Saturday, January 1, 2022
7:43 am. Room 1, Like View Guest House
Mae Hong Son, Thailand
It’s hard to believe but the year has ticked over from 2021 to 2022. The year that would never end has ended. Yet, it feels like nothing has changed. Whatever promising signs were out there were quashed by the omicron variant. And as if that isn’t depressing enough, I started watching yet another TV series about a pandemic. This one is called Station Eleven. I’ve only watched two episodes so far, but I like it. It’s unusual. It’s different. In a way, the epidemic is not even a central theme or part of the story. It’s almost like the flu epidemic was just a convenient plot device to wipe out most of the human race and set up the environment in which the author wanted his characters to live. And these characters all exist as part of a traveling Shakespearean performing troupe. At the moment, it strikes me that the same story could be told easily without the pandemic and the post-apocalyptic world. Yet, there are extremes and mysteries in the story that might require the vast and devastating consequences of a worldwide civilization-ending to make sense. I had a funny moment when I recognized the main actress. Yet, as often happens, I couldn’t remember where I knew her from. She had clearly made a big impression on me in a previous role, but I couldn’t remember what it was. And as I always do, I called up her entry on Wikipedia, and I scanned through her roles to find the one I was thinking of. And to my surprise, she played the hero in the movie Terminator Dark Fate. And that made sense. The movie is not great, obviously. But I remember that actress making a positive impression on me. She stuck in my head.
For the last day of 2021, I decided to visit a couple of local attractions. The first was a scenic lookout point in the hills about fifteen kilometers away to the south. And the second was a bamboo bridge leading to a temple about ten kilometers to the north. I wanted to record the events of the day on video, and I fired up the GoPro here at the guest house. I set up the day first and gave a quick tour of my room. Then I set up the GoPro at a variety of spots leading away from the guest house to capture some video of me on the scooter. I don’t really have a strong sense of what I’m doing with that technique, and to make up for that, I fell back on this idea of coverage. I filmed the sequence multiple times from many different perspectives. I don’t think that is absolutely necessary, but I realized that in setting up the camera once, I actually approach the camera location at least three times. Let’s say I want to put the camera on a stop sign at the corner of the road. I have to ride my scooter to that sign first in order to attach the camera. So why not have the GoPro running while I ride up to the sign? Why waste the moment by not filming it? Then I attach the GoPro and ride away from the camera and back to my original spot. Why not film that as well? Then I ride to the camera as I originally planned. That was the only shot I wanted from the beginning, but by running the camera the entire time, I end up with two more shots. And then, since I already picked out a camera location and I can safely mount it there, why not just turn the camera around and point it up the street? Then I can film myself as I ride past the original spot. And then I get three more shots surrounding that perspective. I did that a few times as I rode up the driveway and onto the street. And then when that was all done, I actually needed to go to the bathroom. It took that long. And since I was still right beside the guest house, I just went back to my room. But since I was doing that anyway, I figured I might as well film riding back to the guest house, getting off the scooter, returning to the scooter, and then putting on my helmet and riding up the driveway and down the street in one long unbroken sequence. With all of those shots, I have just about every angle covered of that simple ride. It’s crazy, but we’ll see if it ends up being helpful.
I did the same thing when I was riding along the curving road up into the mountains. I think I did that at two spots. And I did all of this again several times when I got to the bamboo bridge. It will likely end up being way too much of this, but you never know. Might as well have some fun with it and try something different.
On my way out of town to the south, I passed the ministry for tourism building, and they had a little table set up on the sidewalk with travel brochures and maps. I was pretty excited about that, but there really was only one item there that struck me as interesting and possibly helpful. It was an illustrated map of Mae Hong Son province with tourist attractions marked. I’m not impressed with it, but it might end up being helpful for my trip. The viewpoint I reached was nice. It was interesting to be able to look back on the city of Mae Hong Son from so far away and from so high up. On my way down this very steep and long road, I passed two foreign cyclists. They were busy powering their way up. I wonder if they were annoyed to see me, another foreigner, going to the exact same lookout point but getting there effortlessly and quickly on a scooter. Then again, the whole point of doing it by bike is the physical challenge and exercise, so they would get out of the experience what they wanted. I was worried a little bit right at the beginning of this climb because it looked like I would have to buy a ticket to a National Park to go to this lookout point. But it turned out that you could still ride down the road without a ticket. You only needed a ticket if you were going to hike along the National Park trail.
