Sim City 2000 rang out, just like it always does, calling us back into the world of the living. We obliged, knowing that if we did not hustle we might miss the 5:30 am bus from Nakhon Ratchasima to the border.

The sun was still not up, so we wheeled through the Thai night toward the station. Traffic was very light, and the streets were essentially deserted. As we drew nearer to the station, we started to see fellows on motor bikes coming in from the country, already in uniform for their jobs as desk clerks or factory workers. We made it to the station just in time to load our things on the bus, buy our tickets from a woman who had erected a little wooden stall next to the platform, and pay a little $3.00 graft “bicycle fee” that we were quite certain did not technically apply to the folding cycles. We considered it a $3.00 donation to the cheerful women who were overseeing the operation, and feeling quite triumphant, relaxed into our seats.

I slept so soundly I did not even notice when the bus attendant brought water and cookies around to all aboard, and only barely noticed when the bus was suddenly loaded completely full to the hilt (I’m talking people packed in, standing in the aisles) and then subsequently unloaded a few stops later, in a tiny place called Ban Dan. A little more snoozing and suddenly we were the last passengers on the bus and were being dropped off at the giant border market called the Cambodian Friendship Market.

The market was sprawling with hundreds if not thousands of small stalls selling all kinds of goods for exchange between Cambodia and Thailand. A section of the market near the center was belching smoke, indicating to us that it was either a smelter or a food court.

Either way, it would be of interest to AsiaWheeling, so we threw on our bags and unfolded the speed TRs.

There was a fellow on a pink child’s bicycle across the street yelling at us as we unfolded the cycles and started into the market. As we made our way in, the fellow on the bike came up to us. He explained in nearly immaculate English that recent changes in Cambodian law had closed this border crossing’s visa-upon-entry station, and that we would need to get a visa issued on this side.

We were dubious, but a few factors lead us to consider his argument as truth:
a) on our previous entry into Cambodia, there had been no visa-upon-entry station
b) we saw many of these visa outfits, and they all seemed to be packed with people (with foreigners getting visas)
c) we had been too long traveling in the land of the honest salesman

So we forked over about 150% of the cost of a visa-upon-entry and our passports. He helped us to fill out the necessary forms, our entry and exit cards, and ran across the border on a motor bike to get our visas.

We drew the line when he tried to tell us that without a Cambodian ID card, we would not be able to buy sim cards across the border, and that we could only buy them from him for $15.00 a pop.

Armed with our newly issued Cambodian visas, we headed toward the border, by way of a Thai-Cambodian friendship chicken satay stand. We ordered a bunch of chicken grilled on a stick, with two plastic bags of sticky rice to accompany them. This food was tasty enough, and effective in its primary mission of sustaining our energy.

Thailand let us out with little fuss. While sweating profusely in line, we ran into a German/Hong Kong/Israeli fellow who agreed to share a cab to Siem Reap with us. We also ran into the visa-upon-entry counter, which was completely operational. Well, you can’t win them all, can you?

When we finally had made our way through a large stretch of casinos, catering to Thai who wish to get around the prohibition of gambling in Thailand (express buses from Bangkok to here are called the Gambler’s Express), we found ourselves at the health check station.

Here we filled out a form indicating that we were in good health, then headed to the passport control line, which was very slow; once we finally made it to the front, it was quite straightforward. They took a picture of my face, checked my visa, and let me into the country.

On the other side of the border, I bid goodbye to our German/etc. fellow as he climbed onto a tourist shuttle to the bus station. I waited for Scott to finish his processing, passing the time by doing folding bicycle schtick with the many touts who were interested in providing me with everything from cab rides, to hotel rooms, to prostitutes. When Scott finally emerged from passport control, we discussed our options. We had been on a bus for a while, so wheeling to the station, rather than taking the tourist bus sounded more our speed. We had told our German/etc. friend that we would meet him there. Little did we know, however, it was the last we would see of the man.

We wheeled across the city, periodically asking for directions to the bus terminal. We got some strange responses, which appeared to be sending us in two different directions simultaneously, but we decided to use the Indian method of averaging all responses to produce the verdict. So we rode on, straight through and out of Poipet, into the countryside.

It was hot, and we were going through our water at an alarming rate. This would prove to be the theme of our time here in Cambodia. So far, I would deem it the most dehydrating country of the entire trip. Even when we stopped for more water, we were told to keep going, only four more kilometers ahead.

Cambodia is flat as a pancake. We rolled along on a well maintained road, lined with new looking electric lines. It was brutally sunny, mildly humid, and the landscape looked dry. If you had plopped me here out of the blue and told me this was Nebraska during the summer, I could easily have been convinced.

But the real question was: who would build a bus station way out here in the countryside? What cruel joke were the locals playing on us? We let these questions whirl around in our heads, but kept riding. The voices were promptly silenced when, low and behold, we arrived at a giant bus depot. A totally deserted bus depot.

We parked the bikes and got off, feeling something like characters in a zombie flick. We wandered into the empty interior of the depot. Almost all the shops were closed, including the ticket counter and the information counter. There were a few people wandering around doing nothing in particular, zombie-like. Interactions with them proved that some of them spoke a bit of English.

We were able to ascertain that there were two bus stations in this city. And for reasons that still remain a mystery, the Poipet officials switch between the two stations on a daily basis. One station is right in the Poipet city center. The other is this one that we had managed to find our way to.

Luckily, everyone in the station seemed to be friends with a guy who would be willing to drive us to Siem Reap. And after a fair bit of bargaining with the crowd, all present proceeded to completely forget the agreed upon price, upon the arrival of the cab driver. Scott and I looked at each other. We hadn’t really made much progress in the bargaining, so we just capitulated and climbed into the cab.

Our cab driver was a great chap, and the cab was reminiscent of a certain Toyota Camry that my friend Joe had driven in high school. I felt comfortable in the car. The cab had no radio, but proved to offer great acoustics for the ukulele. As we drove,  I sat in the back and played most of the songs I knew. We were beginning to notice a peculiar thing about Cambodia: all the cars were Toyota Camrys. And while I am, of course, mildly exaggerating here, the percentage of Camrys really was astounding, likely 90%. Any reader who can shed light on this is most heartily invited to do so in the comments.

We stopped for petrol and provisions at a road stall along the way, and watched the pump work as the hose snaked through our Speed TRs into the back of the car.

By the time we finally reached Siem Reap, the sun was beginning to sink low in the sky. On the ride we had selected a hotel from our Lonely Planet pdf and pulled up to find it quite a beautiful structure.  It was on a gravel road in the city center, and went by the name of The Mandalay Inn. It proved to be staffed by strikingly friendly and capable characters, to be totally affordable, spotlessly clean, and featured free wifi. An instant seal of approval.

