Sunday, December 19, 2021
6:30 a.m. Room 5
PS Riverview Guest House
Mae Sariang, Thailand
This is morning number two in the Dungeon. I’m just as happy and comfortable here as on my first morning. Perhaps even happier, because I had a shower with hot water. The mystery of the hot water heater has been solved. I spoke to the owner about it, and he came down to my room to take a look. I’m not sure what he thinks of me now, but the way to fix the hot water heater was to push the on/off button. The unit had a big, broad, silver on-off button shaped like a bar across the front. It even said “Push On/Off” engraved in the metal. But in all my investigating of the problem, I never saw this button. I never knew it was a button. I wasn’t wearing my reading glasses at the time, and this silver bar across the front was just a blur. I never noticed there was any writing on it. To an extent, I can be forgiven for not figuring this out on my own. I’d already had to turn on so many fuses and throw so many switches and turn so many dials to operate the heater that it never occurred to me that there was one more. After all, the main control dial also serves as an off/on button. When you spin the dial all the way to the left, it eventually clicks into the off position. When you turn it to the right, it audibly clicks on. It is also an on/off control. And since it had this on/off control, why would I look for a second one? When you break it down, it requires seven actions to get hot water. You have to turn on seven different controls in sequence to make the thing work. But now I know.
For breakfast yesterday morning, I went to a small restaurant that sits on a nearby corner. I went there for dinner on my first night and then again for dinner last night. So far, I’ve had three meals in Mae Sariang, and they were all at that same place. I like this place because it’s basic, inexpensive, and nearby. Plus, the menu has English on it. The owner speaks English and is very friendly and outgoing. I suppose there isn’t a lot of variety on offer. All the meals are prepared in the same manner: fried in a wok. So, they make a variety of similar dishes with the same ingredients and produce a range of fried rice, fried noodles, fried eggs, and fried vegetables combined in different ways. My favorite is a dish of wide noodles with meat and veggies. It is served in a bowl with a thick broth. For breakfast, I had white rice with a minced pork omellete. I’m pretty sure I will have the same thing again today.
After breakfast, I grabbed my GoPro and I went for a walk around my neighborhood. I intended the video to be a simple account of my morning plus a quick look at my surroundings. I started by talking about the water heater. And I expanded that story to include my trick for dealing with the various door latches and locks. These issues are common in all of these low budget guest house rooms around the world. And I suppose what I end up thinking about the most is how these simple problems never get addressed. A common issue is that the door will lower just a few millimeters on its hinges over time. And this means that the bar of the door latch will no longer slide into the unit on the door frame. It won’t be aligned anymore. I end up oiling the two sides and I grab the door and lift it with all my strength to adjust it just a bit in its hinges. But the owners should really monitor this and simply lower the latch portion that is screwed into the door frame. It would be easy to do. But they never fix the problem. It will go on for decades and will be a problem for every guest. Yet it never gets fixed.
Another problem for me is that the mirror over the sink is far too low. This mirror is ridiculously low. I understand that most mirrors in Asia will be mounted too low on the wall for me. I’m taller than the average Thai person. But this mirror is so low that I’m pretty sure every Thai man has to bend way down as well. I can’t imagine how anyone would place it there and somehow conclude that it was at the right height. The installer must have been unusually short. I’m thinking about staging a photo showing how far over I have to bend in order to see myself in the mirror. That might be a funny image for Instagram. I’ve been so busy lately that I’ve been completely ignoring Instagram and the YouTube Community Tab again. I started using those a lot while I was in Kamphaeng Phet and Sukhothai. But then I stopped as I got so busy.
My plan originally was to walk alongside the river to go to the Mitmaitri Coffee Shop. But then I decided to walk there along the riverside road and come back beside the river. That turned out to be a good decision because I was able to see the many guest houses on the road. At one of them, the manager invited me inside to take a look around. I think it was called the PP Guest House and Coffee Shop. It’s not even listed on Google Maps. But it was a big place with two separate sections. One part of the resort was on the east side of the road away from the river. It consisted of very nice rooms in wooden buildings that were connected by raised wooden walkways. As I noted in my video, it had a Swiss Family Robinson vibe, something like tree houses built inside a jungle. And on the west side of the road, beside the river, they had built an open-air coffee shop plus more rooms right down at the base of the hill as close to the river as you can get. The rooms were interesting because each one had been built around a tree. I’m not sure if the trees themselves were actually there and they had built the rooms around them or if they had brought the tree trunks in from somewhere else and sunk them into the ground deliberately to create this effect. Either way, the effect was striking, and I can see the rooms being popular for offering the experience of having a tree growing beside your bed.
