Late To The Party

December 5, 2014

Suddenly it dawns on us, this is what bike touring can be.

Mae Sai to Chiang Saen 24 miles

Chiang Saen to Chiang Khong 35 miles

Dear little friends,

Today is the king's birthday here in Thailand, a national holiday, but that hasn't slowed the pace of construction here in Chiang Khong. Chiang Khong has been sort of backwatered by the new bridge to Laos opened a year ago, but large hotels are still being built, and a new riverfront promenade is being smoothed by a backhoe behind our once-peaceful guesthouse.

We left Mae Sai on December 1, heading east and south toward Chiang Saen on a quiet back road and suddenly something became very, very clear to us. OHHHHHHHH. So THIS is what all fuss about bike touring is about! Look at this velvety butter-cream frosting asphalt road with shoulders, kilometer markers, and passing traffic that does not honk in our ears! Look at the passing scenery instead of for potholes! Where are all the speeding buses and trucks and motorbikes? I mean, there are still speeding buses and trucks and motorbikes but they aren't every 1.5 seconds apart, they are minutes, sometimes half an hour apart and generally they aren't grazing our elbows.

What is this thing called smooth wide shoulder with no traffic?

We started making facetious comments about the appalling conditions on our sweet road.

"Check out this washboard! I'm going back to Myanmar!" over a tiny corrugation of dried buffalo manure. A stray rock was the subject of loud exaggerated warnings of mayhem. An orange peel prompted loud wah-wah-ooga signals.

We have come to the conclusion that December 1st was our first day of bike touring, that our entire time in Myanmar was something different, maybe we can just call that part of the trip loaded mountain biking? Looking back at our photos of road conditions maybe it was we who were loaded, I don't know.

Zooming along, I remembered reading something about hills in Northern Thailand. And then we came to a hill in Northern Thailand. It was right before the Golden Triangle area where Thailand, Myanmar, and Laos meet, and it was a real SOB. My tray food breakfast in Mae Sai had been so spicy hot it was inedible and I hadn't supplemented it with anything else so suddenly, for the first time biking, I had the shakies, a blood-sugar plunge was that going to shut down any upward activity until it was addressed.

We stopped for peanuts and water and some fruit. Bruce photographed some beautiful grasses waving to the blue sky. Eventually I stabilized but I was fixated on one thing that I had spied in Thailand and remembered were everywhere in Thailand: Wall's ice cream freezers. You see the red heart-shaped "W" everywhere, and in them are the bars and drumsticks and such that could literally SAVE MY LIFE if I found one, so that's what I thought of on the long way up that hill in Northern Thailand. These hills are so steep that we have to push the bikes up them, perhaps stouter breeds of cyclists don't.

Finally we reached the top and sailed down, found a Wall freezer, and ate black-n-whites with the sweet little chocolate in the cone tip. We stopped at the Golden Triangle to marvel at the tourist tackiness and the psychotic Chinese casino areas across the river in Laos. Then we scooted on into Chiang Saen, our big hill back in the distant past, victory was ours.

This big Buddha looks out on the Golden Triangle, where Laos, Thailand, and Myanmar meet.

Chiang Saen is not the sleepy backwater I thought it would be. It has some very ancient ruins of walls and forts and stupas, it has a fun riverfront restaurant scene where som tam (green papaya salad) vendors set up small tables on mats every evening and you can eat while watching dozens of wooden Lao cargo boats painted in candy colors pass by and moor for the evening. Our guesthouse was very nearby and the later it got every evening, the more raucous that area became but back in our little room we slept through most of that.

The ancient city wall around Chiang Saen.

The moat around Chiang Saen's ancient walls.

Som tam, grilled pork, sticky rice, and Chang beer served with ice, that's the menu on the Chiang Saen waterfront. Too bad you weren't here.

Setting up for the dinner hour on the Chiang Saen riverfront.

There are numerous candy-colored Lao boats going up and down the river all day.

We discovered something marvelous in Chiang Saen: Tung Yai (Big Bag). This is a Slurpee sized bag of iced coffee in it's own bag with a straw inserted, perfect for a hot afternoon of touring around looking at walls and ruins.

After a few days in Chiang Saen we were ready to make a move to Chiang Khong and then decide what our plans would be. 35 miles later, our plans became, "Let's rest some more."The ride was beautiful but guess what? There are more hills in Northern Thailand than the one we had climbed before, and they are longer, steeper and more horrible than I ever imagined. It was still a beautiful ride but it really kicked our asses, and we arrived in CK sweaty, tired, and very proud of what we had accomplished that day. We did a lot of pushing. We did a lot of eating when we got to town, including the Wall Cornettos I had promised myself on those long uphill pushes. Double chocolate this time.

The bikes that don't make it on the hills end up here.

I've always liked Chiang Khong and I still like it. It's a good place to hang out, there is some pretty good food in town including the best bread in the entire world made by an old Thai hippie couple that also have a Mexican restaurant, of all things. Our guesthouse has little rooms that have porches facing the river with some noisy geese wandering below, a dining area that is convivial and busy, with folks from other guesthouses stopping by to eat and visit. Right now a high school film class is using it to shoot a scene despite the backhoe still doing its thing in the background and Mrs. Guesthouse talking on the phone. I have yet to hear a film shoot here say anything like "Quiet on the set!" which is good because it will never ever be quiet on the set.

The best breakfast on the Mekong, at Bamboo Mexican Food in Chiang Khong, homemade whole grain bread to die for.

In the few days we have spent in Thailand we have observed a lot of things about Thailand that will probably wait to be written about until we are out of Thailand, which is kind of remarkable considering we certainly didn't wait until we were out of Myanmar to tell it like it was there. So maybe that tells you something about Thailand you didn't know already.

Today's ride: 59 miles (95 km)
Total: 268 miles (431 km)

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