Monday, December 27, 2021
6:30 a.m. Room B4
Muangchaem House
Mae Chaem, Thailand
I’m happy to report that all my worries about visiting the Doi Inthanon National Park were unnecessary. I had a great experience and a great day. It was a wonderful Christmas Day.
I was awake quite early on Christmas morning, but I eased slowly into the day. I didn’t hop on my scooter as soon as I woke up. I took my time and enjoyed the morning. I went out for a walk in Mae Chaem in the thick morning fog and got something to eat. I enjoyed a cup of coffee. And then, when the time felt right, I got on the scooter. And I did attempt a little bit of the new technique of filming myself from distant perspectives. I recorded my process of getting on the scooter and leaving my guest house parking area by setting up the camera in various spots. And then I set up the camera out on the streets at certain corners to capture some video of myself riding by. For what could end up being my favorite shot, I attached the GoPro to the rounded traffic mirror at a blind corner. Instead of aiming the GoPro at the street, I pointed it backwards at the mirror. The GoPro captured the full fish-eye view of the traffic mirror, which means it could see down both streets even though they were at sharp angles to each other. And the GoPro filmed itself at the same time.
I kept up this habit for a little bit down the main street of Mae Chaem as well, just so I could capture the entire sequence of leaving my room, leaving the small streets around my guest house, and then getting on the main streets of the city. I can’t remember now if I talked at all during this sequence. I don’t think I did. I waited until I had left the city streets behind completely and was entering the small road to the park itself. And there, I attached the GoPro to a street sign. I turned around and rode back into Mae Chaem, and then I rode back to this small road and stopped my scooter right at this street sign in front of the GoPro. And there, I set up the day and talked about where I was going.
After that, I think I talked a bit more while I was riding. The atmosphere was spooky and beautiful with thick fog covering the entire world, and I think I talked about that and how it made sense not to try to see the sunrise. With this fog, you wouldn’t have been able to see the trees around you let alone the sunrise from the top of the mountain. I enjoyed these sequences so much that I then went a bit crazy and I mounted the GoPro in the middle of a corn field where the corn had been harvested. I then returned to the road and walked through the brown stalks of corn to the GoPro and talked a bit about the National Park and where I was going. To do this, I had to attach the GoPro to a dried corn stalk, and that took some effort to get the angle right, find a corn stalk that was strong enough, and then adjust the GoPro Jaws Flex Clamp to attach properly. While using these techniques, I’ve started to think a bit like a film director concerned about coverage – getting all the angles you need and perhaps some extra angles just for safety. You may not use all of the shots you take, but it’s nice to have them just in case. So after telling my story on camera, I turned away and just walked out of the corn field while leaving my GoPro on the corn stalk. That captured the view of me walking away. But, of course, I then had to turn around and go back and get the camera. But instead of just turning off the camera, I held it in front of me and filmed all the corn ahead of me as I walked through it. If I’m walking through this section anyway, why not film it just in case I can use it? And I even chose a route that took me through the thickest patches of corn just to make it more interesting visually. This gives me several perspectives on the same scene to choose from and mix together in editing.
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how to deal with long periods spent on the scooter on the road. I was there actually riding the scooter, so, for me, the ride was spectacular. The road was extremely beautiful and interesting, and made more so by the early-morning fog and the cold. Therefore, I could sit on the scooter and enjoy the ride for two or three hours. But that doesn’t mean anyone wants to watch a two-hour video of that ride. A video of an experience is not the same thing as the experience itself. So, how do you capture the mood of that ride, the fun of the road, and the beauty of the scenery on video? I’ve been doing a lot of time lapse video to achieve this. And that makes a type of sense. It is one way of showing a lot in a relatively short amount of time. And the high speed shows how curvy the road is. But the time lapse was really my only idea for shooting video of the road. It’s all I could think of doing. But now at least I have this second technique to fall back on: mounting the camera at the side of the road and taking video of myself from a distance as I ride by. When I set out in the morning, I didn’t think I would do any of this. I wasn’t in the mood, and I didn’t want to take the time. But once I was riding, my mood changed, and when I hit the very first very curvy section of road, I stopped to film myself. This turned out to be quite the challenge.
For one thing, there was a surprising amount of traffic on the road, and stopping at sharp curves to set up the GoPro was a little dangerous. And then I had to make constant u-turns across the road as I would go back to ride past the camera and then turn around again to retrieve the camera. And I made things even more complicated when I realized that I could film myself in two directions from the same physical spot. I could aim the camera back along the road and film myself approaching the camera. But then I could simply point the GoPro in the other direction and repeat the process to capture video as I rode past it. And that meant returning to the same spot on the road several times. It also meant thinking about audio. I had to think carefully about where to place the microphone on my body so that it was facing the GoPro at the correct time. When I was riding up to the GoPro, the microphone had to be on my chest. But when I planned to use video of me riding past the camera, the microphone had to be on my back. I made a mistake this time because I had this idea of keeping the microphone more on my shoulder than on my back. I thought that this would capture audio of both the approach and going past. But I forgot that this would create wind noise in the microphone. I may not be able to use the audio from these portions because the wind noise was so loud. I’ll probably have to mute all of the video and just play music.
