Good morning my lovely people, this is an update from the road.
Yes, I’m road trippin’ in real time for once – a sort of experiment – do please give me your feedback. On the one hand, it allows you to feel alarmed along with me at all mishaps, because neither one of us knows yet how the story is going to end. On the other hand, there are mundanities to everyone’s daily life, including my peripatetic roadtripping existence. I am afraid I might bore you out of your tree with my accounts of washing socks and how pleased I was to walk barefoot on the tiles of this small hotel which are perfectly clean. The sensation of cool, shiny, perfectly clean tiles underfoot makes me happy – I don’t know if that makes me a simple or merely peculiar creature. But here’s the thing: life is full of delights if you let yourself enjoy them.
So it’s a cool morning, I’m wearing my hoodie, no air conditioning needed, and the birds are making a racket outside. I don’t know what they are – starlings? I don’t even know if we have starlings in Thailand – but there are hundreds of thousands of the things partying on the power lines in the street.
Speaking of those birds, they’re in the video I made summarising my day yesterday. You might as well watch it before I recount all the same information to you. I do spend a lot of time in this video explaining how I pack for a road trip and what I wear, but that’s fairly representative of the importance of getting that stuff right. If you pack wrong, or too much, or don’t wear your gear, or don’t have enough layers to keep warm, you’re going to have a horrible time.
Still, having said that, if you’re here for the adventurous highlights and not the how-to, you might want to skipp the first half of the video.
I need to eat before I leave town this morning, because I didn’t really have dinner last night – just a beer and hot soy milk – and so if I don’t eat proper food soon, I will certainly run out of energy. I’m also heading off the main road and into the hills, so who knows what will be available up there.
Last night I had this truly wild dream in which I revisited my old law firm, walking amongst desks piled high with papers, with my successor desperately asking me questions about how to fix a new problem in an old case I had once worked on. I just looked at her – stressed and thin and well dressed – and shook my head. No, I said, it isn’t my problem anymore; I don’t have to solve it, I don’t have to sweat over it, and it’s not as important as you think it is. She stared at me, unable to imagine how I could not care about the multimillion dollar problem of an inanimate corporate client. I wished her luck, and cautioned here against taking the concerns of soulless entities so personally, and I left. She followed me into a garden which had a hedge maze, reminiscent of the tea party scene in Alice in Wonderland. Clutching at my elbow, I suspect that she might have been Alice and I was almost certainly the Mad Hatter. I was serene. The dream ended.
And the moral of the story is: it’s much more fun being the Mad Hatter than Alice.
Okay, now I’m going to take a shower, find food and get back to my joyful vagrancy. May you have, also, a glorious day.
Well I like the birds on the wires and note that Thailand sparkies have managed to keep the wires reasonably parallel – at least to the common junction hub.
I guess… as long as it works – and it seems to work.
Clean tiles floors is also nice and probably quite common in Thailand as there is some order and containment amongst all the confusion. Crunchy cereal under bare feet isn’t all that great.
I noticed that while riding our scooter in Chang Mai – that no one seemed to mind riding in close proximity to others and certainly were not bashful about filtering right to the front of the queue at any intersection. Authorities did maintain a sense of order around helmet wearing though. One day while rounding that big square “block” at the NW corner onto the last stretch to our hotel – the gendarmes were busy waving over almost every motorcyclist to give them tickets for not wearing helmets.
As farang, we were of course wearing our helmets on our speedy little 125 and they just let us pass by.
I do enjoy reading and not least those of your regular adventures in such a lovely country.
We’re still “on” for Australia but that could easily change in the next month. We’ll see..
The police always used to have those checkpoints around the moat where they would pull over all the farangs on scooters and book them for not having international licences. It was quite the money spinner until covid. Now there are no farang tourists left to hit up, it’s just us more permanently resident farangs who all have thai licences anyway. So no fun in that – they packed up almost all the checkpoints about a year ago.
I love how they used to focus on just one thing at a time though – helmets, or licences, or whatever, I once went through a licence checkpoint, gave them my expired IDP, and they said that was fine and waved me on, apparently not at all concerned that the bike I was riding was clearly displaying a registation sticker which expired years ago.
Chiang MaI has also introduced automatic cameras that are supposed to take a photograph and fine people without helmets but I’ve seen no change in the number of people with unprotected heads.
Love these posts, and vids. It’s uncurated you, and it’s awesome! Nothing boring.
Thank you so much, I’m so glad that you enjoy. Thanks for always being one of my biggest supporters ????
Yes, being Mad is quite fun. First thing to master is simply not caring about the opinions of others. Second one is…..
I dunno.