpriced. But I guess you are paying the premium for the setting. I would prefer to be right inside the town, but I can see how some people would like that this place is in the countryside and has more of a garden setting. And I see that a lot of Thai people treat their vacations as a kind of expedition. I see a lot of big four-wheel-drive vehicles packed to bursting with all kinds of camping gear, and for them, it is convenient to stay at places like this. There is tons of parking, and they can just drive their big vehicles right up to their front door. So I can understand why a countryside resort like this would be popular. Plus, most Thai people are traveling with a large group, and they pack as many people as possible into each room. That would bring the cost per person way way down compared to someone like me. It’s interesting that outside of backpacker towns, single rooms are a rarity. No hotel ever has a room for just one person. The idea of being by yourself is not a normal one in a culture like Thailand’s.
My original idea was to visit the nearby Mae Usu cave yesterday. However, that didn’t happen. I spent a good part of the morning writing in my journal and reliving the small adventures of my ride to Tha Song Yang. I also edited one of my journal videos. That took longer than I expected. And then I started working on the video from my scooter trip here. And then another hour or more was taken up with arranging to change rooms and then moving into this new room. And then I dove back into editing the latest video. So much time had passed by this point that I gave up on the idea of going to the cave. I decided to postpone that to the next day, which is today. I didn’t even go exploring in the town of Tha Song Yang. I spent pretty much the entire day here at the resort being a YouTuber. That is still something that feels odd and perhaps even wrong about my new YouTube hobby or YouTube identity. So much time is required to work on video that far less time is available to actually go out and do things. It’s challenging to find the right balance.
During the day, I also spent more time on Google Maps trying to recreate exactly how I went wrong on my ride here. That was a fascinating experiment. I still find it amazing that I can go back in time and by comparing the video of the actual moment with Google Maps, I can see exactly what happened. And, to be honest, I keep thinking that I want to go back now and see for myself what happened. What I mean is that before I leave Tha Song Yang, I want to take my scooter back into those mountains and ride back in the opposite direction to see exactly what the road would have been like. I can even make an expedition out of it by making it my goal to visit the waterfall. I like the idea. I would essentially leave all my gear in this room at the resort and go for a fifty-kilometer loop to the waterfall and back. And I would be able to see for myself exactly what the road conditions would have been like had I NOT made that wrong turn. I don’t think I would go all the way back to the exact spot where I went wrong. That might be too far. That would be something like seventy-two kilometers. And if the road is rough, that would be too much.
While looking at Google Maps, I also came up with another possible destination. I just happened to spot a village sitting in what could be a beautiful valley. From Satellite view, it has an astonishing setting. It makes me think of a kind of Lost World situation, a village that time forgot where dinosaurs could still be roaming the earth. It might not be quite that remote, but it gives that impression. I’m not aware of anything special being in this village. I don’t even know if it is well known for any reason. I think the place is called Ban Doi Kham, and it is in or near the Op Luang National Park, encircled entirely by mountains.
The idea would be to go to Mae Sariang first. And then from Mae Sariang, I could follow highway 108 to the town of Hod. And from Hod, I could do a day trip into Ban Doi Kham. It’s only eighteen kilometers from the main town. But that is a major detour off my route to Mae Hong Son. There are probably lots of spots to visit that are just as nice but closer to the route to Mae Hong Son. We’ll see. The more I look at Google Maps, the more enticing roads I see. The issue always appears to be places to stay. Those might be difficult to track down.
I have one last thought for this morning, perhaps, and that is that I really enjoyed the one bit of video I shot during my scooter ride of me just parking the scooter. I did that thing where you put the camera down at a certain spot and then you go away and return, pretending that you are arriving for the first time. It’s just a goofy technique to film yourself as if you have a film crew. It’s fake and staged, of course, but it actually looks good to me. I liked it, and I started to think that it would have been interesting to do that all along the scooter ride, particularly at those points where the road presented some challenges. At the very least, I could have captured a few seconds of me riding past and going up a very steep grade plus a few seconds of me bumping along some very rough patches of road. It would mean going ahead to set up the camera and then going back and redoing it, but I think the end result would be a lot of fun. I’m also thinking of this because when I review the video from yesterday, it starts to get very monotonous. There is a section at the beginning when I have the GoPro aiming at me as I’m riding the scooter and talking. But it feels very weird because you can’t see the scooter at all. There is no context. In movie terms, there is no establishing shot. It doesn’t feel interesting visually or cinematically. Perhaps doing some more of these establishing shots would make the videos much more interesting. Less talking, less POV, and more shots of the scooter itself on the road. Something to think about.