Once I started this process on the road, I kept it up for far longer than I planned. I was only going to film a couple of turns. But once I finished those two turns, I thought I might as well add the next one. And then I did another and another and another. And I was filming each turn twice. Plus, I had the Hero 7 on my chest filming a time-lapse of the entire time. And, finally, when I thought I had recorded enough of the riding, I rode all the way back to the beginning and reshot the whole thing in one long sequence from the beginning in real time in one unbroken shot. And I mounted the Hero 7 down low on the foot pegs of the scooter to capture that angle. And on top of all this effort, I had to wait for long periods of time between shots to make sure there was no traffic directly behind or directly ahead of me. I had to do that because I needed the shots to line up. I couldn’t edit the shots together if in one shot there were several pickup trucks going past while in the other, the road was empty. The shots had to match.
I also experienced a small amount of concern about leaving my GoPro unguarded at the side of the road. I really shouldn’t worry about that overly much. The GoPro looks prominent to me because I know where it is. But for anyone riding by on their own scooter or in a truck, they would have very little chance of spotting it. In fact, there were many times when even I didn’t see it. And I had a moment of panic when I thought someone had stolen it. I’d ride past the area where the GoPro was located, and it would be gone. My brain would race through the vehicles that had passed, and which ones might have had enough time for the driver to stop, snatch the GoPro, and keep going. But when I turned around, I’d suddenly see the GoPro exactly where I had put it. It’s just so small that I had missed it the first time.
Other factors made this filming sequence even more challenging. For one thing, the areas I wanted to film were always quite hilly. And that meant parking my scooter on quite steep sections of road when I had to move the GoPro. The scooter wanted to always roll forward or roll backward, and I had to be very careful about where I stopped and how I set the kickstand. The road was also quite narrow, and I had to park as far over to the edges of the road as I could, and at the edges, the road was slanted, and the scooter wanted to tip over. Twice, I caught it just before the whole thing fell over. This happened quite dramatically one time on my ride from Mae Sariang the previous day. I was in the middle of changing the battery on the Hero 7 when the scooter suddenly started to fall over. The tendency was even greater that day because I was carrying my full backpack, and that made my scooter top heavy. I reacted instinctively to grab the scooter before it fell over, but that meant ignoring the GoPro in my hands. And the GoPro went flying through the air as I released it, and it smacked into the sign and then went sailing off into the bush. Once I had secured the scooter in a safer position, I had to spend a minute or two combing through the thick bush to find where the GoPro landed. Luckily, I found it, and it wasn’t damaged.
I have to say that doing all this with two GoPros adds considerably to the mental and physical energy required to get through a day. Running just one GoPro normally can be quite stressful, as it constantly does glitchy things, plus I have to change the battery and memory card. Adding a second GoPro doubles the amount of problems I encounter. If just one GoPro leads to GoPro Insanity Syndrome, imagine what running two GoPros does. It’s lunacy. It got crazy at times. Right after I had the experience of the scooter nearly falling over and the GoPro getting lost in the bush, I set up the Hero 9 for another shot as I rounded a wide curve. That one was a real struggle because there was so much traffic. And the traffic was moving fast. Dangerously fast. It took a long time for an opening to appear when I could safely get on the road again. And the thing is that I can’t just ride a few meters away and turn around at any old spot. I have to keep riding back down the highway until I find a spot where I can turn safely. And that isn’t always easy. I had to go around the curve and then around two more curves before I finally got to a wider spot on the road where I had sufficient view in both directions to monitor for traffic and time my u-turn so I could safely get across. And then I had to wait for a long time for a break in the traffic. Huge trucks were on this highway, and they had to climb up slowly in their lowest gear. And I had to wait for several of these trucks to go by before I could finally do my run past the camera. And I couldn’t just wait until the trucks passed me. I had to wait a sufficient time until I felt they had passed the GoPro. And the GoPro was far away, around several corners, far out of my sight. And by the time, I felt the timing was right, another vehicle would be coming up behind me and I’d have to wait even longer.
Finally, there was a break in the traffic, and I rode up the highway and past the GoPro. I did my usual u-turn back to the GoPro after that. And when I got there, I discovered that while I was waiting, the battery on the GoPro had died, and it hadn’t recorded anything. All of that time and effort had been for nothing. It had been an unusually dangerous sequence to record, so I decided not to even try a second time. I just gave up and got back on the road.
