Thursday, December 30, 2021
6:04 a.m. Room 1, The Like View Guest House
Mae Hong Son, Thailand
It’s been a while since I’ve had to think about people who snore. But the guest house I’m staying in has thin walls, and my neighbor snores like a chainsaw. He’s snoring now. Loudly. And he has been snoring steadily for the last eight hours. He started long before I went to bed. And he never stopped throughout the entire night. I have Led Zeppelin playing loudly in earphones right now, and I can still hear the snores. It has filled my world.
I’m now intensely curious about this person and their life. I want to see who it is and see if anyone else was in the room with him. Could that even be possible? Could anyone stay in a room with this person? For that matter, could anyone stay in the same house? I’m hoping he is a one-night guest, since I would despair at the thought of having to share this guest house for another night or longer. Even three rooms away, I think I would still hear the snores. They shake the walls.
I wonder if people like this are aware of how much and how badly they snore. Surely, someone at some point in their life would have told them. How could they not? And does it bother them? When I moved into this guest house two nights ago, I realized instantly how thin the walls were. And that knowledge completely transformed my behavior. My usual habit is to play podcasts over a Bluetooth speaker much of the time – even as I shower and shave – but I won’t do that while I’m staying here. I’m never a noisy person. I’m always careful about closing doors and moving objects. And I’m intensely aware of the time of the day or night when I’m doing anything. How I open the zipper of my backpack will change dramatically depending on whether it is three in the afternoon or three in the morning. I’m even careful not to jangle keys when I put them down on flat surfaces or insert them into locks. I don’t want to bother anyone around me with anything I do or any noise that I make. If I snored like this person, I’d have to become a hermit living in a distant cave. I could not live among people. But what about this person? Did they go to bed last night aware of the thin walls and feeling regretful at how much they were going to bother the other guests?
I just realized that there was a good example of this from my last home. I was staying in a nice guest house in the town of Mae Chaem. However, this town is a popular stopover on an alternative version of the Mae Hong Son Loop, and many vehicles parked just outside my room were taking people around the loop. As such, they saw a lot of activity as people packed them and unpacked them and got them ready for the big drive of the next day. And people tend to leave earlier in the morning than they normally would. And all that noise and the revving of engines and slamming of doors and the crunch of heavy tires on gravel filled the night. Luckily, I don’t sleep well anyway, so noise like this doesn’t usually keep me awake. I’m already awake much of the time. But I’m very much aware of it and its impact on other people.
And then I had to move. I wanted to stay longer in that room, but I hadn’t booked it long enough in advance, and someone booked it out from under me. And the guest house had no other available rooms. I had no choice but to move out. Luckily, I found a room at a hotel just around the corner, and it was relatively easy to move. I didn’t even have to pack up my scooter. I just shouldered my backpack and walked over and then came back for the scooter. Unusually, though, my home at this place was not a room inside a hotel building. It was a separate cottage in a gated area along with one other cottage. The place did have a big building with regular rooms, and I thought I had reserved one of those rooms. According to the booking forms and the pictures, I did. However, once I’d checked in, the woman walked me over to this cottage. It was essentially a little house, and we had to unlock a padlock on the gate on the driveway to gain access.
As soon as I saw this padlock and this gate, my brain started logging all the details and considering the ramifications. For one thing, the padlock had an annoying design that required the key for locking and unlocking. What I mean is that you can’t unlock it and then take the key. The only way to remove the key is to lock it again. And the woman told me that when I left in the morning, I should leave the key in the door to my room. But I instantly saw that if I did that, I would not be able to lock the gate behind me as I left. And if I had neighbors in the other cottage, this might bother them. In fact, to leave this cottage, I’d have to walk out to the gate with my keys, unlock the padlock, slide the extremely heavy and noisy gate to the side on its rollers, and then walk back to my cottage and put the key in the door, and then ride my scooter out, park the scooter, walk back to the gate, and roll the gate shut. But since I no longer had the key with me, I wouldn’t be able to lock the padlock. It struck me as a very poor lock choice for this situation.
