Saturday, December 18, 2021
6:30 a.m. Room 5 (the Dungeon)
PS Riverwiew Hotel, Mae Sariang
Thailand
A new room and a new beginning. Just as with my room in Tha Song Yang, I’ve started with one of their budget rooms. It costs 300 baht per night. And it comes with some interesting design challenges. There is a lot about the room that I like and which makes it much better than my first room in Tha Song Yang. For one thing, it has a bit of furniture. There is a simple wooden chair, a wooden stool, a small bookshelf, and a clothes rack. I was very pleased when I saw that. But, oddly enough, the furniture didn’t help with my complex technology-based lifestyle nearly as much as I thought it would. And that’s because this room has just a single bed rather than a large double or queen. I hadn’t realized how much I’ve come to depend on being able to spread all my gear out on the other half of the bed. If a room happened to have a bit of furniture, that was like a bonus to help me get super-organized and have my coffee beside me on the right side as I work. And this room has the furniture, but since I can’t put any gear on the bed, it ends up being worse than the room in Tha Song Yang. In fact, most of my gear has ended up just on the floor. The bathroom also has a hot water heater, but as I quickly discovered, it doesn’t work. So I’ve had cold showers so far. I may or not talk to the owners about it. I don’t mind the cold showers that much, and I’d rather not complicate my life with having the owners in here mucking about and then possibly needing to change rooms.
I’ve gone back and forth on whether this room is good value or not. From my personal perspective based on my life in general, it might not be good value. I tend to think of a room’s value not in terms of its nightly rate but how that rate translates into a monthly rent. And at 300 baht per night, this room costs 9,300 baht month. My room at the Green Guest House, for example, cost 3,500 baht per month. And I also compare it to other rooms that I’ve been able to get for the same price on a per night basis. My room at the P. Resort in Kamphaeng Phet, for example, cost 350 baht per night, and it was much nicer and better equipped and larger than this room. It even came with a fridge and air conditioning and working hot water. This room has none of those things. It is a fan-only room. Plus, this room at the PS is pretty old and, from a certain point of view, quite worn and dirty. I don’t mind the worn-out nature or the dirt. But in terms of comparing value, the room suffers again because it is so old and dirty. I’ve had similarly priced rooms that were new and clean.
However, and this is a big however, the room and the hotel have other qualities that add a great deal of value. And I end up being quite happy with it. For one thing, the name PS Riverview is not a lie. It sits right on the edge of a river. In fact, my window looks out onto a balcony sitting right above the river. I have a river view. And I like that. And the combination of the river view, the balcony, and the window gives the room an airy and spacious and luxurious feeling. While I was out walking around the town of Mae Sariang yesterday, I popped into the Leo Park Guest House. It had the look of a traditional backpacker guest house, and it appealed to me. I was curious how their rooms compared. I didn’t do a detailed inspection, but the room the guy showed me for 350 baht did look better appointed and newer and cleaner than this room. And I assumed the hot water heater in the bathroom worked. But, as at many backpacker guest houses, the door to the room was down a long, narrow, and dark hallway. The room itself was totally isolated from the outside world. It had no windows at all, and it presented as an interior and somewhat dark and gloomy cube. Once I saw that room and considered how it made me feel, I suddenly felt a thousand percent better about The Dungeon at the PS Riverview.
The town of Mae Sariang surprised me with its large number of hotels. A few are listed on Agoda, and I thought my choices would be restricted to those. And there weren’t many good options. There were a range of 3-star hotels that started at around 700 baht per night and then went up from there quickly. And then there was one place that was much cheaper, but at that cheaper price, all you got was a dorm bed. And with my complicated life, I can’t imagine staying in a dorm. As I rode through the town, I happened to pass one of the hotels that I saw on Agoda. It was called the Mitari 2. I think there are three different Mitari hotels in town. I think for most people, the Mitari would be a reasonable budget option. The rooms cost 450 baht per night. And from the quick glance, I took the room seemed fine. It was on the level of a basic but normal hotel. However, the room had the same enclosed, gloomy, cube-like atmosphere as the room at the Leo Park. It had no windows at all. Windows are very low on my priority list. I’d rather have a second electrical outlet or a simple bedside table than a window. I’d get more value out of those items than out of a window. But with the airy and open feeling of this room at the PS Riverview, those other rooms aren’t appealing.