I have no idea if any of this video from my Mae Sariang ride or my Christmas Day ride will work out. I haven’t seen any of it yet. And I have so many shots from so many different perspectives that I don’t know what I will do with it all. But my sense, to be honest, is that it won’t be very interesting. And that’s because on these road sequences, the field of view is so great. My scooter looks very small in the video. And for that reason, it won’t be very dramatic or interesting. I liked the shots I took like this on the rough roads leading to the river near Tha Song Yang. But in those cases, the GoPro was very close to the narrow path and to the scooter. And I was going very slowly. On these roads, I’m going much faster, and I think the scooter will appear as just an uninteresting speck in the frame as I zip past. But we’ll see.
I shot the initial long sequence on an earlier portion of the road as I was leaving from Mae Chaem. And it turns out that that might not have been the right choice. Later on, the road became much narrower and perhaps much more interesting. The road entered an area of thick forest. The trees were right at the edge of the road the entire time, and the branches closed overhead to form a kind of leafy roof. The sensation was of riding through a tunnel of trees. And filming myself riding through curvy sections of that road would probably have been more interesting visually. But by then, I had used up what energy I had for that kind of video, and I was more in the mood to keep riding and get to the mountain.
The mountain itself, Doi Inthanon, was quite a surprise. At one point, I found myself at the top of a hill. The road went steeply down from there, and I got what I thought was my first clear view of the mountain ahead. I parked the scooter and used my GoPro to record the moment. I had no idea what this mountain actually looked like, so I didn’t recognize it from its shape. But I could just make out two large pagodas, and I was certain those were the matching Grand Pagodas on the mountain.
The shape of the mountain was a surprise. It didn’t have a mountain shape at all. It barely had the shape of a hill. It was closer to a mound – a very long and gradual mound. The two pagodas were clearly visible at one end of this mound. And then the mound rose upwards slowly from there to what I assumed was its highest point – 2,565 meters above sea level. Though it wasn’t dramatically mountain-like in appearance, it was still impressive. It stood separate from the terrain around it and was prominent because of that. And that word is suitable, because as I mentioned a couple of times in the video, Doi Inthanon is what they call an Ultra-Prominent Mountain. I don’t really understand the definition of this type of mountain, but it has to do with the relative height of its peak compared to the land or peaks around it. There has to be a minimum of 1,500 meters of increase in elevation to reach the peak from the surrounding land. The idea, I guess, is that it has to stand out from its surroundings. And Doi Inthanon, despite its rather ordinary mound shape, definitely stood out.
In fact, Doi Inthanon is so prominent visually that you can see it from almost anywhere. I realized later on that I could even see it from my guest house. You can see it from anywhere in the town of Mae Chaem. You can see it anywhere on the roads leading in and out of Mae Chaem. You can see it almost constantly as you ride along the roads from Mae Chaem to the National Park. It was in full view almost the entire time. I just didn’t realize it. I thought that moment on the steep hill was the first time it came into full view, but it had been in full view the entire time. I just didn’t realize it because I didn’t know what the mountain looked like.
I had a funny moment when I arrived at the road that actually went to the top of the mountain. The way the geography worked out, the intersection of my road and that road was about a hundred meters beyond the official National Park gateway and checkpoint. If I hadn’t been paying attention, I could easily have just turned left and gone up the mountain without buying a ticket. But I stopped at the intersection to get my bearings and take some video and some pictures. And as I was looking around, I noticed the busy park entrance to my right. I realized right away that it was the park entrance, and I would have to go there to buy my ticket. The park staff there had also spotted me. And I was clearly a tourist on his way to the top of Doi Inthanon, and they shouted at me and waved at me to come over and buy a ticket. I waved at them and gave them two or three big thumbs-ups to indicate that I understood. They didn’t seem to trust me, however, and they kept waving at me and shouting at me. They clearly didn’t want me making a sudden dash for the mountain without paying the 300-baht entrance fee. A funny thing is that I probably could have done just that. I did buy a ticket, of course, but no one ever asked to see it. There were no checkpoints anywhere on that part of the mountain. So if I hadn’t bought a ticket, it wouldn’t have mattered. At no point was I asked to show that I had one. Had I just turned left without stopping, nobody would have been the wiser. The only way it could have mattered is if the staff at the gate were serious enough about this ticket business to hop on a motorcycle and chase me down. But, of course, I had no intention of making a break for it. Once I had taken my video of the signs at the intersection, I went over to the ticket booth and bought my ticket. It was 300 baht for me and 20 baht for my scooter. The entrance was surprisingly busy. I got the impression that most of the vehicles coming through already had tickets. I didn’t realize this at the time, but this national park is quite close to Chiang Mai. In fact, Chiang Mai is much closer than Mae Sariang, where I had come from. It’s 152 kilometers from Mae Sariang to Doi Inthanon, but only 87 kilometers from Chiang Mai. So the most common way for people to visit this national park is on day trips from Chiang Mai. And these people would have bought their tickets at a different national park entrance already. And at this particular gate, they just had to show their tickets, not buy them. I noticed that despite the large number of vehicles lined up to pass through, no one was ever getting out to buy tickets. When I went up to the window to buy my ticket, I was the only person there.