That evening we wheeled into the city in search of food. We realized that we had not eaten since the friendship chicken, and were well past the point of blood-sugar-related madness. We finally sat down at a restaurant, which was in no rush to serve us, lacked the ability to make many of the things on the menu, but despite all, won us over with its charming staff, strange music, succulent Khmer curried shrimp, strange fruit smoothies, and ridiculous interpretation of the hamburger (called the Crazy Beef Burger –which Scott instantly re-dubbed the “Mad Cow” Burger).

From there, we figured there was just enough light left to take an evening sunset wheel.  We chose a direction that we guessed was not on the way to the Angkor complex, and began wheeling. Cambodia was beautiful; and the roads were smooth as silk.

We had not been able to attain speeds like this in some time, due to either bad roads or thick traffic. It felt fantastic to just let the Speed TRs eat.

And they were hungry. Once the sun began to hang low enough, we circled back, finding ourselves once again on the main road that had led to Siem Reap from Poipet. Traffic was thicker here, but manageable. We wheeled by giant hotel after giant hotel, finally finding our way back to the Mandalay Inn just as the sun ducked below the horizon.

In light of our recent successes in the departments of Wheel Repair and Rural Navigation, we decided to, for once, reward ourselves with a lazy morning. Scott packed up the last bits of his things while I headed over to the corner store to buy some lazy morning supplies.

We made like Frenchmen, drank strong coffee, ate baguettes with butter, and devoured a couple of cups of local Lao yogurt, impossibly creamy with fresh local floral honey. One of the more imperial breakfasts of the trip, I’d wager, but also quite enjoyable.

The night before we had run into the proprietor’s son, Tao, who was more than happy to share a celebratory BeerLao with us (it seems he had already had a few) and sing a few songs on the ukulele. Sometimes it was hard to determine if he knew the words to the tunes I was playing or if he just had a knack for chiming in. Regardless, we had formed a close bond by the time Scott and I had excused ourselves to go work on our pitiful backlog of correspondence for you, dear reader.

The same fellow was now wide awake and much more himself, all grins and joviality, and more than willing to take us to the Thai border in the the family van, for a small price of course.

You see, dear reader, we were on our way to Thailand in order to cut across that fine country, saving us a little time, to make our way into Cambodia near the border crossing in the northwest, near Poipet. To do this, we would need to make our way at least as far as the city of Nakhon Ratchasima that night, and catch a bus for the border the next day.

At the border of Thailand, we bid Tao goodbye, and made our way into the line of people waiting to get out of Lao. My guess is that many of them were as sad as we were to leave. Lao had been a relaxing tour of the extremes. Lao bestowed on us a final gift, when Scott managed, while in line for his exit stamp, to connect to a free five minutes of wireless Internet, offered by Lao Telecom, and achieve a 400 kb/s upload rate while syncing his offline email activity. More points for an already AsiaWheeling-approved Lao.

Also, while in line, we ran into a Thai fellow who was interested in us and the Speed TRs. He asked where we were going and offered us a ride with him and his family who would be driving through none other than Nakhon Ratchasima on their way back to their home in Bangkok. “Will you have enough room for the bicycles?” we asked, showing him the folding technique, and attracting a huge audience in the line to exit Lao.

“Sure,” he replied. We told him we would wheel across the bridge, and if we overlapped on the other side we might take him up on the offer. This would also give Scott and me enough time to talk over our general impressions of the fellow, and decide if we would trust him. Lao let us out, no problem, even waiving the exit fee, for reasons of which we cannot right now be sure.

Wheeling across the bridge proved as fantastic an experience as we had remembered, with plenty of waiving of fees and smiling of officials. In line at Thai customs was our friend with the van, standing in an adjacent line with his family. He sent his daughter over to us with a message. She handed us a crumpled piece of paper, torn from a child’s notebook, with the fellow’s telephone number written in ball point pen. I motioned my thanks to our friend, and once we had officially re-entered Thailand, we decided to take out our phones and give him a call.

Then we remembered, Lao phones don’t call internationally. So we took out our old Thai sim cards and inserted them into our phones. I tried calling, but it seems my service had expired. So I ran over to a payphone, threw in about 60 cents in Baht and dialed. In an experience eerily similar to one we had during the pilot study, I plunged coins into the phone struggling against time and the limits of human communication only to be cut off in the middle of our conversation.

We knew our friend with the van was in the Thai border city of Nong Khai, so we saddled up and headed down the road looking for him. Not long into the ride, we began to despair; Nong Khai was not such a small place, and we were trying to find a needle in a haystack. When we were just about to give up, however, he somehow magically appeared behind us in a giant silver van, and as he pulled to the side of road, he also motioned for a nearby tuk tuk (the Lao and Thai version of the auto-rickshaw) to pull over as well.

And that was how we ended up in a family van with two folding bicycles, two sweaty members of AsiaWheeling, a Canadian couple, and a Thai family, headed for Bangkok. We stopped not long into the trip at a Vietnamese restaurant for some food. Scott and I bungled the ordering process and ended up with way too much. So laden with many white plastic bags full of delightfully diverse and fresh Vietnamese food, we sought solace in sharing with the rest of the van.

We drove on through the day and into the night, drilling our way into the heart of Isan. Isan is the name for the central and northeast parts of Thailand and also the name of the majority ethnic group in that country. Although in Bangkok you wouldn’t know it, Isan people and restaurants are seen as somewhat “country.”

When we finally arrived in Nakhon Ratchasima, it was well after dark. We did our best to compensate our man fairly for his kind transport, and headed to the bus station. As we had suspected, there was no overnight bus to the border; we would need to stay somewhere in this large city in the middle of Isan for the night.

We plugged our laptops into the wall and brought up our pdf copy of the Thailand Lonely Planet. It seemed there was a reasonably inexpensive hotel not far from here and… eh! The power was cut when a security guard unplugged our computer. It seems we would need to pay to use the electricity here.

Fair enough. We paid them and subsequently were forced to endure a drawn-out receipt writing, copying, verifying, and stamping process before we were finally able to get back to work. We took note of the location and name of the hotel and congratulated the officials on their fine work extracting money from us. With that, we hopped on the cycles and headed south into the city.

It was not a touristy town, and our presence was one of considerable interest to the many local youth who were whiling away their time on the street corners. The roads were very good and traffic was light, so we made short work of the few kilometers to the hotel. The hotel proved to be $10.00 for a night with A/C, so we registered immediately without bargaining. The room was clean, and low and behold, blessed with free wifi. Our first like this in Thailand.

We made a quick trip out to get a couple bowls of delightful Isan noodles, then retired to our hotel to have a quick Internet feast before our long day of traveling to Siem Reap, Cambodia, location of the fabled Angkor Wat.