I’ve been calling this room the Dungeon. And that contradicts all the things I said about how open and airy the room is. But the name Dungeon comes from the fact that it is a lower room. It is part of the foundations of the building, and as such, it has cement walls. It feels like a basement room, and I immediately thought of it as a faux prison cell or dungeon. The PS Riverview does have much nicer rooms on the first floor, but they were a bit expensive for me.
When I first rode up on my scooter and went inside, I was a bit disappointed. I was particularly disappointed in the tenor of my reception. An elderly woman was sitting in a chair in a cluttered lobby area. And she just happened to be one of those people with the look of gloom and death and unhappiness and annoyance permanently plastered on their face. She may have smiled once in her life, perhaps as a child, but perhaps not. She certainly did not smile at me. The face she raised to me when I entered was one of annoyance and fatigue more than anything else. I did not feel welcome. However, one thing I’ve learned in life is that you can’t judge a person solely on their facial expression. I do value a warm greeting and a smile very much. I feel much, much better about a hotel or a restaurant or a coffee shop if I get some kind of friendly greeting. But if you don’t get that friendly greeting, you can’t assume that this person hates you. Instead, you should focus on what they do. Look to their actions and make your judgement call based on that. And her actions were absolutely fine and helpful. In fact, she was much more helpful than the clerks at most hotels I’ve stayed at recently. She got a key and showed me one of the rooms on the first floor. This was a nice, large double room for 600 baht a night. The hotel itself does not live up to that kind of price, that’s for sure. I would never pay that much for that room. The room at the Mitari for 450 baht per night was nicer. And I assumed the extra cost of the room was because of the location and the view of the river and the countryside.
I asked the woman if she had a cheaper room, and she pointed downstairs. And she indicated the price of 300 baht with her fingers. I said that I was interested in one of those, and she went into the office and came out with a handful of keys. She then led me down some stairs to the bottom floor, the foundation floor, and she opened a series of rooms for me to look at. And I ended up in Room 5, the Dungeon, almost at the end of the balcony. So, in fact, this woman’s actions had been very helpful and professional: She was in the lobby of the hotel and available when I showed up. I didn’t have to go around looking for someone as often happens in Thailand. And she quietly showed me a range of rooms and communicated the price with her fingers. She did everything you would expect a hotel owner and worker to do. Admittedly, she did it all with a face of thunder and gloom. But I guess she can’t help her face. But the key moment in our relationship came later on in the evening. I had just returned from getting dinner at a little restaurant on the corner, and it was getting dark. I walked into the lobby of the hotel, and this woman and a younger man were sitting there. I greeted them, and then I turned to walk down the stairs to go to the dungeon. And this woman said something to the man and pointed to the stairwell. And this man got up and walked over and turned on a light switch. Then he went down the stairs ahead of me and turned on the exterior lights on the balcony. The woman had been concerned that I wouldn’t be able to see in the evening’s increasing darkness, and she made sure that the lights were turned on for me. Judge her by her actions, not by her demeanour. And she has been very helpful in her actions.