From that point, the summit of Doi Inthanon was only nine kilometers away. My original idea was to ride to the top of the mountain first and then slowly make my way back down. But since the summit was only nine kilometers away, I changed my mind. Since the summit was so close, I figured that no matter how slowly I made my way to the top, I would still have enough energy to appreciate it when I got there. So I decided to visit the other attractions on the way up first and make my arrival at the summit the official or ceremonial end of my day.
The first places I encountered on my way up were the two large pagodas. I didn’t have high expectations for this visit. How special could more temples be? Thailand is not exactly experiencing a shortage of pagodas. However, I was pleasantly surprised. I had a sense that these pagodas might be special when I found the entrance a beehive of activity. There were motorcycles and scooters and cars and trucks parked everywhere. And a steady stream of people were flowing past either on foot or packed into the back of a type of shuttle bus. I didn’t understand this at the time, but there was a parking area for these pagodas 500 meters up the main road. And since this parking area was so far away, the temples had set up a free shuttle service to ferry people from their cars to the temple grounds. I don’t know if this only takes place at busy times like Christmas. Perhaps at other times, it is possible to ride your scooter or drive your car all the way up the hill to the temples. There is a parking lot up there as well. But it was clearly far too small to accommodate all the visitors there that day. Everyone was expected instead to park their vehicles somewhere else and then enter the temple grounds on the shuttle buses or on foot.
I parked my scooter at the entrance beside a bunch of other scooters, and then I paid 40 baht at the entrance and started walking up. A funny personal note, and one that is indicative of just how crazy GoPros make me, is that I did all of this while still wearing my scooter helmet. I walked all the way up the access road to the temples with the helmet still on my head. And I didn’t even realize it until I got there. I’m so distracted these days. Running the cameras and taking video occupies 90% of my brain, and I’ve become so forgetful about other things. And because of that, I found myself carrying my helmet around with me the entire time I was at the pagodas. It was too far to bother going all the way back down the hill to leave it with my scooter.
The temple complex was far grander and far nicer and more developed than I expected. And it offered tremendous views of the surrounding scenery. The two separate pagodas had their own names, but they were much too complicated to commit to memory. I didn’t even try to ever say them or remember them. On Google Maps, they are referred to as Grand Pagodas. And that’s the name my brain went with: Grand Pagoda 1 and Grand Pagoda 2. The access road ended at a large parking area with some restaurants, bathrooms, and a coffee shop. There were landscaped hills and flower gardens and fountains everywhere. And the two grand pagodas towered over everything. It was a very impressive place, and I enjoyed wandering around very much. The whole place was connected in some way with the Thai Air Force. In fact, it appeared that the Air Force had built and paid for the entire thing. I don’t know why the air force of a country would build its own temples in national parks, but it does feel like the sort of thing that would happen in Thailand. And, of course, the pagodas were dedicated to and named after various members of the royal family. I talked about that a little bit on video, but, to be honest, I didn’t pay a lot of attention to the facts. It has become commonplace for places in Thailand to be named after various members of the Royal Family. It’s so commonplace as to be expected and not even noteworthy anymore. To say that this or that dam or river or temple or forest or park or mountain or street is named after a royal family member is expected. It’s just what they do here.
I wasn’t fully committed to the process, but I did make some attempts to take video of myself as I walked around. I didn’t have a clear idea in my head of how I would capture the experience of this temple on video. I didn’t have a lot to say about the place. And I didn’t know how I would use the video, but I occasionally put the GoPro down on its little tripod and I filmed myself walking around. I filmed one sequence of me walking over a bridge over a pond, another of me walking around and admiring Grand Pagoda 1, and a third one of me walking down the steps. Again, I haven’t seen any of this video, so I don’t know how useful it will end up being. My feeling is that I will end up being too small in the frame for the video to be very interesting. I think that is the last time I tried to do that on this visit to Doi Inthanon. In the back of mind, I had had the idea to use this technique when I got to the summit itself. The summit, after all, was to be the highlight of the day. But by the time I got to the summit, I had worn myself out using this technique. And I just stopped doing it.