We woke up quite relaxed, mostly due to the last vestiges of the anti-anxiety medication we had taken the night before, and mostly no worse for the wear. The bus ride to Nong Khai had taken quite a bit longer than expected. The traffic leaving Bangkok was an immense snarl. I remember waking up a number of times on the bus to find us simply stewing in an endless stagnating river of bumper-to-bumper traffic.

The bus had no bathroom and stopped infrequently, so I had deliberately dehydrated myself. Not surprisingly, my first thoughts off the bus were of water. My next was of time. The sun seemed quite high, so I looked down at my watch. Our bus should have arrived a little before 8:00nam, but it turns out we had not rolled into Nong Khai until nearly noon. Our chances of getting to Luang Prabang in the north of Laos that evening were growing ever slimmer.

We unfolded the speed TRs and slung on our packs. My knees were a little creaky, and my feet a little sore from sleeping for so long in the upright position, crammed like sardines against the bulkhead, but we were more or less well rested and excited to be AsiaWheeling again. Onward to a new country again, at last!

Once we got clear of the bus terminal, we wheeled for a while in the wrong direction, mostly due to some sour advice given to us by a fellow driving a large pickup truck full of watermelons. Eventually, a family running a small roadside repair and noodle shop explained to us that a simple uber-rausch would have us back on track.

Now headed in the right direction, we laid into the speed TRs double time, just letting them eat road. And soon we were at the border. This border is called the Thai-Lao Friendship Bridge. We exited Thailand with no trouble whatsoever, and commenced wheeling across the bridge. The guards at the entrance to the bridge seemed uninterested in soliciting a toll from us, instead greeting us with huge smiles and flagging us on.

As we rode on across toward Laos, our way was adorned with Lao and Thai flags. We looked down to our left, where some kind of strange emergent beach party was coming to life on the banks of the Mekong.

The Mekong was, and still is, at its lowest point in the last 50 years, but even during this current terrible drought, it is a mighty river to behold. And the extent to which the bridge overshot the shore on either side spoke to how much larger the thing could be during a heavy rainy season.

Near the midpoint of the bridge was a place where both of the side walkways abruptly ended in giant warning signs, and we were forced to portage the cycles down onto the main road.

This was somewhat harrowing since there was no shoulder and little room for the giant goods and construction trucks to avoid us. Luckily traffic was pretty light, and from there we rode into Laos, which we quickly learned is locally written “Lao.” The French added the “s” to the end in order to be French, but the Lao have since dispensed with it, as will we.

There is an interesting moment once you cross off the bridge and onto Lao ground. In Lao, they maintain the French style of driving on the right side of the road. Until this point, AsiaWheeling had been traveling exclusively in left-side driving countries. The bridge itself was a lefty as well. But upon arrival on Lao soil, the road criss-crosses itself, much like a figure eight slot car track, and we started driving on the right.

It was strange to drive once again on the side I grew up with, like trying on an old pair of tennis shoes that has long languished in a closet at your father’s house.

We wheeled up to the Lao visa upon entry counter and had very little trouble acquiring the required documentation. In fact, our passports came back to us not only with a gleaming new visa, but with an entry stamp to boot, allowing us to shortcut the arrivals line and wheel directly into Lao.

On the other side, we met a French fellow named Olivier, who was also headed into the Lao capital city of Vientiane. The three of us haggled a decent fair for a van ride into the city, though our driver was successful in extracting another $3.00 above the quoted rate from Scott and I when we asked to be dropped off at the bus station rather than Olivier’s hotel. Fair enough. Once at the station, we unloaded our belongings and began to survey the area.

The Vientiane bus station is a none too glamorous place. It is small and jam-packed with old Korean buses. Likely due to the impending New Years celebration in Luang Prabang, it was also reasonably crowded, with people looking to head out of the city for the holiday.

All the scheduled VIP buses had been booked long ago, so we were left with the option of waiting here in Vientiane for a bus tomorrow, or getting on one of the many “people’s buses,” which ran on no schedule, and simply left as soon as all the tickets were purchased. With so many people in the station, these were leaving at the alarming rate of two or three an hour. That said, they were also quite the crap shoot in terms of quality. Some of them looked passably nice: aging Korean double deckers advertising interior bathrooms. Others were more like crumpled jalopies held together mostly by paint and rust.

It was then that we realized we were starving. The decision of what to do next would warrant a full stomach we decided, and thus proceeded to a restaurant in the vicinity of the bus station, where we were able to procure two giant steaming bowls of the Lao interpretation of Pho, my favorite Vietnamese soup variant. Each steaming bowl of noodles was accompanied by a large plastic basket of freshly washed greens (basil, mint, lettuce, and dandelion) which could be torn apart and added to the soup, along with fresh cloves of garlic and hot peppers. We doped ours heavily with a variety of fish, and spicy and savory sauces before tearing apart and adding plenty of greens. It was glorious.

With sanity, logic, and lucidity rising as they tend to along with blood sugar, we decided that we needed to get to Luang Prabang, and that the people’s bus would do just fine. And with that, Scott purchased tickets. We rounded the corner to check out the bus on which we had just snagged a spot, and breathed a sigh of relief. It was one of the nicer ones and even seemed to sport a bathroom. Feeling quite jolly about the whole thing, we began to fold up the cycles and load them unto the underbelly of the large double-decker.

Just as we were trying to do this, a man came up to us and indicated that we stop, and step back with our luggage. Though he was not in uniform, few of the officials in this station were, so we followed his orders. He then proceeded to conduct a team of men who loaded the entire remainder of the underbelly of our bus with large multicolored tarpaulin bags. When this deed was done, the un-uniformed official came over to us and apologized, explaining that he did not know we had so much luggage, and we would need to catch the next bus.

We protested a fair bit, but when it came down to it, he held the cards. So Scott was ushered into the back door of the ticket office, where he exchanged the tickets for ones on the next bus. Along with the exchange came a hefty refund as well. It seems the next bus would be a little more down to earth. It was certainly no double-decker, and had no bathroom, but the seats reclined and there was room for our luggage, so AsiaWheeling climbed aboard in the highest of spirits.

So high were our spirits, in fact, that it seemed nothing could bring them down. Not when the bus broke down the first time, and the driver and his helper got out to top up the power steering fluid, bleeding the hydraulics in a thick stream out into the road.

Or the second time it broke down and the driver and his helper got out a Persian looking rug that they laid down beneath the bus to make working underneath it more comfortable.

One of the breakdowns occurred near a giant street of baguette vendors.

Lao was after all a French colony at one time, which we discovered has its perks. In fact, for the rest of our time in Lao, we would never be too far from a pretty decent crusty bread.

The bus also stopped at an interesting night market in the middle of nowhere, which sported a great many vendors selling all manner of dried river fish.