I mentioned that Mae Sariang surprised me with the large number of hotels and guest houses. It has also surprised me with a feeling of being foreigner-friendly. For example, the older woman at this hotel communicated the prices to me with her fingers. That might seem like common sense when you are dealing with a language barrier. But in my experience in Thailand, people are generally not capable of making that logical leap. When I’m trying to talk to someone and I don’t speak Thai and they don’t speak English, we generally hit a dead end. I keep expecting the shop owner or the hotel manager to switch tactics. I keep expecting them to use their fingers, sign language, type the price on a calculator or simply write it down on a piece of paper. But it never seems to occur to them. But this elderly woman instantly used her fingers, and it worked, and I appreciated it. Then I dropped by a computer store to find out how much a portable hard drive would cost. And the store clerk got out a calculator and typed out the price on it and showed it me. At the Mitari, as soon as I walked in, the hotel clerk at the front desk handed me a laminated sheet of paper with photographs of the rooms, details about the room, and the price of the room, all in English and Thai. The front desk clerk at the Leo Park did the same thing. And the neighborhood restaurant I went to had a menu in Thai and English. I can’t tell you how much easier this made my life. My landing in Mae Sariang has been so easy and smooth and enjoyable because of just this little bit of English and sign language at key moments.
I was very pleased by the foreigner-friendly nature of Mae Sariang, but I was also confused by it. Why was this town so different? And then while doing some reading on the Internet last night, I learned about the reason. Mae Sariang is an official part of the Mae Hong Son Loop. And I had never even thought about that. In all my research and examination of Google Maps, I never realized that Mae Sariang is one of the main towns that you pass through as you do the full loop. Going counterclockwise, a tourist would go from Chiang Mai to Pai and then to Mae Hong Son and then to Mae Sariang. And from Mae Sariang, you take 108 back to Chiang Mai. Therefore, everyone going round the full Mae Hong Son Loop would either be passing through and probably staying overnight in Mae Sariang. And with all those foreign tourists passing through town, Mae Sariang changed and adapted, and the businesses developed natural ways of communicating information through English or sign language.
My trip to Mae Sariang was an interesting one as well, full of twists and turns and a lot of beautiful scenery. The day began with a pure Three Stooges atmosphere, I must admit. My time in Tha Song Yang had fried my brain for some reason. I couldn’t think straight and I had no idea what I was doing. And I struggled greatly with my gear, particularly with my camera gear. The biggest part of the problem was my recent change in how I was shooting video. I’d started incorporating elements of shooting myself remotely from a distance. And doing that has confused the heck out of me. No longer do I just grab the GoPro and start talking. And there is no longer a straightforward linear progression from the start of the day to the end of the day. I have these ideas now of filming a non-verbal opening sequence and then officially starting the video at a later point on the road and in the day. And that sounds great, but it doesn’t come automatically. I end up paralyzed because I have no idea what to do anymore. I have no clue what I’m doing. I have too many cameras and too many shooting styles to choose from, and I end up stuck.
And then yesterday, I decided to use the chest harness. For two mornings, I’d done the thing where I filmed myself getting on the scooter, turning it on, and then riding out of the guest house property. I didn’t want to repeat that, and my idea was to use the perspective of a GoPro on a chest harness. I decided to capture my packing in a time lapse, then do an intro to the day from my bed, then an intro to my planned route through a Google Maps screen capture, and, finally, film the loading up the scooter and my actual departure from my chest harness. And then I was going to do a time lapse of the first 30 kilometers on the road until I reached Mae Salid. At that point, the plan was to ride up the mountain road a short distance to the first lookout point. The idea was that the sun would be up by then, and I would get beautiful views of the mountains, and there I would officially start the day’s video journey.
All of that ended up being so complicated that my brain just short circuited. I had no idea what I was doing or what followed what or how it connected. And I’d introduced a half dozen new bits of technology, and all of that, on top of my other recent changes, overwhelmed me with new problems. Some of the problems were old friends that I’d encountered before yet never fixed. And some were brand new ones. It was completely insane.