As I walked along, I talked a lot about the foreigner-friendly atmosphere of Mae Sariang and how there was more English around than I was used to seeing in Thailand. A funny thing is that the very place I was most interested in visiting – the coffee shop – was the one place that had no external English signs and was difficult to spot. I walked right past it the first time. And I wasn’t terribly impressed with the place. It’s talked about as the best coffee shop in town, and much is made of the view it offers of the river. And I guess there is nothing wrong with the place. But I didn’t find it to be particularly nice. It’s a fine coffee shop, but I wouldn’t rate it among the best. The best thing about it for me was that the interior portion was air conditioned. I noticed that a lot of students took advantage of this to set up their laptops and tablets and phones to do homework and work on individual and group projects.
The coffee shop had a series of steps leading down to the river, and I was able to walk back down to the cement sidewalk there. As always, I was surprised at how unpopular and underutilized this riverside walkway was. Only the largest and fanciest of the riverside hotels even had access to the river. Along most of the distance of my walk, there was no possibility of even getting down to the river from the road above or from any of the guest houses there. The river face of these guest houses were all sealed and barricaded. It was the same at my guest house, and I wasn’t able to walk up from the river to my place. I had to continue past it and walk all the way down to the main bridge that road 1194 crosses into the city. Then I could make my way back up to the road and go back to my guest house. I have to walk around in a big circle to get to the river from my guest house. It’s odd that these guest houses and the city as a whole wouldn’t take more advantage of that riverside walkway.
Later in the day, I got in touch with a friend and asked him if he could ask his Thai wife to contact the owners of the bungalow in the small village I had passed through. She was successful, and I learned that the bungalows were fan-only and they cost 350 baht per night. And the owner required one day advance notice for a reservation. So I’m thinking about riding back to that place and spending a couple of nights there. As I noted the other day, going back is no small undertaking. It is ninety kilometers away over some very hilly terrain. But that can also be seen as a good thing. I get to ride on that road again with a guaranteed wonderful place to stay at the end of it. And then I can do the ride a third time knowing that I have this place in Mae Sariang waiting for me whenI return. The only question is where those few days would be best spent, there in that village or elsewhere in the north, like Mae Hong Son or Chiang Rai. I guess it comes down to scheduling and the best use of my time. But I’d like to do it.
I’m also still considering buying another portable hard drive. The problem is the price. Here in Mae Sariang, I found one IT store, and they have a couple of Western Digital My Passport external hard drives on the shelf. But when I asked about the two-terabyte model, they quoted me a price of 2,600 baht. And I bought my last Seagate two-terabyte drive for 1,750 baht. So the price here in Mae Sariang seems far too high. On Lazada, this same hard drive sells for around 1,700 baht. I don’t know why they are charging so much more. And there is the risk that their hard drives have been sitting on that shelf for years. I don’t want to take the risk.
I realized that I haven’t recorded any thoughts about my last day trip in Tha Song Yang. My plan for that day was to ride along the highway that goes into the Mae Moei National Park. This section of road was part of my original Mae Moei Loop idea. And since I had to stop part way and turn back, I never did see that highway and its scenic viewpoints. And those scenic viewpoints were the entire reason I came up with doing the loop in the first place. So I decided to ride the thirty kilometers to Mae Salid and then ride into the park as far as I could go and then turn around and come back. And while I was planning this trip, I spotted a temple inside a cave just a short distance off 105. And I decided to visit that place as well. I also thought about dropping by the Mae Usa Cave again and doing the climb up to the top along the trail. The day didn’t turn out exactly how I’d planned, but it was a good day nonetheless.
I set about recording myself from a distance on the GoPro again. This time, however, I incorporated the chest harness and I used both the Hero 7 and the Hero 9. I had the two cameras mounted sometimes on the chest harness, sometimes on the scooter, and sometimes at the side of the road or attached to road signs. That made the day somewhat complicated. The biggest problem with this technique was that the Hero 9 in the Ulanzi cage with the Mic Adapter on the RAM Mount was a bit heavy for the harness. When I leaned forward, the GoPro had a tendency to tilt way down. Plus, I now had the issue of my reading glasses banging against the GoPro and the harness to think about. Every time I try to do something like this, I run into so many technical problems. I often wonder if other people have these problems or whether it’s just me.