We rode on munching bread, wishing we had bought some fish, but with spirits ever rising, not damped even when the driver stopped again and again to do strange things like wandering over to closed convenience stores and peering in the windows (looking for more steering fluid?), or walking around the bus, or hammering on the latches of the luggage bins with mallets for a while waking everyone up.

All we cared about was that this bus was headed to Luang Prabong and so were we.

Tokyo Envy

Flying into Bangkok from Sri Lanka, we alighted from the plane and promptly began searching for food in the airport. The most obvious choice  seemed to be a ramen restaurant, which appeared fast, easy, and relative to airport food, reasonably priced.

Odd, I thought, sitting down, that our first meal in Thailand wasn’t the world famous Tom Yum Khaa or Green Curry we had been dreaming of. Watching people pass in the airport as I dined on these noodles, it seemed there was more of Japan in Thailand than just the food.  Clothing worn by the glitzy airport patrons brought me back to my time in Tokyo. The emphasis on and intensity of cosmetics on the light faces of women passing by matched Japanese standards of beauty and public presence.  All around the airport, customs officials and idle waitresses read Manga translated from the Japanese. Throughout Thailand we found that 7-11 (owned by Japanese Seven & I Holdings) does a brisk business, with over 5000 locations in the country, despite pricing goods at a premium over family-owned bodegas.

The aesthetic experience of Japan has permeated Thailand and become a point of desire held by a large class of consumers. Food packages, media design, retail experiences, and public transportation feature Japanese-style iconography.

These designs are characterized by simple geometric shapes to communicate meaning (such as flavor, function, or usage directions), anime-style illustrations, cartoon characters, and often Japanese writing, as if to suggest their progenitors or intended export destination. Japan, as a tourist destination, commands much attention among the Thai. Bangkok itself even has a surprisingly high number of Japanese expatriates, complete with associated neighborhoods of book shops, restaurant-filled streets, and cafes.

Korean cultural artifacts also have been in high demand among Thai consumers. While not as present in packaging and products, the K-Wave has swept across Thailand in the form of pop music, film, and fashion that has made Korea the new “cool” for Thailand. This wave of Korean and Japanese influence is especially interesting, as it can be considered to be unseating the U.S. and Europe as the cultural producers whose styles and products are interpreted and consumed in developing Asia. As Thailand looks to Japan and Korea as  trading partners, tourist destinations, and marks of high quality products, what are the implications for the future?

Overseas Chinese Entrepreneurship

Bangkok’s business community seemed to be the most pronounced example of a phenomenon we experienced in Indonesia, Malaysia, and Singapore: Overseas Chinese entrepreneurship. In Thailand it came as a surprise to discover Chinese heritage, as the vast majority of overseas Chinese business families in Bangkok had migrated long enough ago to adopt Thai surnames. The name Bangkok itself was given by Chinese traders who populated it as a port city before it became the nation’s capital. Vast numbers of Hakka, Fujian, Chaozhou, and Cantonese people settled in the metropolis to found manufacturing companies and create a financial infrastructure to support them. These Chinese now represent an engine of growth in the Thai economy, both producing manufactured goods that make up the bulk of Thailand’s exports, as well as driving growth in Bangkok’s upmarket institutions that firmly place it in the category of “world class city” as it would like to be defined. How far do these Chinese bonds go? Will they facilitate trade and partnership in the new wave of Chinese foreign investment in infrastructure and industry that has occurred over the last three years?  The sheer quantity of Thai-Chinese business families will no doubt make it a space to watch.

People’s Hero

AsiaWheeling visited Bangkok at a time of political upheaval, experiencing street demonstrations and all night speeches projected onto giant screens near a democracy monument. Hundreds of thousands of farmers and fishermen from rural areas came to rally, spill their blood, erect bamboo barriers, and demand elections be held. On the surface, this movement for democracy, against corruption, and against urban favoritism is one of altruism, making it easily encouraged by outsiders’ encouragement. The individual nearly deified on these red shirts is Thaksin Shinawatra, the former Thai Prime Minister who held office from 2001 to 2006. While the protesters demand new elections for a number of candidates, the understanding is that this will allow Thaksin to be re-elected.

Why should the Red Shirts favor Thaksin, other than the fact that he may be monetarily compensating both the leaders of the movement and the commoners for participating in the rallies? He’s a billionaire businessman and Thai Chinese (see above) who represents the elite old guard, who, one would assume, is out of touch with the needs of plebeians. However, during his time at the helm, Thaksin discovered the key to growing his popularity in terms of sheer number of supporters was to satisfy the rural poor. To achieve mass appeal, he instituted the “30 Baht per visit” healthcare policy, allowing Thai nationals to pay only 30 Baht ($0.90) per clinical visit and receive medical treatment at no additional cost. Additionally, he instated rural credit expansion programs, allowing individuals to borrow against their future incomes at very low interest rates, essentially nationalizing the payday loan industry.  Thaksin  legislated direct injections of cash into village development funds, and instated the “One Tambon One Product” stimulus program that  identifies superior goods in each sub-district and formally provides these products with marketing exposure on the national level.

However, something about Thaksin’s behavior doesn’t align with the Red Shirts’ cries to end government corruption. He has been accused of selling strategically valuable national assets to foreign governments, as well as for exhibiting illegal and nepotistic sales of Bangkok real estate to his family members. Now jet-setting around the world, Thaksin operates the Red Shirt puppet show in Bangkok from stopovers in Dubai, Moscow, Brunei, and London.

Before he was a politician, Thaksin was simultaneously a police officer and businessman who experimented with a number of failed ventures including a silk shop, a movie theater, an apartment building, public bus radio services, and security systems, which left him over 50 million baht in debt. Finally, with the help of his police connections, he founded Advanced Information Services (AIS), nominally a computer rental business, but one that went on to capitalize on mobile phone growth in Thailand just as the sector was beginning. Started in 1990, the firm gained a 20-year monopoly concession on 900-MHz GSM mobile service from the Telephone Organization of Thailand, growing rapidly and getting listed on the Thai Stock Exchange. One year later, it became the largest mobile phone operator in Thailand.

Thaksin would later grow his holding company, Shin corporation, into an entity that held large stakes in:

• AIS – The aforementioned mobile phone operator carrying the majority of Thailand’s wireless voice data.
• Shin Satellite – The first Thai company permitted by the Ministry of Transportation to launch satellites
• ITV – A major Thai television station acquired from the King’s Crown Property Bureau, with a 30-year concession to operate UHF frequency broadcasts
• Other portfolio investments include additional media, telecomunication, and information technology firms, as well as Thai Air Asia, the local branch of the low cost carrier.