First, I had to figure out how to mount a GoPro on the chest harness again. And I went with the Hero 7. I had the Hero 9 on the chest harness the other day, but the full Hero 9 on the RAM Mount and with the Rode microphone was too heavy. It leaned forward from my chest when I bent over. The harness wasn’t strong enough to hold it firmly in place. And I didn’t want to bother with changing how the Hero 9 was mounted. Then I realized that I had two different cages for the Hero 7. I had purchased two Ulanzi cages long ago. One has the GoPro finger mounts. And the other one has a tripod screw thread. I realized that with those two cages, it would be much simpler to move the GoPro from one cage to the other rather than moving the cage itself. I put the cage with the tripod mount onto a combination tripod and grip. And I put the cage with the Finger Mounts on the chest harness. And I used the new swivel buckle mount that came with the Pocket 2 mount that Brett gave me. And to keep this rig as light and small as possible, I used a small GoPro thumb screw.
Unfortunately, this resulted in many problems and mistakes. For one thing, the swivel buckle mount wasn’t long enough. To work on a chest mount, the buckle has to be quite long so as to allow the GoPro to tilt backwards and therefore point upwards. But on this swivel mount, the GoPro was pointing downwards too much and the field of view wasn’t right. But I didn’t realize this until later. Plus, the swivel mechanism was too loose. It was so loose that the slightest pressure or bump would make it turn, and it kept going out of position. And then the GoPro thumbscrew was a nightmare. At a certain point on the road, I had to adjust things, and I couldn’t unscrew the darn thing. My fingers were frozen from the cold morning air, and I didn’t have the strength to undo the screw. I had to work long and hard to get it loose, and the pain to my fingers was intense. I hate those GoPro thumbscrews. I don’t know how anyone uses them or why GoPro still uses them.
Of course, by introducing a second camera, audio suddenly becomes a problem. The microphone is plugged into the Hero 9, not the 7. For most of the situations in which I planned to use the Hero 7, that wasn’t a problem. I wouldn’t be using any audio while filming timelapses anyway. And I thought I could film the loading of the scooter with musical accompaniment. But as the day developed, I found there were lots of times when it seemed convenient to let the Hero 7 keep recording from my chest and record audio at the same time. And then I could just use the mics that are built into the Hero 7. The audio isn’t great, but it might be good enough. However, that introduces the problem of my reading glasses. I’ve developed the habit of wearing my reading glasses around my neck on a cord. But that means the glasses are banging against the Hero 7 and the chest harness, and it creates a horrible clicking and clacking noise in the audio track. I never found a solution to this problem. When I encountered it before, I started just throwing my glasses around so they were hanging down on my back and not my chest. But then they were very difficult to retrieve and put on my face. And I forget they are there. So I put on my knapsack without thinking, and the weight of my knapsack snapped my glasses half. I tried all day long to find a solution to this problem, and I never found one. Needing reading glasses is a giant problem in life.
So much for the chest harness. I also am still struggling with available memory. And I had to do a lot of fancy juggling to find a memory card that I could clear, reformat, and then use with the Hero 9. I managed to take a Sandisk Extreme 128 GB card that I usually use with the Hero 7 and put it into the Hero 9. And that stupid card gave me read errors all day long. The GoPro froze constantly. I got file errors constantly. The GoPro kept having to rebuild and repair files. I had to pull the battery out constantly to get the GoPro unfrozen. And on top of that, I lost a bunch of files that couldn’t be repaired. That was a personal nightmare that went on all day long and nearly drove me permanently into GoPro Insanity. I think the psychiatric community could invent a new official mental illness called GoPro Insanity. It’s a real thing.
It was these struggles with the memory cards (again) that sent me out yesterday in search of another external hard drive. The problem is that most of my memory cards are still full with my videos from Sukhothai. I copied those video files to my one external hard drive. However, I’m reluctant to clear the memory cards because that would leave me with just one copy. And if the external drive fails, I’d lose everything. It’s a rule of thumb that you need at least two copies of everything until the final video has been produced and uploaded. And I started thinking that I need a second external drive. With a second drive, I can constantly clear my memory cards. That would make my life so much easier. I’d go out for a day and shoot video all day. Then when I returned to my guest house room, I’d copy the files to both external hard drives. And I’d do this through the MacBook, which is super fast and convenient. And once I had two copies of everything safely stored on two separate external drives, I can delete everything from the MicroSD cards and start all over with as many fresh cards as I need. The thing is that memory in external hard drives is much cheaper than memory in the form of memory cards. I can buy a 2-terabyte external drive for 2,600 baht here in Mae Sariang. To buy the equivalent in Sandisk Extreme MicroSD cards, would cost 12,600 baht, nearly five times more.