There were a few other attractions between the Grand Pagodas and the summit. I noted on the map that one of them was a part of the National Observatory. It was marked on the map as a scenic lookout point, and I assumed it would offer beautiful views of the surroundings. But, perhaps logically, it didn’t at all. After all, the telescopes were placed there, not because that spot was a good vantage point for viewing the surrounding countryside. That vantage point was all about looking at the stars. So it made no difference if it was possible to see anywhere but straight up.
When I first turned my scooter up the short access road to the observatory, I worried that it wasn’t even open to the public. It clearly wasn’t popular. No one was there but me. The road was empty. And there was a guard at the gate to the complex. But he indicated that I was free to go in and then climb up to the observatory itself. There wasn’t a great deal to see there, I suppose, but I enjoyed the visit very much. I probably got more out of that personally than out of the Grand Pagodas and the summit. It was clearly a real place of science. Real work was going on there. The domes covering the telescopes weren’t open, of course. They would only open up at night for viewing the stars in darkness. But it was interesting to see them. They looked like space helmets or the heads of futuristic robots.
To my surprise, I was able to go inside the building itself and look through windows into the control room. The room was jammed with all the computers and fancy scientific equipment you’d expect to see. Of course, I had no idea what I was looking at. And there was just one person in there. But it was interesting. And they had extremely nice public bathrooms there. That was another pleasant surprise. I joked on video that it would get special mention on George Costanza’s app for locating all the best bathrooms.
The other big attraction on the way up to the summit was the Kew Mae Pan Nature Trail. People speak highly of this short hike, and I wanted to do it. However, I also read that you might have to wait a long time for a guide to be available. You have to hire a guide for this trail. Apparently, this costs 200 baht and you can have up to ten people in your group. Being Christmas Day, I thought the trail might be overly busy, and I was right about that. The parking area was a circus. It was more Disneyland than nature trail. I didn’t actually stop there and look into it, but from the number of people around, I assumed it would be impossible to book a guide for this hike. I looked around the parking area, and then I kept riding to the summit.
I was glad that I had reversed my original plan and kept the summit for the last event of my trip. And that’s because no matter how interesting it is intellectually to be at the highest point in Thailand, it isn’t that dramatic in real life. At some point, I imagined I would be standing at the spot where the sign said it was the highest spot in Thailand. And that would be about it. One assumes that while standing on the peak of Everest, you know that you are standing on the highest mountain in the world, but you also get the fantastic views of the Himalayan mountain range around you. At Doi Inthanon, at the highest spot, you are just standing on a simple trail in some forest. There would be nothing particularly grand or beautiful about it. And that’s pretty much how it turned out.
I still had an interesting time there, though. It was a weird place with an interesting mix. The parking area was packed. And there was a big sign there welcoming you in English to the highest place in Thailand. To my surprise, there was a large scientific complex there as well. There were lots of domes containing telescopes, and the signs indicated that this was part of the National Observatory and also held a Neutron Monitoring facility. You could enter this area through a narrow gate, and both sides of this lane were lined with market stalls selling snacks and drinks and souvenirs. I found that a bit odd. I wondered why this small but bustling market was located where it was – directly inside this clearly very sensitive area. I had my personal experience of how sensitive it was when a soldier came up to me at one point and requested that I delete some of the video I had taken. I was just walking along and taking video of the telescopes around me. But, apparently, I was also taking video of some sensitive military structures. These were just nondescript triangular buildings. I think in the video I called them quonset huts, though I’m not very sure of what a quonset hut is. A soldier saw me pointing my GoPro towards those buildings. They were right beside the telescopes, so they just naturally got into the frame. And this soldier, in quite clear English, asked me to delete that video. He tried to explain what I could take video of and what I couldn’t record, but I didn’t quite understand what he said. A funny thing is that all these places are mixed up together. Right beside these military buildings and mixed in with all the telescopes was a public temple. The soldier explained that I could take video of the temple, and he said I could take video of the telescopes. But I wasn’t allowed to take video of the quonset huts. Yet, the huts were right in between the telescopes and the temple. With the wide field of view of a GoPro, you just naturally get all of that in the same shot. In fact, as I was leaving this area, after deleting the offending video clip, I did a bit of vlogging, and I was speaking into the camera. But, of course, the telescopes, the temple, and the military buildings were all in the shot directly behind me. Later on, I visited another shrine up on a high platform. It was a very popular spot for Thai people to pose for selfies. And as they did so, the entire National Observatory was clearly visible behind the shrine. Yet, the barbed wire fence surrounding the observatory was plastered with giant signs saying “No Photography.” But, of course, every single visitor was taking pictures of the observatory. It was right there in the background behind the temple shrine.