In 2006 Thaksin and his family then sold their 49.6% stake in Shin Corporation for US$1.88 billion to Temasek Holdings, the sovereign wealth fund of Singapore. He has received considerable judgment for this sale, both because of the national information infrastructure assets that are now owned in large part by a foreign nation, as well because many of Shin Corporation’s business lines benefited favorably from legislation that was put in place when he was at the helm of government.  The fact that this sale was free of any capital gains taxation, based on Thai securities and investment law, further angered many.

In 2008, Thaksin was found guilty by Thailand’s Supreme Court of arranging the sale of plots of land at government auction for a discounted price, violating the National Counter Corruption Act, which prohibits officials and their spouses from entering into contracts with state agencies for such purchases. Sentenced to two years imprisonment, Thaksin continued on his self-imposed exile abroad, requesting political asylum in Britain stating that the case against him was politically motivated. Repeatedly, Thaksin has ignored the arrest warrants and bail terms and failed to appear in Thai court. Since then, he has lived as an elite global fugitive, spending the bulk of his time in Dubai, Manila, the UK,  and Germany, and obtaining status as a diplomat of Nicaragua.

As of the time of this writing, the Red Shirts are still demonstrating on the streets of Bangkok, sporting Thaksin’s image on coffee mugs and tee-shirts, under banners proclaiming “Truth Today” and “End Corruption.” How are the beliefs of the Red Shirts and the actions of Thaksin reconciled? Could it be  possible that, in the eyes of the Red Shirts, Thaksin’s siphoned cash and refusals to face justice are inconsequential in relation to the vast improvement in their quality of living? Or is it that the current government is, in fact, worse, exhibiting both corruption and ignorance of the farmers’ plights?

One thing is for certain.  If Thaksin is indeed seeking revenge on Thailand’s current government, he’s doing an incredible job of unleashing fury on Prime Minister Abhisit’s regime.

It was 10:00 am, and in a rare role reversal, Woody remained in bed as I paced on Steve’s balcony.  With phone in one hand, and MacBook Pro balanced on the air conditioning unit, I sipped on an open WiFi network while avoiding condensation drips raining from above.  That morning the dear parts from SpeedMatrix and My Bike Shop in Singapore had left Thai customs and headed toward Bangkok proper.

Logistically, the parts had to be delivered by Axial Express Courier’s Bangkok counterpart, received at ProBike, fitted to the Speed TR, tested, and packed up ready to go by 7:00 pm for the bus to the Lao border.  I was now at step one of this process.  Where were the parts now?  With the help of Google voice, I dialed Axial Express and chatted with the office manager-cum-client service agent, who provided the phone number of their Bangkok representative.

After a series of negotiations with multiple parties, ProBike would accept delivery of the package and front the money for the customs charges on the goods if I agreed to pay it.  The package was now scheduled to arrive at 2:00 pm, giving us a tight window for repairs.

With Woody still in the throes of a virus, we made our way to November, a nearby cafe that had been amenable to the construction of AsiaWheeling mobile offices.

When the time rolled around, I hopped in a taxi and headed for ProBike.

Wan, my contact at ProBike, was sitting at a desk behind the cashier, and stood up to greet me.  I began thanking her and commending ProBike for all their help.   She cut me off.

“First, bad news,”  she said.

I gulped.  “Show me.”

She held up a threaded bolt that joined the handlebar post to the fork.  Placing it in the fork, it was clearly too small.  Can we bend back the original fork?  Can we coat the bolt in metal? Rubber? Saran wrap?  Caulk?  None of these seemed ideal to either of us.

I sent Woody an SMS and he promptly replied with ideas for a stopgap solution, which it seemed we must implement.  We had spent too long in Bangkok and were beginning to go stir crazy.  A small piece of threaded metal wouldn’t get in our way.

“Can you check the warehouse for a larger part?” I asked Wan, and she agreed, making her way to the door as I poked around the shop floor looking for various metals and polymers to provide a sleeve for the bolt.

Magically, Wan arrived back smiling with a larger piece in hand.  She screwed it in, and voila, the parts joined perfectly.  Now we could get cracking on putting Humpty Dumpty back together.  The bike mechanic who had straightened Woody’s primary ring was assigned to this project, and he worked like the dickens.

I began filing a thin copper washer to widen its gauge as he began slicing the fork with a metal saw.  Measure twice, cut once, I thought. The adage, which my father had taught me in our backyard years ago, crept into my mind.  Next, I was swapping out the inner tubes and tire on the new hub and rim.  Finally, we were moving.

It was now approaching 5:00 pm and the final adjustments were being made to the Speed TR as we fastened the handle bars to the post and took her for a spin.  It was good as new, with a cobalt blue fork to remind me of the rebuilding.  With a few quick calculations, I paid Wan and thanked her and her team, and exited to return to Steve’s room (may his beard grow ever longer and his mind stay ever blissful) to report the success.

Starving, I went on a quick wheel through the back alleys of Lumpini, and grabbed a few baht worth of grilled meats and sticky rice, which I fastened to the bike’s handlebars.  It was 17:10, and we were set to leave at 18:00.  I raced back home.

Woody seemed on the mend, though his appitite had not yet returned, and we did a final scan of Steve’s room and laid a bar of Meiji chocolate on his pillow for good measure.  Strapping down and making the decision to hail a cab, we headed downstairs.

The first couple of cab drivers refused to battle the rush hour traffic for such a long ride, and we settled on one fellow with no meter but a will to negotiate pricing.  Forty five minutes of medium speed through Bangkok on elevated freeways proved stimulating enough, and we were dumped in front of the Mo Chit bus station.  It was packed.  It was Friday before the Thai New Year, Sangkran, and everyone was heading home to see grandma.

We promptly found our bus port by catching the eye of an attendant for Thai Ticket Major, the broker through which we had purchased the tickets, and were ushered to the platform.  Some real characters and some real chaos, but Woody and I both thought to ourselves: things would be ten times more hectic in India.  Thailand had become AsiaWheeling Lite, and we were excited to head north to Laos, land of secret wars, old growth rainforest, and packed-earth roads.

As Woody stood guard, I ventured to the restroom and to acquire something to quench my thirst.  No one, however, was selling our beloved Leo Beer.  No beer, it seemed, was being sold at all at the train station, because of the New Year holiday.  Smart for crowd control, I thought, but surely there must be loose data points to be exploited.  Slipping into a small bodega inside the station, I asked nicely and was granted a can of beer on the condition that I would hide it in my shirt during the sales process.   Giddy, I slipped back to the bus port, and tagged Woody for the bathroom.

After Woody returned and the bus arrived, we loaded our gear on and found ourselves in the two front seats of the bus.  Our knees were cramped, but that detail wouldn’t be enough to dampen our spirits as we slipped in ear plugs, tilted down our Panama hats, and settled into slumber.

Scott and I had just finished a bowl of that fantastic northern Thailand curried noodle dish, Khao Soi, at our favorite joint just a few blocks down from our place at Chez Steve (may his beard grow ever longer, and chest ever hairier), when we decided to lay into the task of getting to Laos.