To be honest, I was displeased with the whole setup as soon as I saw it. I disliked sharing an enclosed space with another cottage. Personally, if I went out into the city, I would just leave the gate unlocked behind me. I wouldn’t want to deal with the hassle of constantly closing and locking that gate every single time I went outside. But if some Thai people moved into the other cottage, I knew they would be hyper-concerned about security, and they would want the gate to be locked all the time no matter what. So I would have to take their wishes into consideration in terms of my daily life.
That night, I noticed that some people with a car had moved into the cottage beside mine. And I saw that, sure enough, they had locked the padlock on the gate. And I knew that I would be awake and moving around and starting to pack up my scooter at around five in the morning. And this had the potential for causing two big problems: I could make too much noise and wake up and disturb my neighbors. AND my movements could cause them alarm as they might think I was a robber trying to break into their car. I noticed that they had turned on and left on all the outdoor lights and they were flooding the car with light. I had turned all the lights at my cottage off because I wanted the interior to be dark as I slept. The closed padlock on the gate and the floodlights on the car told me that these people were security conscious, and I began to consider what that meant for my early-morning departure.
In the end, I acted much more like a thief than I normally would have. I was so aware of any potential noise, that I walked around barefoot and quietly and slowly as I brought my backpack and other items out to my scooter and started packing up and tying things down with straps. I was just packing up for a day on the road, but I was actually behaving like a sneak thief. The irony was not lost on me.
When the scooter was ready, I carefully walked down to the gate and unlocked the padlock. Then I had to slowly push the heavy gate to the side. I did this at a gradual pace, like a giant snail, making sure the rollers didn’t squeak and the metal gate didn’t bang against its metal supports and guides. And then, with the memory of the revving engines at my previous guest house, I didn’t turn on my scooter’s engine. I simply let gravity take it down the driveway and out the gate, and then I pushed it down the street for fifty yards or so. Then I walked back to reverse the process of slowly closing the gate. I felt bad that I wasn’t able to close the padlock behind me, but with the key inserted in the door of my cottage, I had no choice but to leave it unlocked.
It’s kind of a miracle that my neighbors didn’t come charging outside to confront me. All my movements were so furtive and quiet and dark that I was behaving exactly like a thief would. I was the very definition of a person stealing that scooter. Nothing about my movements matched that of a rightful owner. But I’m pretty sure they slept through my departure. The people of the world have long demonstrated to me an ability to sleep through an astonishing amount of noise, and simply not notice things.
And that brings me back to my snoring neighbor. He’s still snoring. And of course it’s a he. I would be astonished to learn that this locomotive is a woman. I just did a quick Google search, and the Internet tells me that forty percent of adult men are habitual snorers and only twenty percent of women. But I like to think that even the twenty percent of women snorers are of a more dainty variety. I have to think that a man like my current neighbor is special. Natural selection alone must have limited the number of men who snore that loudly. Their friends and family and neighbors would be driven to kill them and therefore remove them from the breeding population. You’d think whatever genetic makeup leads to the snoring would be bred out of the population through satisfying murders.
It’s admirable in a way. The snoring, I mean. It’s quite an accomplishment to sleep that long and that hard while snoring that loudly the entire time. He began snoring steadily long before I even thought about turning off the lights. He snored constantly through my entire night as I drifted in and out of sleep. And he’s been snoring steadily ever since I got out of bed and made my first cup of coffee. Chances are that he will snore for two more hours. And he will wake up stretching and yawning and feeling fully refreshed for another day, perhaps oblivious to the tremendous undertaking of the night. That, to me, is an achievement to rival anything done by an Olympic athlete. It’s a physical achievement. I really do want to get a look at this marvel. I will listen for when the door to that room opens, and I will find a pretense for opening my door to look outside. That I got any sleep at all, by the way, is due entirely to earplugs. Without them, it would have been a completely sleepless night for me.