Another problem I faced just had to do with the weather and my clothing. Actually that is an entire world of problems. Obviously, I’m not properly outfitted in terms of clothing for a scooter trip like this. In fact, I’m not properly outfitted for life as far as clothing is concerned. I finally gave up on my thick pair of North Face pants. I’d gone through that 3-ring circus of trying to get a tailor to repair them. And that attempt had failed. I thought I could eke a month of use out of them, but in the few days in Tha Song Yang, the pants had torn open so badly that they were unwearable. It’s one thing to have a few fashionable tears in your pants at your knees. But these pants were so torn up that they were barely pants anymore. They had gone from fashionable to rags, and pointless rags at that. The massive tears in the pantlegs meant that the thicker material wasn’t providing any warmth or wind protection anyway. I might as well have just been wearing shorts. I decided to just throw them away. I tried to salvage a couple of useful pockets from them, but these pants were so heavily sewn with so many layers that isolating a useful pocket was next to impossible. It’s amazing how complex a pair of pants can be, especially a technical pair like that.
I ended up starting the day in my orange jacket and my thin pair of North Face pants. The funny thing is that dressed like that, I was quite hot and uncomfortable as I was packing up and getting ready to go. I got particularly hot because I was trying to film the process at the same time. I started to think I should pack away the orange jacket and forget about it. I might not need it. But as soon as I started riding on the scooter, everything changed, and I was quickly frozen to the core. The cold morning air was there. I just hadn’t noticed it while standing still or walking around. Once I started riding down 105 at 50 or 60 kilometers per hour, the icy wind cut through that orange jacket like it was a thin T-shirt. And my hands, wrapped around the scooter grips quickly became frozen claws. I started to shiver and shake, and my whole body tensed up from the cold. I eventually got so cold that I couldn’t move very much. My back and shoulders tensed up. My jaw clenched and stiffened. My arms and hands were locked into place. And I shivered and shook like I was naked in an Arctic blast. My body stiffened up so badly that I could barely do shoulder checks to monitor traffic behind me. And I got knots in my neck and shoulders such that I couldn’t move even when I got off the scooter and warmed up. Last night, I had a great deal of trouble sleeping because my back and shoulders hurt so much. And it was all from the cold.
The air was not only cold but also very wet. And this led to another series of cascading and connected problems. This series of problems began when the visor on my original helmet got so foggy in Mae Sot that I couldn’t see out of it anymore. And that problem appeared to be fixed with this new helmet. However, even though the visor of this new helmet is clear, it is also distorted. It provides a wavy and kind of house of mirrors view of the world, and I found that it wasn’t pleasing, and it wasn’t safe. I couldn’t tell through the distortion of the plastic whether the road was smooth or warped. I couldn’t tell if the warped nature of the world around me was real or just a result of the warp in the plastic. So I haven’t been able to ride with the visor down.
Yesterday, I thought I could deal with that by simply wearing the clear plastic safety goggles that I bought at Mr. DIY. However, those don’t work very well. A big problem is that they fog up very easily when I’m wearing a mask. My hot breath goes straight underneath the edges and fogs up the inside. I thought I could deal with that by pulling the mask down while I was riding. I would just pull the mask up when I encountered police checkpoints or stopped anywhere. But the air was so thick with moisture that within seconds, the glasses were covered in condensation, and I couldn’t see a thing. The helmet visor was the same. It was dripping with water. I eventually found a convenient garbage container and threw the glasses away along with my old pair of North Face pants, now turned into rags.