A woman who had been sitting near us eating a little Khao Soi of her own had overheard our struggles and decided to step in. Soon the three of us were deep in the world of Thai bus service websites, and making calls. The train was certainly sold out by now, since we were looking to leave the Friday before the beginning of the week and a half holiday.

We needed to get a bus, and those were filling up fast as well, she assured us. Finally we were able to find a bus line and a number to call, and with the help of the fine stranger, we were able to secure the last two seats on a third-class bus headed for the border town of Nong Khai. It was too late to pay over the phone, or via the usual method, which is to go to 7-11 and wire funds through the cashier. In order to pay for the ticket, we would need to go to a giant central mall and find a movie theater on the top floor, which would have our tickets waiting. Fair enough.

The parts for Scott’s bike had still not arrived from Singapore, but this was our last chance to get into Laos in time for the New Year, so we had to take the chance. We told our new friend to go ahead and initiate the sale.

We offered to buy her a little green tea ice cream as thanks.

While the three of us enjoyed the celebratory treat, I could not help but think what would happen if the parts did not come tomorrow? Or what if they came, but there was not enough time to perform all the repairs to Scott’s bike in time to catch our 8:30 pm overnight bus? Would we ever escape Bangkok?

Stay tuned dear reader, stay tuned.

Meanwhile in Bangkok, while Scott and I had been stuffing ourselves at the many expensive aristocratic eating houses of that fine city, the people of Thailand had poured onto the streets in one great prolonged protest. They called themselves the Red Shirts, I believe in no small part due to communist tendencies within their political doctrine, but more primarily because they all wear red shirts.

It is technically illegal for a foreigner to engage in Thai political activism when in Thailand, and though (as you may already have gathered, dear reader) Scott and I have not brought any shirts of red color wheeling with us, we did know some foreigners who had made the mistake of wearing one during a protest. The protest had been going on for weeks now, with red-shirted people pouring through the streets, jumping around in the back of pickup trucks, wearing cowboy hats, playing patriotic music, and generally causing a ruckus.

It is my understanding that the primary goal of the Red Shirts is to create enough havoc in the city to convince the government to invoke a rule within the constitution that calls for new elections, should a significant number of people request them. Most of them wish to do this at least in part to give an ousted Thai leader by the name of Thaksin Shinawatra another chance at re-election. Taksin had been ousted by a group of people, many of whom were wealthy Bangkok elites backing a group of military leaders to take over and re-organize the government. These fellows wore yellow shirts, and were, at least at the time of this writing, more notoriously violent than their red shirted equivalents, having done such things as shutting down the Bangkok airport for a few days, and deeply eroding many foreigners’ faith in Thailand as a safe place to travel. Well, looks like the Red Shirts are moving in that direction as well.

In addition to that, there is discontent in Thailand because of the great disparity in wealth and development between Bangkok and the surrounding countryside. Most of the Red Shirts are country folk who have come into the city to make their voices heard. Many of them are also being paid a decent wage to do so by Thaksin and his organizations.

I’m not sure what it’s like to be in Bangkok these days, but while AsiaWheeling was there, it was not scary at all. The Red Shirts were so friendly to us, and appeared to be simply holding a large party in the streets, plastering Bangkok with many signs preaching their non-violent approach. As of late the threat of violence has been increasing. We can’t pretend to even begin to understand the complicated snarl that is Thai politics, so let it be said that the simple wish of this publication is for the peaceful operation of democracy in Thailand.

SIM City 2000 rang out bright and early not for the first time in Steve’s room. It was not really that early by most standards, but during our time in Bangkok we had become so shifted from the normal solar-based schedule that it might as well have been ringing at 3.00 am. We groggily extracted ourselves, grabbed our passports and computer bags and made our way down to the street. It was a Sunday, and the city was still mostly closed for business. We were quite easily able to find a cab, and we explained to the driver that we needed to head to the Ekamai Metro Station. We were not sure where that was, but we knew there would be a bus for the Cambodian border leaving from there at 9:00 am.

It turned out to be quite a way from Dane’s place, and by the time we got there, there was little time to acquire breakfast and coffee. With most of the shops closed, and even the noodle sellers still getting their vats boiling, we found ourselves strolling into McDonalds and purchasing two McEgg sandwiches and a couple of coffees.

It took what seemed like an hour for the sandwiches to emerge, and when they did we thanked them and hurried to the bus stop. When we got there, the rest of the passengers were already filling out their emigration cards: one for Thailand and one for Cambodia.

This was a special bus, just for visa renewals. You see, dear reader, it is true for people from many countries that Thailand issues on-the-spot 15-day visas upon overland entries. Thus could we gain the extra days we needed to fix Scott’s cycle by entering Cambodia for a moment and promptly returning to Thailand.  True, this would require the purchase of a Cambodian visa, but it was one of the only ways to re-legitimize our presence in Bangkok.

With our cards filled out, we forked over some money and our passports to a very sharp Thai woman who was running the operation. She was the kind of woman who is just solid gold for any organization of which she is a part. Organized, edgy, kind and mothering at times, and an all-controlling Voltron-type at others. Sort of like my mom. With her at the helm we felt great, and soon drifted off to sleep.

We awoke somewhere in eastern Thailand when the bus stopped at a convenience store/gas station complex.

It was then that we began to realize our fellow riders on the bus were all of a particular ethnic background, and were speaking a language that was somewhat reminiscent of Spanish. We later discovered that they were Filipinos. Why such a large crowd of Filipinos were all investing nearly $30.00 on a bus to the Cambodian border, a visa into Cambodia, and a ride back was beyond us. But, as always, we invite speculation in the comments.

We were all told to get off the bus and not to come back for 10 minutes. “Yes Ma’am,” we replied, and proceeded to wander the vicinity, checking out the surrounding timber farming operations, and purchasing a few cans of coffee from the shop.

When we returned back to the bus, lunch had been prepared and laid out for us.

We struggled for a bit at the calculus of picking up the trays that now sat on our bus seats and negotiating ourselves into position with the trays on our laps. With that success we could tuck into lunch and begin to wake up.

We were driving through beautiful country, though markedly poorer than anywhere we’d been in Thailand to date. The surrounding jungle grew thicker, and low laying mountains appeared in the distance. Meanwhile they played American crime thriller movies at maximum volume on the bus’s formidable entertainment system.

When we finally reached the Thai-Cambodian border crossing, we found it to be quite modest. A large reasonably ornate arch covered the Thai side, emblazoned with imagery of the king and the royal crests. The crossing was a stretch of gravel road. The Cambodians appeared to be building a competing archway, but it was still under construction, so was currently just a large cluster of scaffolding.