After all of this, it was finally time for me to visit the actual highest spot in Thailand. A short trail led from the parking lot to this place. This was also suitably amusing because it turns out that the sign indicating the highest spot in Thailand, and the place where everyone was taking their selfies, was not actually on the highest spot. I could tell that instantly because the trail went past the sign and then continued to climb higher up the hill. Sure, the sign was close. It was on a trail that was on the hill that contained the highest spot in Thailand. But the actual highest spot was above and beyond the sign. I continued up the trail, and I found myself at a shrine that was clearly on the actual highest spot. The trail stopped going up at that point and then went down beyond it. I shot some video there, and I made a big deal about how this was the real highest spot in Thailand, not the tourist sign below it. But then I followed the trail around the shrine, and just behind it was the official geographical and scientific marker to indicate the real and final and actual highest spot.
But even this confused me a little bit. The marker appeared to be a solid metal button that was embedded in a stone platform. I understood that this bit of metal was the official scientific reference point from which all measurements were taken. And the accompanying sign broke it down to several decimal points. It indicated that this spot was 2,565.3341 meters above sea level. Therefore, it was accurate right down to a single millimeter. Yet, this metal button was on a raised stone platform, situated half a meter or more above the ground itself. So, technically, it wasn’t the highest spot either. It was raised up higher than the ground. I kept thinking that the official marker should be right at ground level. Raised up like that, it was off by quite a bit. I assume it all made sense somehow. Perhaps the actual reference point was at the base of this metal button. Perhaps the button was sitting on top of a metal pole that was sunk into the ground below, and the reference point was the exact place where the pole met the ground. And this button was placed above the ground on a platform for the sake of convenience. But with my brain, I wouldn’t have done that. I certainly wouldn’t have put the official tourist selfie-sign down below the highest spot. I would put the official marker right at ground level. And I would put the sign there beside it. Why not be accurate? As it stands, tens of thousands of people take pictures of themselves every year, claiming that they are standing on the highest spot in Thailand when they’re not. They’re a couple of meters below the highest spot.
Now that I think about it, maybe there was a line or spot on the sign itself that indicated the highest spot. Maybe, since the sign was several meters off the ground, there was a mark on the sign indicating the accurate elevation of the highest spot to match the scientific marker behind it. I doubt it, but that’s a possibility.
Because of this inaccuracy, the climax of my little video was a bit of an anti-climax. I was building up to the point when I was standing on what was supposed to be the highest spot in Thailand. But then I had to talk about how the sign wasn’t really at the highest spot. I then filmed a second sequence at the shrine, where I claimed to be standing at the actual highest spot. And then I had to film a third sequence, what I called an epilog, when I encountered the official scientific marker of the real highest spot. And even that marker didn’t seem accurate to me. The whole experience ended up being a bit diluted. At one point, while standing at the shrine, I even aimed my GoPro upwards and pointed out that, technically, the tree towering above me could actually claim the distinction of being the highest spot. Why should the ground claim to represent the highest point of the Earth in Thailand? Isn’t the tree part of the Earth? For that matter, the massive communications tower at the National Observatory was clearly much higher than anything around it. The tip of that tower would be the actual highest spot.
Once I claimed my place at the roof of Thailand, I considered the video to be over. But I still ran my GoPros on a time lapse as I rode back down the mountain to Mae Chaem. I had the Hero 9 mounted on the scooter grip, and I had the Hero 7 mounted on the foot peg low to the ground. I don’t know if I will do anything with that video. Perhaps I will have to create yet another YouTube channel as a kind of behind-the-scenes dumping ground for all the video I shoot that doesn’t end up anywhere else. When I started shooting long time lapses of riding the scooter and of nature scenes, I thought I could just put them on my main channel. I figured people could watch them if they wanted to and not watch them if they weren’t interested. I figured it would do no harm. But I started to think that it actually does harm the channel. People who didn’t like those videos got quite annoyed with them and with me for making and posting them. I always thought it wouldn’t matter. People could visit the channel and watch the videos that interested them and ignore those that didn’t. But it turns out that posting videos like that makes people dislike the channel as a whole. So I started to think that it was best to post just one type of video to the channel. It would be better to post just full travel vlogs to Planet Doug and nothing else. Even the Relive videos that I’m so fond of probably are a bad idea.
But I still end up with tons of videos that I like and that I just delete. I don’t dare post them to Planet Doug because I don’t want people to give me a hard time about them. So maybe I need a dumping ground channel – a place where I can post anything I please and not worry about it. In this case, I have a full time lapse video of the entire ride from Doi Inthanon back to my guest house in Mae Chaem. And I have that time lapse from two perspectives on two different cameras. I’d like to keep that video at least for myself. But I can’t post it to Planet Doug. So maybe I can make a new channel. I can even make a defensive joke about it and call it Planet Doug’s Dumping Ground. And then if people tell me how stupid and boring the videos are, I can just point out that this is my own personal video garbage dump. Don’t expect to find diamonds there. Or I could use a film reference and call it Planet Doug’s Cutting Room Floor. It would contain all the video clips that get cut in the editing room and end up on the floor. That reference might be too obscure for a lot of people, though. I already have the Planet Doug Behind the Scenes channel for recordings of this journal. I could use it as a dumping ground, but I don’t want to do that. I’m starting to see that it is better to keep YouTube channels uncluttered. Post only one type of video to each channel. Don’t mix up the content.