It’s now 8:30 in the morning, and the snorer next door is still at it. I’m astonished. I can’t remember the last time in my life I was asleep at 8:30 in the morning, let alone still snoring after what has to have been eleven hours of non-stop snoring. Crazy. What must it be like to be this person? To live inside that head and that body? It must feel substantially different to being me. Maybe they sleep much longer and harder because it is physically more difficult to breathe. It would take more effort. Of course, in this long diatribe, I’m assuming that I don’t snore. And with my solitary life, I don’t know that with 100% certainty. Perhaps I snore just as loudly, but I’m not aware of it. That’s the thing about this super-annoying habit of loud snoring. You are asleep while you are doing it.
9:00 a.m.
I’ve now moved on to a coffee shop here in Mae Hong Son. It’s a very interesting place called Morning Coffee. I’ve been here once already, and I even shot a bit of video here. However, the overall video effort kind of sputtered and died that morning, so I don’t know if I will end up using any of it. In that video, I went off in search of another coffee shop called Feel Good Coffee. But it was closed. The sign on the door said that the owner was busy. So they closed. That seemed odd to me because it was a very large coffee shop in a very large building. You’d think that the staff could run the place for one day with the boss being absent. But it was closed. And then I had to regroup and find a new coffee shop. My idea at that time was to find a coffee shop with a garden where I could sit outside and record some of this journal on video. But by the time I found Feel Good closed and then walked all the way back to my guest house and then to this new coffee shop, I was too hot and flustered to do any journal recording. Plus, the only seating here was right beside the street, and a local sound truck was blasting loud music on the street. I did try to record some vlog video as I talked about the special variety of coffee they made here: They made a special coffee using peaberry coffee beans. I’m assuming that I came across the concept of peaberry beans before, but it felt like a new concept to me, and I talked about that on video. Apparently, coffee beans normally grow as a pair inside each coffee cherry. And these two beans grow with one flat side against the other. So they are rounded on one side and flat on the other. But in some coffee cherries, only one bean gets pollinated and starts to grow. So there is only one coffee bean inside it, and it grows more rounded in shape. It doesn’t have a second bean to grow flat against on one side. These beans are separated during the harvesting process and are roasted differently. There is debate whether these beans are better than ordinary beans. But they are often considered a specialty, and a premium is charged for them and the coffee they produce. I had one of these yesterday, and it was quite good. This morning, there is even louder music. A local temple is playing loud live traditional music right beside the coffee shop. I don’t mind that at all. It adds atmosphere, particularly after a morning of Led Zeppelin and snores.
It’s interesting to be in a place like Mae Hong Son with its higher amount of tourism compared to a place like Mae Sot. And there are other foreigners here, which is interesting. When I arrived at Coffee Morning, a western couple was sitting at one of the tables inside the shop. They had that backpacker hippie vibe to them. And I was amused to see just now as they left that the man was wearing the famous elephant pants. I was reading about those just the other day, and I assumed that the elephant pants were a thing from twenty years ago. But I guess they are still just as popular today with backpackers.
My ride from Mae Chaem to Mae Hong Son was very enjoyable. I left from Mae Chaem fairly early. In fact, from my Relive record of the day, I can see that I began the trip at 7 in the morning and I arrived in Mae Hong Son at 2 p.m. The whole trip took exactly six hours and fifty-one minutes, and I rode 175.6 kilometers and climbed 3,519 meters in total. Previous mornings had all been extremely foggy, but that morning, the skies were clear and bright. And cold. As has become a habit, I was under dressed. While packing up the scooter, I was wearing just my orange jacket, and I felt overly warm. However, everything changed once I started moving on the scooter. The cold morning air cut through the jacket like it wasn’t even there, and I was soon shivering badly and cramped with cold. I realized that I would have been better off wearing at least one other shirt. For some reason, that had never occurred to me. But if I’d worn my immigration shirt over top of the T-shirt, I would have been much warmer. It would at least have provided a certain protection from the wind that the orange jacket does not. I will definitely do that on any early-morning trips in the future. I don’t know why, but this concept of layering with the clothing I already have doesn’t often occur to me. I kept thinking about that much thicker and warmer jacket I saw in Mae Sot. I keep thinking that maybe it wasn’t as small as I thought it was, and I should have tried it on. I think it would have cost close to $100, but it might have been worth it. Yet, I might have been just as warm on all these cold mornings if I’d simply doubled up on my shirts underneath the orange Dancer jacket.