No one appeared to be working on it. Thai people in cowboy hats were crossing the border, perhaps to gamble or buy duty-free items. In addition, a reasonable traffic of gentlemen and women with wheelbarrows transporting all manner of goods flowed back and forth from both sides. The border itself was marked by a 30-foot-deep trench, at the bottom of which some water stagnated.

The border crossing was a bridge over this trench, and after we were stamped and officially exited Thailand, the same woman from the bus was there to meet us. She took our passports and hurried off, leaving us with only photocopies of our essential documents, bearing a passport size image our face stapled to them. “Back here in 10 minutes,” our woman explained “for shopping.”

We made our way across the bridge and were soon swarmed by children begging for money. We then realized that this was the first time in the past month or so that we had been confronted with pan-handlers. Thailand had been almost completely devoid of them. We wandered through the duty-free store, which certainly did feature rock bottom prices. A carton of L&M brand cigarettes, for instance could be had for a little over $3.00. That’s nearly the cost of one pack in Bangkok.

Back on the Thai side of the trench, our fine woman was handing all the Filipino passports back, and had yet to lay into Scott’s and my U.S.passports. Using this time as productively as possible, we chatted with a burly Dutchman with tattoos covering his arms who shared stories with us about working on offshore oil rigs in Angola.

“What are you doing in Thailand?” We asked.

“As least as bloody possible,” he replied, nursing a cigarette between his thumb and forefinger.

We loitered for a bit longer, taking in a number of strange royalist shrines that were there, along with an interesting set of rooster statues. When we finally got our passports back, they had brand new Cambodian visas, smelling like freshly applied paste, issued, signed,  stamped, and voided in the same instant. We gave our passport copies and pictures back to the Thai authorities, who dutifully logged them and filed us away. Then returned to the bus.

On the ride back, we spent most of our time watching “The Hangover” at maximum volume, followed by a violent serial killer flick, “Law Abiding Citizen” starring Jamie Foxx.  The hangover had subtitles that seemed to have been translated into a foreign language, and then back into English.  The film became surprisingly more enjoyable with this unexpected feature.

When we were not transfixed by media, we spend our time talking about what a strange place Las Vegas is, and what a strange place America is, and how much there is to both love and hate about our country.

Meanwhile, somewhere in Singapore, the shipment of parts which would save AsiaWheeling from stagnation and inoperability was stirring and assembling itself, poised to board some mixture of trucks and planes, and make its way to Bangkok where we would be waiting in Steve’ s (may his beard grow ever longer) apartment, to spring into action and resume AsiaWheeling.

A strange haze was hanging over the city of Bangkok when we awoke. It may or may not have rained the night before, and there was an oppressive sticky wetness to the air, which instantly soaked a fellow in his own sweat. I was in a strange place, for recently I had gone to the Citibank to withdraw funds only to find when looking in my wallet that my bank card had evaporated. It seems I had somehow left it in an ATM in the north of Thailand. No harm done though, and Citibank was more than happy to overnight me a new one at no cost to me. Regardless, I felt like an idiot, like Bangkok was making me soft, and was glad to know that the new one had arrived and we were going to wheel to pick it up.

This took us down one of the major streets off Rama IV, and we perhaps foolishly decided to pick up the bank card before having breakfast or coffee. So by the time we had arrived at Citibank, soaking with sweat and already reeking from a foul affliction of the armpits, we were a sore sight and in a sour mood. The woman at the front desk was very friendly, despite my dripping reeking saltwater all over her official documents, handing her a sopping wet passport, and repelling most of the other customers to a healthy five-foot radius. With the card back in my possession, I felt good. It also still seemed to manifest cash, which just boosted the already good mood.

But as we rode on, the hunger began to hit hard, and the effects of severe under-caffeination began to take hold. We seemed to be trapped in a financial district of Bangkok, and suddenly restaurants were few and far between. The odd street food vendor appeared to be selling either unappetizing things or just sweets, so we wheeled on quickly descending into madness, and frantically searching for a place to eat a real meal.

We finally found a joint that promptly overcharged us, but delivered a fair volume of mediocre Thai dishes.

The coffee was so thick with sugar syrup, and flavored strangely of black licorice and chicory that I found it completely undrinkable. So it was only in a marginally more lucid state that we took to the road again.

Our next waypoint was the train station. We needed to buy tickets for the next day’s train to the border of Laos. We had seen the train station on previous wheels, so we pulled a vast uber-lichtenstein and made our way back to Rama IV.

On Rama IV, we were pedaling hard toward the station, keeping an eye out for a source of more decent coffee. I was riding bishop when I heard a terrible noise behind me. I whipped my head around just in time to see Scott sprawled in the street, looking startled and confused. The bright pink cab behind him, thanks be to Jah, had come to a stop well before hitting him. Scott’s Speed TR, on the other hand, had been launched violently into the air, where I witnessed it make solid contact with a passing delivery truck, which pulled the body of the cycle down toward the pavement, eventually sucking the front half through its rear wheel and spitting it back, mangled and bleeding into the street. By this point I had somehow pulled over to the side of the road, and began making my way back toward where Scott was scrambling to collect his sunglasses, his Panama hat, and the twisted remains of his bicycle in order for traffic to resume.

“Is your body okay?” was my first question for Scott. By then a group of Thai street vendors began to gather around us. One of them had made a mad dash into traffic to heroically retrieve Scott’s partially full bottle of Singha brand water. “Yeah, I’m totally fine… but my bike is pretty trashed.”

He was not lying. The entire front half of Scott’s Speed TR was an ugly wreck. The handlebar post no longer locked into place and curved unsettlingly to the right.

His front rack has been bent into what looked like a pile of gray noodles clinging to the wheel.

His fork also looked strangely inverted, although the exact damage was hard to describe.

We were badly in need of a bike mechanic, and likely not a few spare parts.

Now, dear reader, if we might pause from this most recently discussed strife, and think back for a moment to our time in Goa. Scott and I had just unfolded the cycles for our first wheel into the Indian countryside. I had looked down to notice that my primary chain ring had been badly bent during its time in the custody of GoAir. Upon arriving in Bangkok, however, we had brought the cycle to a shop that had been recommended to us by a kind elderly fellow we met at our local coffee joint down the street from Chez Steve.

The elderly fellow was from California and dressed in a pressed white shirt, a kind of Irish cap, and a painful set of Burmese spectacles that endured because he was quite fond of the added functionality of their wrap-around ear pieces. He explained to us that these were the standard ear pieces back when he was a young man in the U.S., and back then he could swim the butterfly with his glasses on and no fear of losing them in the water. So when he saw another pair of wrap-arounds while traveling in Burma, he promptly purchased them and had them retrofitted with his prescription lenses. Unfortunately, the frames lacked the little nubs which normally allow the glasses to rest upon one’s nose, so they dug painfully into his face along the crest of his nose, until he had finally resorted to wrapping a length of thread around the offending piece of metal in order to alleviate the slicing into his skin.