As far as the channel name goes, perhaps it would be best not to be specific in any way. That’s one thing I’ve learned. A vague name is always the best so that it can suit any kind of content. So, garbage dump and cutting room floor might be too specific. The problem is that I have so many ideas floating around in my head. For example, I always have new ideas and subjects prompted by podcasts that I listen to. I have pop culture stuff. And I often think about design. Right now, I feel this urge to talk about design elements of this hotel room, and the bathroom in particular. But I can’t make a separate channel for every single subject. And cutting room floor implies that this video was something I intended to include in the main video but then deleted. But what if I shoot some video that was completely separate and was never intended to be in a main video? It wasn’t cut at all. This time lapse video of my ride is perhaps a good example. I didn’t really think I would put it into the main video. The video ended when I got to the highest point on Doi Inthanon. I just ran the GoPros during my ride back to Mae Chaem for fun. But now that I have that video, what do I do with it? An interesting question.
I had an interesting encounter on that ride, by the way. To my amazement, as I was racing down the mountain road to Mae Chaem, I saw two long-distance cyclists riding up. They had a full set of pannier bags on their bikes. I know that sometimes cycling seems harder from a distance than it is in real life. When you race by effortlessly on your motorcycle or in your car and you see someone on a bicycle, you tend to feel profound sympathy for them. It seems like such hard work. Impossible work. But I was often that person on a bicycle, and it wasn’t as difficult in real life as it seems from a distance. Yet, I couldn’t believe it when I saw those two cyclists. That road struck me as impossibly steep. It would be a brutal road to ride, and an endless one in terms of the steep hills you’d encounter. Plus, it was relatively late in the day. I had finished my entire day, and I was on my way back to my hotel. It was mid-afternoon, and these two cyclists were not far outside of Mae Chaem. They had a long way to go to get anywhere. It seemed far too late in the day to be where they were. Where could they possibly reach before the sun sets? And they didn’t seem to have camping gear. I worried about them. I wished I had something to give them – some food or snacks or something else. But I had nothing with me. And, of course, I wanted to stop and talk to them and hear their story. But I resisted that impulse. Considering how late it was in the day, they probably didn’t want to waste time chatting with random strangers. And it would probably annoy them to have to stop pedaling to talk to me and then start up again. So I simply called out “Good luck” and kept riding.
I had a second interesting encounter when I got back to the hotel. It was just starting to get dark in the early evening, and I left my room to go to the nearest 7-Eleven when I spotted a tall white dude coming out of another room. And he had a big Honda 300cc dirt bike parked there. I said hello to him, and I got a bit of his story. I never learned his name or where he was from, but he was doing the Mae Hong Son Loop as part of his 17-day holiday in Thailand. I was a bit confused about that because he said he wasn’t here to visit Doi Inthanon. He was just doing the loop. But my understanding was that Mae Chaem was out of the way. The official loop would take you through Mae Sariang, not through Mae Chaem. I was thinking that the only way you’d end up here was if you came here to go to Doi Inthanon. But then things made sense. He showed me a map of the loop that a friend had sent him. And this friend said that a more interesting alternative was to pass through Mae Chaem on the way to Chiang Mai rather than to go through Mae Sariang. And when I saw the map and thought about it, I realized that that made sense. Mae Chaem is on the way to Chiang Mai. By going this way, he is following the smaller roads 1088, 1192, 1284, and perhaps 1013 instead of going on the bigger 108 the entire way. Honestly, I don’t know if one route is any better than the other. The bigger 108 is also a beautiful road. So I think both routes would be enjoyable. But after I heard his story and thought about how the roads worked, I could see that going through Mae Chaem makes sense as an alternative way to complete the loop. He was going in a counter clockwise direction, so he had started in Chiang Mai where he had rented his motorcycle, and then went to Pai and Mae Hong Son before coming to Mae Chaem. And he was now heading back to Chiang Mai, where he would fly to one of the islands down south. I enjoyed chatting with him for those few minutes.
1:00 p.m.
