Koh Tao to the North
I flew into Bangkok under a little stress due to my time with the Burmese military secret police thinking they may take my stuff, ‘computer’, before I boarded the plane but at that point and I had my stuff and concluded I was no big fish. Bangkok is under siege of different groups all trying to get out from under what they perceive as a dictatorship of corruption, it very well may be. Corruption in my opinion is the wave that actually works most efficiently and always has, that and some form of celestial combination such as the big ‘T’; Saturn, Uranus, and I want to say Pluto but I may be wrong on that one. Idealism is the concept that there is such a thing as democracy and that there is such a thing as FAIR and EQUAL. From what I’ve seen, I say Bollocks. I’m off my point, always have been.
So there I was in Bangkok and I decided to give diving another try because the last time I had Bacterial Pneumonia in my left lung and couldn’t dive. I took a bus from BKK down south and hopped a boat to Koh Tao Island and low and behold developed some new ailment shelving the idea of entering the water. I spent a week in a hotel room, a nice one, Asia Divers Resort, and did nothing but write in a manuscript not worth mentioning yet. When I left Koh Tao I vowed, if I came back this way to get to Nepal via ‘Malaysia Airlines’ again via KL, I’d give it another try – yet to be seen.
I decided to go north to Chiang Mai and do a little tourist stuff up there then make a decision on what next. I stayed at the Top North Hotel again because of it's location and a pool. I hired a driver for the next day and went to the 'Tiger Kingdom' to see some big cats.
The Insect Zoo
The Snake Farm
I took a bus to Mae Hong Son, far north on the Burma border that I thought was going to take six hours and again found myself still on the bus after 10 hours. In the middle of the night I grabbed motorcycle taxi girl and she drove me to a guesthouse not worth mentioning but would sort it out my living arrangements in the morning. Down the street was a place called ‘Like View Guest House’. 200 baht/night if you want your own room with a bathroom. 80 baht/night if you can handle a dorm with no one else in it.
Once I checked in I went for a badly needed walk. All I could focus on was the pagoda at the top of the hill and what I thought was a road. It turned out after talking to the owners of Like View guest House that it was just a walking trail and I could be at the top in 30 minutes. Some signs say, ‘If you haven’t been to the top of the hill, you haven’t been to Mae Hong Son.’ After eight months of ‘planes, trains, and autobuses’ I realized I had done no physical activity. Sweat poured out of my body in the afternoon 100-degree blue-sky weather with smoke. I got to the top gasping for air with a limited success. I didn’t know if it was me or just no air.
The sunset was pretty though. I sat with a couple monks who were meditating and I was still gasping and my heart rate was off the charts. As the drops of sweat fell off my eyelids like a shower I realized it was a combination of all above and I’d have to do this everyday I could at least once if not twice a day. My regiment was beginning. I thought I’d reconnect to the physical side that I’ve ignored for the last eight months or so. At my age, 53, I can watch my body change from a rock to a ball of putty in weeks of activity loss. Bed bugs in the trains, hard benches on boats, no legroom on buses, do I care, no but it makes it difficult to be physical when you sit on buses, boats, and planes for hours on end and then go have fun. I’ not a sit down kind of person, I never have been. Growing up on Stinson beach I was never one to lay on a towel and bar-b-que in the sun. Skim-board, body surf, swim with the Great Whites in the triangle and watch seal pups erupt out of the water in the jaws of a shark was my childhood as I swam desperately to Bo-bo shores. Now I’m older and experience says wiser but I can’t be sure.
I stayed at the Like View guest House; ph # 083-5684752 or 082-1877785. The phone is best versus a site. No one looks, not even the owners. Make a phone call and you have a place to stay for cheap. The qwner/wife speaks proper English and the husband, god bless him, is a non-English speaking gentleman that will do anything to make you happy and content in the shadow of the pagoda. Highly recommended for many reasons. Oh yes, and these people have an ‘IN’ on guides for trekking in Northern Thailand. This brings me to my point in a round about fashion. I wanted to walk to Pai, 120-130 kilometers away through the jungle. Next blog.
www.davidcdagley.com