The cave temple was a big surprise, and I had a great, though somewhat overwhelming experience. It turned out that just as I arrived on my scooter, a birthday party was getting underway. A monk at the temple was celebrating his fortieth birthday, and people from the local communities had gathered to put on a breakfast party. At first, I thought I was witnessing a school field trip. There were a hundred or more young children there, and they seemed to have come there in a set of large white vans. There were long tables set up as well, and people were getting drinks and food. And there was a mobile ice cream seller on a motorcycle. The ice cream was very popular, and there never seemed to be less than ten people waiting in line.
Parking my scooter and adjusting my GoPro was complicated. I had so many different filming techniques going on that I didn’t know what I was doing anymore. I tried to take it slow and think the steps through, but I still got confused and I made all kinds of mistakes. And this was compounded by the number of people that came up to me and urged me to help myself to iced coffee and snacks of all kinds. One man and one woman in particular became my helpers, and I found myself trying to balance a cup of iced coffee, a noodle salad, a bamboo tube of sticky rice, a cup of water, and a layer cake all while trying to record some video of the events. I got so flustered. Simply living this kind of life is complicated enough. Trying to take video of it at the same time makes it more complicated by tenfold.
Luckily, there was a bench or two available, and I settled down on a bench with all my snacks arrayed around me. It was a bit of a circus, I admit. I was so distracted that I even made mistakes as simple as forgetting to hit the record button on the GoPro. I’d get all ready and start eating the noodle salad and talk about the noodle salad and do a whole thing, and then I’d realize that the GoPro wasn’t even recording. Then I’d start all over again, but I’d make a mistake with the audio. And on and on. And on top of that, of course I had no idea what I was talking about or what I was doing. I had been given a bamboo tube of delicious sticky rice, but I had no idea how to open it. The man indicated that I simply needed to peel the sections of bamboo back like peeling a banana. But try as I might, I couldn’t do it. I didn’t have the hand strength. The man saw me struggling, and he came back and demonstrated how you crushed the bamboo tube to break the seams along the side. Then it becomes possible to open it, and he peeled back a portion to show me. But even then, I had trouble. I simply didn’t have the proper technique or finger strength to open it up. I struggled so much that the tube ended up bouncing around and throwing rice in all directions. And even when it was open, I had trouble extracting the sticky rice. It really is sticky, and it sticks to the bamboo. How do you get it free? Do you gnaw on it with your teeth like eating corn on the cob? Do you dig away at it with your chopsticks and risk tossing it through the air when it comes free? It was very tasty, and I enjoyed it very much, but I was a sweaty and distracted dude by the time I was done with my breakfast.
From pictures online, I got the impression that the temple was inside a very large cavern with a pond around it. I’m not sure now why I thought that, because it turned out not to be true at all. The first place I looked was up on top of the cliffs. The woman who had spoken to me and told me that this was a birthday party for one of the monks, encouraged me to follow the trail to the top of the cliffs. She seemed to be indicating that that was where I should go and that the temple was up there. So, after I finished my meal, I started up the trail. I tried to film myself with the GoPro and I was partially successful in that. I would walk ahead and set up the camera, and then I would go back and repeat the walk for the camera. This got complicated, however, because at the very beginning, I saw a set of footwear. People had taken their shoes and sandals off when they went up the trail to the temple, so I thought I should do the same. I filmed myself removing my sandals and then walking up the first part of the trail. And then I had to wait for a long time because large groups of people were coming down, and the trail was narrow. I had to wait for them to pass. And I noticed that only a few of these people had removed their footwear. Only the older women had done so, and they were still wearing thick socks. Most of the people were still wearing their shoes and sandals.
Once these groups had passed by, I set up the GoPro to record myself from the back walking up the next set of stairs. But the steps had hundreds of very sharp stones embedded in them, and I soon found it impossible to take even a single step. It was far too painful. I had no choice but to stop and go all the way down to the bottom to get my sandals and put them on. And then my original GoPro footage would make no sense. So if I wanted to record this experience, I had to set up the GoPro a second time and record that entire sequence again, this time with me leaving my sandals on.