When I planned my ride from Mae Sariang to Mae Chaem, I considered going by small countryside roads, and I plotted a possible route. In the end, I ignored that option and took the main roads the entire way, and I was glad that I did. Even the main road was challenging and very beautiful. There was no need to go off-road along rocky farming paths in order to have a good experience. And when it came time to leave Mae Chaem and head to Mae Hong Son, I wondered if I’d have to retrace my path and go all the way back to Mae Sariang first. That might have made the most sense if the country roads were extremely rough. But what I didn’t realize is that there was an in between option. The small road that went north out of Mae Chaem was a true countryside road, and it went through gorgeous, hilly terrain. And it linked up with a series of similar roads for one hundred kilometers until it finally reached main highway 108 to Mae Hong Son. And in all of those hundred kilometers, the road was nicely paved. As I found out from the motorcycle dude staying at my guest house, that route is actually known as an attractive alternative to the main Mae Hong Son Loop. He ended up taking that route because a friend of his knew about it and sent him a map that showed this route through Mae Chaem instead of the route going through Mae Sariang.
I thought about vlogging the day for YouTube, but I ended up not doing it. I was in the mood to do it, but I was aware that I just wouldn’t have the time required to edit the video. And since I planned to ride all day and not really stop anywhere, I wasn’t sure what subjects would be available to focus on. It would just be me riding all day long through beautiful countryside. As it turned out, I probably could have made an interesting video out of it. Rolling my scooter out of the guest house parking area silently would have been funny. And then I got to see the sunrise over the top of Doi Inthanon. I also saw the machines that removed the corn kernels from the cobs, and I saw the mountains of leafy debris those machines left behind, and I saw grain silos. I passed by some interesting strawberry growing areas. And then I would have had my arrival in Mae Hong Son, where I discovered that my Like View Guest House, which was supposed to offer nice views of the lake, failed to do so. The lake was drained and empty of water. There was no lake. And the Like View Guest House turned out to be much more of a dump than I expected. As I’ve often talked about. I don’t mind dumps. I kind of like them. However, in Thailand, they are overpriced. The dumps still charge non-dump prices. Even so, I’m glad to be here. The owner is accustomed to dealing with us cheap foreigners, and she speaks conversational English. She’s friendly, and checking in was hassle-free with no formalities. The room, though dumpy and old, is large. The bathroom is also large and offers hot water once you figure out how the water heater works. There is no air conditioning, of course, but it is fairly cool most of the time, and a fan is more than enough. The bed is somewhat hard for foreign tastes, but I’ve been sleeping fine. My one problem with the place is that the walls are too thin, and it’s possible to hear what is going on in the other rooms – including people who snore. And, as I already wrote about, thin walls make me self-conscious about everything I do. I’m aware of any noise I make, and I’ve not felt comfortable enough to listen to podcasts or do any video recording in my room. I’m even self-conscious and uncomfortable as I type on my laptop, because I’m worried that the noise is bothering my neighbors. I’ve been accused of being a loud typist in the past.
After my peaberry coffee at Coffee Morning, I walked up to a famous temple, Wat Prathat Doi Kong Mu, that sits on a hill high above the city. That temple and the views from there became the focal point for my entire day. I spent quite a bit of time up there, particularly after I discovered that the temple complex contained a very nice outdoor coffee shop. The midday sun was a bit harsh over the city and the surrounding mountains, so I returned in the late afternoon to catch the views as the sun was setting. I hope to make a video out of that experience.