Our conversation with this man about his glasses turned into a conversation about AsiaWheeling, and eventually I mentioned that I was looking to get my primary ring repaired. He directed us to a bike shop by the name of ProBike, which lay opposite of the central Lumpini Park, where Dane and I had done a fair bit of running during our stay in Bangkok. The fellows at ProBike had first addressed my chain ring with a fair bit of frowning and shaking of heads before repairing the thing in a matter of minutes with a few well places whacks with a mallet, charging me $3.00 and leaving it essentially good as new.

Meanwhile, on the side of Rama IV, Scott and I frowned down at his poor speed TR and shook our heads. It was a sorry sight. Scott did not have a scratch on him, but he was plenty rattled. We looked across the street and noticed that we were just on the other side of Lumpini Park. ProBike was perhaps a five-minute wheel away. It seemed the Gods of Wheeling had not yet forsaken us completely, so I climbed onto my cycle while Scott loaded the mangled remains of his Speed TR into a cab and headed for ProBike.

When we got there, it took a while for them to perform the full survey.

The fellows explained to us in bits and pieces of English that we would need at the very least a new fork and handlebar post, and likely a new wheel as well. They only had connections with the Dahon office in Taiwan, and any order of parts would take at least a few months to arrive.

Well, dear reader, AsiaWheeling did not have a few months. In fact our Thailand visas expired in less than 48 hours. We also had a date with a certain Mr. Stewart Motta in Laos for the Lao New Year. We needed to do a few things and fast.

First of all, Scott explained to the bike owner that we had contacts in Singapore and would likely be able to get the parts ourselves. ProBike then agreed to store the wounded Speed TR and receive the parts. Scott immediately got on the phone with our friends at Speed Matrix and My Bike Shop in Singapore and discovered to our great relief that they did indeed have the parts we needed.

Even with all this great fortune, we would need to wait until at least the middle of the next week for them to arrive in Bangkok. As long as we could solve the problem of our rapidly expiring Thai visas, the chances of them arriving in time for us to get up to Laos for the New Year with a working set of folding bicycles seemed pretty good.

The next order of business was our legality in Thailand. We needed to do what the locals called a visa run.

We woke not that long after sunrise in our comfortable, albeit somewhat insect-infested quarters in Doi Mae Salong. The smoke was still thick, obscuring the greater part of what must have been a fantastic view from our balcony at the top of the mountain. In fact, there was only one point higher than our guest house compound, and that was a golden temple that sat veiled in smoke on an adjacent peak.

Dane had suggested the night before that we might do well to attempt to run to the top of that hill and visit the temple. I was excited to get a little exercise, since we had been doing a much more sedentary, albeit high voltage, type of wheeling as of late. So, with that, I changed out of my Choco sandals and into my pair of Vibram five fingers. With that, we took off jogging down the mountain.

It was rough going, the ambient smoke had definitely been doing a number on my lungs. Paired with the high elevation, I found myself huffing and puffing quite uncontrollably, and that was even before we turned uphill towards the temple. Sweat was pouring into my eyes, matting my hair to my head. As I slapped the soles of my feet against each step, I took a moment to look up and saw only thousands more, snaking up the mountain as far as I could see. It was time to just dig in.

I though about my sister. She is a very serious rower, looking right now at the possibility of competing for her team in the NCAA championships in Los Angeles. She mentioned to me once that her coxswain would yell out to the boat as they were in the throes of a particularly tough bit of rowing, “have you entered your pain cave?” It also might be a fight club reference… I’m not sure, but I certainly entered my pain cave.

When we finally reached the top of the mountain, the temple proved almost blindingly shiny, though the view from the top was almost completely submerged in that ever-present smoke, giving us the feeling of having run up into a kingdom in the clouds. The temple was covered in gold foil or paint of some kind, and was positively burning in the morning sun. Meanwhile my throat was killing me, and my lungs were none too interested in ceasing a painful session of huffing and puffing.

It was not until we had walked almost halfway down the mountain that I finally began to return to my normal respiratory state. When we finally returned to the guesthouse to find Scott happily typing away on his Macbook on the porch, he looked up and asked, “How was the run?”

“I’ve been born again…” I replied hoarsely.

Back on the motorcycles, we made our way down the mountain to sweet Maesalong where we gave our friend’s breakfast offerings a try.

They proved delightful, with thick slices of home-made whole grain bread, fried eggs, and crispy bacon.

Dane also insisted we order the honey toast, which came out positively swimming in melted butter and steaming with piping hot and startlingly fragrant local floral honey.

There was of course the coffee as well: a dark rich Americano, swirled with golden crema and so mellow it tasted creamy even with no milk.

Back on the motorcycles we chose a route back to Chiang Rai which took us around the other side of the mountain and down a steeply twisting, and rather treacherous dirt road.

We put the cycles into first gear.  The sun was setting once again into the smokey infinite by the time we returned to the city.

For our last night in Chiang Rai, Dane took us on a tour of the nightlife, which was unbelievably vibrant even on a Monday night. We visited venue after packed venue, filled with Thai young people, listening to live bands create deafening Thai pop-rock hits. Few of the Thai seemed inclined to dance, and our repeated efforts to start a dance party were mostly unsuccessful, and hopefully not offensive.

One particularly interesting part of the Thai nightlife scene is the presence of the hexagonal table. Rather than leaving the floor area of the nightclub free of obstructions to encourage general raging, the floor is covered with a great many hexagonal tables. Your average Thai nightclub patron will usually attend one of these venues along with a group of friends, secure a hexagonal table, and purchase –to be shared among them– a bottle of hard liquor (generally heinous scotch), a number of bottles of cola and soda, and a vast bucket of ice which they will have brought to the table. They will then commence drinking and yelling, while scanning the room for new people to make friends with and execute clinking of glasses with. Once they find a friend, they can call a night club employee over and have the tables moved together and fused into one great honeycomb. It is this way that the party develops. Cigarettes are often also part of the night experience, the smoke from which hangs in the air thickly. This makes the laser light show and disco balls more dramatic, but can get tough on the lung piece during extended periods of dance related hyperventilation.

The next morning we had just enough time to visit one of the more modern Thai temples in the region, this one still under construction, funded by the King, and sporting a decidedly modern theme.

The entire temple was made of a stark white stone-like material, adorned with hundreds of thousands of tiny mirrors. Quite a sight to behold.

Inside the temple, where no photos, hats, or shoes are allowed, we found a great mosaic, featuring items from modern pop culture, such as the 9-11 trade towers falling, Neo from the matrix, Darth Vader, characters from Anime, and even soft core pornographic images. Quite a religious site.