A related problem is that my GoPros got soaked with the wet morning air. I started the day with the Hero 7 recording a time lapse from the chest harness. But it was pointing too far down. And, much later, I realized that the camera lens had been covered in condensation anyway. I should have been wiping the lens clear of water from time to time, but I completely neglected to do that. Plus, I had the Hero 9 with the Rode Wireless Go mounted on the scooter and ready to go when I needed it. But as I was riding along, it occurred to me that they were probably also getting soaking wet. And I stopped to check, and they were so wet that they might as well have been underwater. I was very worried that they both had been damaged beyond repair, since they are not waterproof. And I did my best to dry them off and then I had to put them away until later in the day when the sun came out.
Just on and on and on, I had to fight with technology problems like this all day long. It was incredibly frustrating and tiring. And then when I got to Mae Salid, where I planned to ride up to the lookout point and capture that fabulous scenic vista to start the video, it turned out that the world was still socked in by morning cloud and fog. There was no point to riding up the mountain. I would just have seen more and more and thicker fog. I decided to just keep riding.
At one point on the road, I encountered a large dump truck coming up from the Moei River on my left. The dump truck bed was filled with people, and I had this idea that this truck had come across the river from Myanmar. I turned around and rode my scooter down that rough side road to see what the river looked like there. I had an interesting experience there. I parked the scooter and then waded out into the water to get to a wide riverside area that, apparently, was used by the local people as a convenient spot to get truckloads of sand and gravel. There were two pickup trucks there when I showed up. At one truck, a group of monks were filling sacks with sand. At another truck, a large family was gathered to do the same thing.
And when I reached the side of the river itself, it looked too deep to be able to cross by car or truck. And the terrain on the other side seemed too rough for any kind of road to exist. So I was probably wrong about that big truck coming from Myanmar. All the people in the back were probably a work crew that had filled the truck with sand and gravel. It was a very enjoyable stop, and I took advantage of the time to officially start the video, as I’d planned to do from the scenic lookout point. But by this point, I was so far into the day’s journey that it wasn’t really the start of anything. I was all mixed up about what I was doing with the video. I figured I’d sort it all out later on.
Farther up the road, I encountered a beautiful riverside village. I knew about this village in advance, and I’d even considered stopping there for the night. It’s only 53 kilometers north of Tha Song Yang, but it’s the place where 105 leaves the Moei River and heads inland. And I’d seen on Google Maps that there was a bungalow-style place to stay there. People spoke highly of it. And when I got there, I was stunned by how beautiful the region was. The area down by the river was particularly nice with rugged limestone cliffs carved up by the river. With the fog and early morning light, it struck me as similar to King Kong’s island home.
I wasn’t entirely sure about the name of the place. On Google Maps, it appeared to be called Mae Moei. But the signs on the highway leading to the place called it Ban Tha Song Yang. And a man in the village called it something else entirely. When I first arrived, I rode my scooter down to a kind of small harbor with a couple dozen local fantail boats pulled up on the shore. It was a gorgeous spot. From there, I rode to the official port. In normal times, I think this port is busy with boat traffic going back and forth from the equivalent port in Myanmar on the other side of the river. It’s closed now. And when I rode up on my scooter, I was faced with a dozen soldiers. A local man spoke some English, and he explained to me that a meeting was taking place that day between officials from Myanmar and from Thailand to discuss cross-border issues. Because of that, I wasn’t able to go to the water’s edge. But this man did confirm for me that there were bungalows available for rent in the town. By this point, I had made up my mind to stay in this town for a night or two. I couldn’t pass up a setting like that.