In the morning after my Christmas Day ride to Doi Inthanon, I ran into problems once again with memory. I had filled up more of my memory cards with video from that trip and from the previous day. I decided that enough was enough and it as time to buy a second external hard drive and stop relying on memory cards for long-term storage. I checked on Google Maps, and I found a computer store here in Mae Chaem. I didn’t have much hope for the selection they offered, and at first, it seemed hopeless. Being a small shop in a small town, it carried largely junk. The photos contained in its Google Maps listing showed practically no name brand items. It was all cheap no-name junk. However, in one picture, I just happened to spot a couple of Seagate external hard drives. The pictures were from years ago, but I thought it was worth checking out. I rode to the shop in the morning, and I discovered that though they had no Seagate Backup Plus Slim drives as show in the picture, they did have two Seagate One Touch external drives. There was a 1-terabyte model and a 2-terabyte model. I didn’t know much about these One Touch drives. But the fancy backup and password features didn’t matter to me. I wouldn’t use any of those. I would just use it as a simple storage device. And for that, it seemed fine. I was concerned only that it was a real Seagate, and it seemed to be, and that it had a USB 3.0 connection at least. USB 3.2 would be better, but I’d be content with 3.0, and that’s what it had. It was also a bit more expensive than at online shops. Lazada had places offering this drive at 1,800 baht. And at this shop, it cost 2,290 baht. The owner gave me a 90-baht discount, he said, and he sold it to me for 2,200. I’m sure I was overpaying, but I didn’t care that much. I just wanted that drive and be done with it.
Most of the rest of the day was spent in just setting up that drive. My idea is to now keep two copies of all my video source files. I’ll keep one copy on one external drive and a backup copy on this new drive. And with those two copies, I’d feel secure deleting the original video files from the memory cards. Even if one drive fails, I’ll still have the second drive with the backup copies. And now I can just cycle through my memory cards. I have six memory cards for my Hero 9. And they are numbered in sequence. Every day, I’ll copy the original video files to these two hard drives. And then I’ll keep filming until the memory card is full and then I can move on to the next memory card in the numbered sequence. In essence, as long as I keep up with producing final videos for YouTube, I should be working with at least two copies and sometimes as many as four copies of all original videos. I’d have the two on the external drives. I’d have the copies on the memory cards that haven’t been erased as yet. And I’d have the copies on my phone that I’m actually using to make the final video.
In getting this set up, I first had to copy all the source files from my original external drive to the new drive. That took hours to complete. I did this by plugging both of them into my MacBook. The MacBook is essential for this kind of operation. And when that was complete, I went through all my memory cards one by one and make sure that all the videos had been copied to both the original drive and the new one. That took a lot of time to complete as well. But it was finally done, and I feel much better now. I don’t have to worry about memory for a while.
My original idea was to spend the day in Mae Chaem getting caught up with editing video. And then I was going to ride to Mae Hong Son the next day, which is today. But it took so long to copy all the files, and I was so worn out by the mental and physical effort that I decided to stay for one more day and one more night. Unfortunately, my room at the hotel had been booked online, and I wasn’t able to extend my stay. In fact, the whole hotel was fully booked, and I had no choice but to leave. And then I got a bit lucky. I was looking for affordable rooms in Mae Chaem, and I found rooms for 500 baht at a hotel that appeared to be right around the corner. I booked one night there through Agoda. It was convenient because even though I was changing hotels, I didn’t have to pack up fully and carefully. In fact, I didn’t even have to use my scooter. I simply made three trips. I walked over to this new hotel after my morning coffee carrying must my knapsack, and I checked in to the room. That was a bit tricky because at first they kept telling me that I hadn’t booked a room. But they finally found my reservation, and after carefully checking my vaccination status, I was given the key to my room. I thought I had booked a standard twin room as shown in the pictures online, but I was actually shown to a separate bungalow. It’s its own separate house with a driveway, so that’s kind of cool.
Once I was checked in, I returned to my original hotel on foot and packed up my backpack roughly. Then I walked back here to this new hotel and dumped the contents onto the bed. Then I went back to the first hotel, packed up the remaining stuff and then rode my scooter back to this new hotel. It was effortless and fast. And here I am inside my own little house. The idea is to spend the rest of the day editing video and relaxing. And then tomorrow morning, I will get on my scooter and begin the ride to Mae Hong Son. I think I will divide that ride into two parts. It’s possible to ride the full 163 kilometers to Mae Hong Son in one day, but I’m in no hurry. I can ride just 100 kilometers along the small road out of Mae Chaem to highway 108 and spend the night there. There appear to be a bunch of hotels in that town. And then I can ride the remaining 60 kilometers the next day. I’m still finding the hotels available in Thailand to be fancier than I need. The standard backpacker guest houses don’t seem to exist. Or maybe I just don’t know where they are. The hotels are very good value, I have to admit. This room at the unusual Sangthong Building costs $15 US per night, and it is a bargain at that price: spacious, modern, clean, private, quiet, hot water in the bathroom, air conditioning, refrigerator, table and chair, nice big bed, and more. It has it all. So, I shouldn’t complain.