Ja, another motorbike loop, although likely the last one for this trip. I keep doing these because, at this point in working my way through Southeast Asia, I’m losing interest in visiting sights, be they natural wonders, museums, historical structures. I’m sure the caves and waterfalls of Thailand are worthy, but after seeing so many elsewhere, they are all starting to look the same. Just because something is there doesn’t mean it needs to be visited. I learned my lesson regarding this when I visited Georgia. I spent one very hot and spectacularly sunny day working my way between two caves near Kutaisi, catching transport that involved buses with limited timetables, a ride in  one of the ubiquitous junker Lada taxis, hitching a lift with a very sweet family in a very crowded car, waiting for marschutkas that never showed up, and then a several kilometer uphill walk, made worse by the fact that I didn’t know how much further the cave was. And at the end of all of that, both caves were a grand disappointment. I got back to Kutaisi an exhausted, sweat-drenched, grouchy mess, marveling at my own stubbornness in continuing to slog ahead with visiting these caves when there were great big flashing neon signs indicating that maybe, just maybe, it was A Bad Idea, and anyone with an ounce of brains would pause to rethink the game plan for the day. But some days are just so, and I feel a bit smarter for them. Thankfully they are few and far between.

Most of the towns along this loop, at least at this time of year, and other than Pai (I found nothing appealing about Pai) and Soppong, were blissfully untouristy. They were just everyday little towns going about their everyday business, full of simple pleasures to find. When I say simple pleasures, I’m mostly taking about food, priced attractively low instead of food priced for tourists. I chased down the ice cream man with his motorbike and sidecar in Chiang Dao, which wasn’t as easy as you’d think for a town with basically one main street. The daily market was in full swing, and I couldn’t find a convenient spot to pull over and park. I think I went up and down at least four times before giving up and thinking I had lost him, only to catch up with him, conveniently, next to a parking lot (cup of ice cream, 15 baht. Also, a funny rice sausage with a side of cabbage leaves, 12 baht). And then in Mae Sariang I got a bag of spicy deep fried onions at the Friday night market (20 baht). You may think a bag of deep fried onions isn’t anything to write about, but this bag was. And iced green tea (30 baht). I don’t know how to say this in Thai, and my usual method of pointing at something wasn’t going to work, so I used my phone to take a picture of the cup of green tea on the poster outside the cafe, and showed it to the guy running the place. He put on his glasses, took a look, and said, “Ah, green tea” (in Thai), whereupon a woman’s voice from the back room said “Green tea!” (in English). I love simple, random, and successful exchanges like this. My tea was pulled in exactly the same manner as an espresso shot, mixed with condensed milk and what I think was simple syrup, poured over ice, and topped with froth. I want another right now.

I’ve been lucky enough to visit many places of natural beauty in the last few years (Iceland, you are still my beauty queen), so my bar for visit-worthiness is fairly high. It’s burn season right now in northern Thailand, so the air is very hazy; viewpoints that are probably spectacular in the green, rainy season now offer a perfect view of dry, brown hills obscured by smoke. I was content, for the most part, to spend my time on this trip just passing through. The part of me that wasn’t content was my posterior. I think two weeks of sitting on a motorbike compressed my glutes. Sore derrière aside, I just like driving. I think it’s an American thing, this culture of the road trip, where getting there is as much a part of the journey as the final destination, and where the final destination can be Nowhere In Particular. Sometimes I find that being In-Between is easier than being Somewhere. When I’m in-between, all I have to do is keep going until I need to stop. It gives my brain a break, because once I stop, I’m suddenly faced with multiple tasks and decisions–where to sleep, what to eat, what to see, what to do next. I didn’t always like the road trip. Pretty sure there were times as a kid, crammed into the back of a Volkswagen with my sister, the family dachshund, and a pile of books, when I wished I were elsewhere. Like all acquired tastes, there was a period of dislike preceding the development of a deeper appreciation.

So for the most part, I passed right by waterfalls, national parks, and extensive and apparently spectacular cave systems that I may like to revisit some day. The one thing I did made an effort to see was the evening return of hundreds of thousands of swifts who spend the night in Tham Lod cave near Soppong. I sat at the exit for over two hours, from 17:00 to past 19:00, watching a constant stream of birds returning from the day’s bug hunting to roost among the stalactites for the night, the twittering tweeting from inside growing louder and louder as those two hours passed. I wish I could have camped out there overnight, just to see if the twittering ever died down. Then I sat around a bit more waiting for the bats to leave, but only a handful departed, and by then it was almost completely dark. I walked back to the lodge aided by my headlamp. An assortment of nocturnal spiders were starting to emerge, including one that looked like it was covered in glitter. 

Back in Chiang Mai I had six months of hair chopped off to a shorter, sleeker, cooler ‘do more befitting the growing swelter of Southeast Asia. This is in itself unremarkable news, except for the name of my stylist: Chompoo. Also, upon returning to my guesthouse, I was informed by my landlady that Mondays are charmed days on which to receive a haircut (it was a Monday). On the other hand, one should not have one’s hair cut on a Wednesday. You can file that away under esoteric travel tips.