Chiang Mai to Pai

Being a vegetarian doesn't always work when the people serving you food don't understand a WORD of what you are saying.  Despite owning several Thai phrasebooks our attempts at learning the language more often than not met with confusion, as Thai is a tonal language and it is possible to say the same exact word in four or five ways with different tones and have each tone mean something different; although the locals appreciate the attempt, most of the time we would fall back to the old standby, the menu point.  Emily here is trying to enjoy her lunch but I ended up eating it as it had a lot of beef.

We decided to go on a motorbike tour of several hundred kilometers, looping up out of Chiang Mai to Pai to Mae Hong Son to Mae Chaem to Chiang Mai.

Sometimes being a tourist means people want to have their picture taken with you, and I felt flattered enough to oblige them.  What did I represent to this woman that she would want to look back on it later?  I did notice that, like anywhere, city folks drive to the country for recreation and have different values and experiences than the country folk.  On our way to Pai we were flanked by thousands of motorists as we had unwittingly planned our trip to happen on a Thai holiday weekend.  This meant that, while negotiating one of the seven hundred (actual number, by the way) of the steep mountainous switchback turns in the road one also had to deal with huge stinking trucks and tourist vans and trucks stuffed with live chickens and other motorcyclists, all bumper-to-bumper.  Traffic in the US can get bad, of course, but at least people for the most part follow the rules of the road.  Not so in Thailand- it seemed that as long as you didn't do something that resulted in a traffic accident anything went.  This was great because it allowed one to drive like in the action movies (see The Matrix 2) but of course was much more dangerous.  Thailand has a lot of motorcycle accidents.

Emily had one spill off of her bike but shook it off in minutes.  Betsy was the slowest cyclist in our group, often concentrating so hard on biking that she would roll right by Emily and I waiting on the side of the road, such was the intensity of her mindset.  Betsy lived the theory that no one can make her go faster than she felt comfortable with, the result of which was that she would be passed over a thousand times a day by bumper-to-bumper traffic, invariably pushed over to the side of the road as far as she could go.  It reminded me of the solitary grandma out on the highways, sadly shaking her head at the state of the world and the follies of those in it while driving twenty miles below the speed limit because, by golly, that was fast enough.

The mountains can be a refuge from many things if approached in the correct way, and in Thailand this time the mountains were a refuge from the stinking, dusty heat of the cities.  Up in the clouds was cool and comfortable.