I continued this process all the way to what I thought was the top of the cliff. But things got weird because I never reached a place of any interest. There was no temple up there. There was no cave that I could see. There wasn’t even a scenic viewpoint. I passed a couple of small homes where some monks lived. And there was a small shrine on a platform or tucked away into the cliffs here and there. But there was nothing dramatic up there. I couldn’t figure out why anyone would make this steep climb up there. What was there to see or do? I looked around as much as I could, but I could make no sense of the web of trails up there. Eventually, I decided to turn around and just go back down. And now, with no big moment at the end, the whole GoPro sequence I had recorded felt dumb. Why make such a big deal of recording myself climbing up to the top of that cliff when there was nothing up there to see?
Back at where I had started, I looked again, and I think I found the actual temple. There was a small shrine inside a smallish cavern, and I think it was this cavern that was featured in all the pictures I had seen online. Somehow, the pictures had made it seem larger and more impressive. It was still interesting, but it was nothing like the temple and the cave I was expecting.
But I have to say, I was very lucky that I had gone to this place despite the unimpressive cave. And my timing was perfect. A funny thing is that I had so much trouble eating the food I was given that by the time I was done, the entire party was over and everyone was gone. I’m always a slow eater, I guess. I had barely started to eat my sticky rice and noodle salad when everyone around me was already finished and they were busy packing up the tables and cleaning up and going home. It felt like it had been a very short birthday party. Had I shown up here just a few minutes later than I did, I would have missed the party entirely. I would have had no idea that a party had taken place at all.
With all this unexpected activity at the cave temple, it was much later in the morning than I had planned by the time I left and got back on 105 on my scooter. I even thought about canceling my plan to go to the highway with the scenic lookout points. I felt like I’d already had enough small adventures for one day. But I’d made such a big deal out of this place in my mind and with all the talk about the Mae Moei loop that I felt I had to go. The day wouldn’t make much sense without it. So I headed to the north and rode quickly to the beginning of the road. I didn’t really understand what going up this road would mean. I knew there was a national park there, but I wasn’t clear on where the park was exactly or whether the road went through it or around it.
The first part of the road was great fun, as expected. It twisted and turned and climbed and provided nice views of the countryside. But then I ran straight into the official entrance into the national park, and all the main scenic viewpoints were still ahead of me. If I wanted to see them, I would have no choice but to go into the park itself, and that turned out to be a bit of a challenge. The main issue was that they wanted to see my vaccine certificate. At first, I was confident, and I eagerly took out my smartphone to call up the Mor Prom app. But it wouldn’t work. Apparently, it doesn’t work without an Internet connection, and I was unable to load it. And since this was a simple day trip, I hadn’t brought my full packet of documents. I had brought only my passport, and the paper certificate was back in my guest house room. I’ve since changed that, and I now carry the certificate and the yellow booklet inside my passport pouch so I have all of it with me all the time, but at that time, I was unable to show them any proof that I had been vaccinated. However, the guys there took me at my word when I showed them that I had the Mor Prom app and I told them that I had gotten two doses of Pfizer. They believed me, and they said it would be okay for me to go into the park as long as they got all my passport and contact information. But then came the issue of buying a ticket. And I didn’t understand any of this, but I had to buy three separate tickets for a total of 220 baht. That was a bit pricey considering that I had no plans to do anything in the park except ride along the road for a short distance and then turn around and ride out again. If this was just my normal life, I wouldn’t have bothered. But since I was shooting a video for YouTube, I decided to pay the 220 baht and go into the park.
I ended up being glad that I did so, because the viewpoints were honestly quite impressive. And they would have been even more impressive if the sun had been in a different spot in the sky. I could see that these viewpoints would be quite nice in the morning after the sun has burned off the fog. The mountains would have been lit up perfectly. However, this was now midday and getting into the afternoon, and the full light of the sun created a haze that obscured much of the view. But it was still quite nice.
My original idea was to continue along this road for as far as I could go on pavement. I wanted to see the exact spot where it turned into a dirt and rocky road. But by the time I reached the third scenic lookout point, I had had my fill of the experience. I decided to turn back and end the day. I officially ended my day of small adventures at a waterfall. I wouldn’t normally do that, but this waterfall happened to be right on the road. Checking it out was as simple as parking my scooter and walking just a few feet. I waded out into the water and chatted into the GoPro and officially ended the day as far as the video was concerned. Then I got back on the scooter and raced back to the guest house.