My original idea was to visit a coffee shop and perhaps have lunch after this trip before going to the bamboo bridge. But I ended up riding back to Mae Hong Son and then right through the town before I made up my mind. And since I was already at the far side of the town, I figured I might as well keep going and go to the bamboo bridge right away. It is called the Su Tong Pae Bridge. I don’t know all the details, but it is one of the longest bamboo bridges in Thailand. The name means Answered Prayer, and it was built in 2012 to allow monks from a nearby temple to more easily reach the village to collect morning alms. The bridge then became a popular tourist attraction.
I found the place surprisingly busy and much more developed as a tourist attraction than I expected, with a couple of dozen shops selling souvenirs, food and drinks, and other regional products. The bridge itself, though interesting, was not overly impressive. I was very glad I went, and once you factor in the ride to get there, the novelty of walking over the bridge, the temple, the scenery and views, and the coffee shop at the temple, it is well worth a visit. However, it wasn’t a particularly impressive or beautiful structure. As I talked about on my video, it was originally built with a very simple, practical purpose in mind. It was built to allow the monks to reach the town without having to walk through muddy rice fields. It wasn’t built to be beautiful or elegant or impressive. It looks kind of tossed together out of whatever materials happened to be cheap or lying around the villages. Its popularity kind of speaks to the desperation of we tourists as we need things to do and places to visit. We need to fill our days with selfie-locations, and this bridge serves very well in that regard.
My favorite part of the experience was walking along a raised bamboo platform at the temple itself. A leafy bamboo tunnel had been built over top of this platform and walking along it was fun. The crunching of the bamboo matts underfoot was always nice. I set up my GoPro multiple times to capture video of myself walking along in these tunnels. And then I discovered the nice coffee shop at the temple. I had an iced green tea there and enjoyed the views. With that experience, I didn’t feel the need to then visit a coffee shop in town. And that was largely the end of my day. I spent some time back at the guest house copying all of the video files safely to my hard drives. And then I spent New Year’s Eve working on videos and listening to the world outside celebrate. There was a bit of music coming from here and there. And there was a smattering of fireworks. But that was about all. I went outside into the streets at one point during the evening, but the streets were empty, and there didn’t seem to be much going on anywhere. It was a very low key evening for the last day of 2021.
I imagine that today, the first day of 2022, will be largely the same. My plan is to treat the day as a kind of housekeeping day. I have to keep working on videos, and I need to do laundry. And I need to reserve a place to stay in Pai. I looked into that a little bit already, and I even went so far as to book a room in Pai. But I got nervous that I booked a bad place, and I cancelled the reservation. The place I had booked was a kind of hippie hostel located a little bit outside of the town itself. It appeared to have a good reputation, but then I noticed that the positive reviews I’d seen were anywhere from four to six years old. And then I started to see recent reviews talking about bed bugs and other awful things. It could be a good place. It could be a bad place. I just couldn’t be sure anymore, and I decided to cancel my reservation and start over. I think I’d rather be in a hotel inside the town itself anyway.
The town of Pai is just over one hundred kilometers away, so the ride to get there should be an easy one. There are a ton of opportunities for taking scenic paved roads into the hills and towards the border with Myanmar. But I find that I’m starting to look at those opportunities a bit askance. I’ve done a lot of simply riding a scooter along beautiful roads. And without any particular point to the ride other than the scenery, I’m kind of losing interest in it. For me personally, I’d enjoy it. But I don’t know what the video about the experience would be. Just more winding mountain roads?