We’re three days into the roadtrip, and are averaging one good adventure per day.
The first day, we arrived to the guesthouse in Chiang Dao (once again), and Tom pulled off the bed comforter to take an afternoon nap. A huge lizard, about the size of the length of our face, was sitting there greeting him. Tom thought it was fake, a little joke played on us by the ‘Nature House’ hostel. But it was no joke, as the lizard sensed his vulnerability and jumped (as though he had wings) from the bed to the wall, then in one jump all the way to the other wall, where he scurried out the window. From this point on, the first thing we do when we’re in our room is to pull down the comforter to check for any ‘friends.’
Our next adventure had us motorbiking up a huge hill (Doi Tung), and realizing near the top that we were quite low on gas. Our destination, another Wat no doubt, was just a few kilometers up, and so we chugged along at a slow pace, crossing our fingers that we would miraculously find some gasoline at the top. We did make it, but had no such luck with the gas, and so spent the next 20 minutes or so coasting down the mountain, in neutral, so as to make it safely to the bottom with some gas to spare. We made it. Boo yeah.
And today, we made our way to the Golden Triangle. When we had coffee this morning and told the waitress of our plan, she warned us that it was a ‘fix road.’ It took us a good five minutes for us to understand that they were fixing the road, or that it was under some sort of construction. We thanked her for the information, and plugged along anyway. Well, what greeted us were maybe 10 patches of 100-200 meter stretches of complete mud and water. We sloshed along, with Tom’s feet soaking up the muddy goodness on either side of the bike to prevent us from falling in. After an hour, we made it out, completely covered in mud from our knees down. Thankfully, a lady allowed us to use a bucket of water in her garage/store to wash up.