Unfortunately, the bungalows were situated in a farming area a kilometer or two outside of the town near the main highway. To get there, you even have to pass through the border patrol checkpoint at the edge of town. With the help of Google Maps, I found the bungalows quite easily, and I was pleased by what I saw. There were perhaps five bungalows arrayed at the base of a hill overlooking a wide open set of farmer’s fields. The problem was that I couldn’t find the owners or the managers. There is no office there. There were no people at all except for workers in the fields. I roamed around for a while and looked at the surrounding places, but there was no one there. I tried to get information from local people, but the best they could do was point back towards the town itself. Apparently, the bungalow owners were there, and I would have to find them in order to arrange to stay. All the complications of the day started to catch up with me here, and I found myself less interested in staying. I could do what people told me to do and go back to the village. But then what? How do I find the owners? Do I just ride up and down the streets aimlessly? I started to picture myself doing that for two hours, finally finding the owners, and then learning that the bungalows were not open or that they were too expensive. With that thought in my mind, I gave up and simply left. I was suddenly in the mood to just get back on 105 and ride the rest of the way to Mae Sariang. The hope was that Mae Sariang would be easier and more convenient to deal with than Tha Song Yang and now this village.
I struggled with that decision. I could feel that this village was a place where I should stay. It seemed a special place. But I was annoyed by the difficulty of finding the owners of this bungalow and how none of the local people seemed remotely interested in or capable of helping me. And my annoyance was compounded a short distance later when I came across a nice-looking coffee shop at a scenic spot at the side of the road. This was the first kind of tourist-friendly cafe I’d seen for a long time. And I quickly pulled over and got off my scooter. But if I was hoping for a warm smile of welcome and a hot cup of good coffee, I was quickly disappointed. There was one woman working there, and she ignored me. She didn’t look up when I arrived. She was doing something with a blender, and she just kept at her work and kept chopping and blending and doing whatever she was doing no matter how long I stood there waiting. I was right in front of her on the other side of the counter, but she never acknowledged me. When she was done with the blender, she just turned and walked away and sat down. With that, I just turned around in my turn, walked back to my scooter, and left. I hear a lot about how friendly and helpful Thai people are, but I often encounter situations like this that tell a different story.
The ride from there to Mae Sariang was much more remote than I was expecting. I guess I didn’t even have clear expectations. So I would have been surprised by anything. But this road was a pleasant surprise. The road itself was smooth and paved the entire time. It went up and down steeply over wild hills, and provided a seemingly endless series of beautiful views. I raced along it, happy to be on the road and making progress to the north. But I was also a bit bothered by leaving that village. It seemed such a special place, and those bungalows offered a rare opportunity to actually stay in such a special place. As I rode along, I started to formulate a plan in my mind that might allow me to go back there. In fact, at this point, the next morning in Mae Sariang itself, I’m starting to think that it might even work out better this way.
The plan I was formulating was to go to Mae Sariang and then find someone who can track down the owners of the bungalows for me by phone. And if this is successful, then I can ride back to this village. To be honest, it’s a bit farther away than I’d like. It’s 90 kilometers away. So, returning there would mean essentially a 180-kilometer detour backtracking to a place I’d already been. However, I still might do it. And it might be a better plan than I originally thought, because yesterday, I was kind of worn out with the difficulties of Tha Song Yang. I’d had essentially no access to the Internet for a long time. And this was becoming a problem. If I’d stayed in that village for a few nights, I’d still have had no Internet access. I can spend some time here in Mae Sariang uploading videos and getting reorganized and relaxing in this relatively modern and convenient town. And once I am all caught up and feeling relaxed and my batteries are recharged, I can ride back to this village. I could even turn the 90-kilometer ride over the mountains into a new experience. On my first trip to here, I kind of just raced over them. I did stop at a couple of side roads that offered to take me to caves and mountain peaks, but the roads looked too rough. I wasn’t in the mood for that kind of challenge. But on a return trip, knowing that one of those bungalows was waiting for me, maybe I could relax and enjoy the scenery more. And I could charge up my phone with a few gigabytes of data to carry me through the time in the village without internet. I could even bring food with me if I thought that was necessary. And I’d have a known quantity waiting for me back at Mae Sariang in the form of this guest house. The whole trip would be stress free and I could focus on the best parts of the experience. And that region around the village was the most beautiful part of the whole trip so far, and I just skipped over it. It would be nice to go back and sink my teeth into it at least a bit more.