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.

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.

While the Red Shirts were doing their best to bring the city of Bangkok to its knees, Dane, Scott and I had been enjoying the finer points of the expatriate lifestyle. And time was flying. Life was good. Life was easy. And, thanks to Steve, may his beard grow ever longer, even somewhat affordable. However, our list of things to see in Thailand was growing shorter at an almost imperceptible pace. Meanwhile, Dane Weschler had been elaborating at great length about his love for the north of Siam, about his times in Chiang Rai and Chiang Mai, the beauty of that part of the country, and its magnificent food.

“This is nothing,” Dane would explain to us over a steaming bowl of succulent curried noodles. “The Khao Soi in Chiang Rai will blow this out of the water.” All that aside, despite the strange time warp that was Bangkok, we were beginning to near the end of our time in the country. And we were well overdue for some more exploring outside the capital.

It was with all this in mind that we sat down with Dane Weschler in yet another of the many delightful, but rather aristocratic, coffee shops in the city to plan our next adventures. Dane immediately began to counsel us against bringing the Speed TRs. My first reaction was sputtering indignation.

“But this is AsiaWheeling,” I attempted to explain… “To travel without the cycles would leave us feeling naked, helpless and alone.” Dane didn’t look convinced. “And who would we be, stripped of our precious steeds? What would we be doing? This is not AsiaTaxi-Cabbing, or AsiaWandering-the-Streets-til-Your-Feet-Hurt.”

“Oh, you’ll get your wheeling,” Dane assured us. And he was right.

We arrived in Chiang Rai after an overnight bus ride, and as the anti-anxiety medications wore off, we found ourselves riding in a little red pickup truck, into the back of which had been installed two long wooden benches.

It was taking us from the bus station to the center of town, where our mission was to rent motorcycles.

Once in the center of town, we quickly found that Dane was even more of a master of this city than of Bangkok.

He led us first to a place where we could purchase a couple of cups of fragrant, strong espresso, laced with plenty of thick golden cream.

And with the caffeination problem out of the way,  we followed Dane around the corner to a motorcycle rental shop.

My experience riding motorcycles added up to the few odd times that I was allowed to putt around on someone’s dirt bike during social gatherings in the farmlands of Iowa. Needless to say, the current situation was quite different. With judicious use of Dane’s formidable Thai bargaining skills, and some minor leveraging of the AsiaWheeling brand (I believe three matching business cards, one of which was in Thai, helped), we were riding off on three brand new Honda Wave 110’s, putting along and struggling to re-wire neural pathways long burned in by wheeling in order to operate these new terrifyingly powerful machines.

I’ll have to be honest with you, dear reader, I am quite conflicted in my views on the motorcycle. It is certainly a scary and monstrously powerful machine. However, on the back of the thing, I found myself somewhat drunk on the sheer power that lay between my legs. And these were by no means large motorcycles.

The more I rode, the more I began to enjoy the feeling of whipping along on this beast, leaning into the turns, and watching the scenery go by.

I let the whip of the wind and the hum of the motor fill my ears, as we tore through the beautiful countryside.

We had little time to get used to these new beastly wheels. It seemed no sooner had we begun to get comfortable with using the transmission and properly signaling and braking than it was time to take our first long cross-country ride.  We were going to ride north, up into the mountains toward a city called Doi Maesalong, once again on the Burmese border. It was tea and opium county, though many of the old opium farmers had been encouraged by the Thai government to switch over to coffee production.

Before joining the AsiaWheeling team, Dane had worked for the international coffee magazine, Coffee T&I, and so was bubbling with data about the local coffee world.

There is little time to chat, though, when motorcycling. Most communications require a fair bit of screaming over the road, engine, and wind. So I just let my head nest into visions from films like Easy Rider, while bits of 70s rock songs swam through my head, and I thought about how I got so close to finishing “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.” That was a good book…

Dane can always be counted on to call waypoints for expensive and delectable coffee, and this ride was no exception. We stopped at a place called “Parabola.”

They provided us with a refreshing sip of free WiFi, and also some delightfully rich and potent coffee drinks, and a startling view of the countryside. It was smokey here too, if anything even more smokey than it had been in Sangklaburi, lending that strange unrealness to the environment, for which I must admit to you dear reader, I was growing a taste.

As the sun began to lower into the sky, the amount of smoke through which it must be filtered increased exponentially, reducing it quickly to a red ball that hung so dimly that it could be observed comfortably by the unaided eye.

As the sun became a different star, we climbed on the cycles up into the mountains, at times finding ourselves climbing mountain roads so steep that we needed to shift down into first gear. The addition of the smoke made the mountains feel unbelievably high, as though we were floating in an infinity of cloud. Once we had made it to the top, we began to work our way along the crest of the mountains, whipping down the startlingly smooth and new Thai country road, past a number of security checkpoints designed to address the rampant problem of Burmese drugs crossing into Thailand. The security guards were neither interested in us, or, as far as I know, effective in stopping the drug traffickers. From my understanding they mostly serve to hassle the local hill tribes, many of which lack proper identification.

The sun was finally giving way to darkness as we pulled into the town of Doi Maesalong, where the road wound way even more tightly and steeply by little shops, restaurants, and, most surprisingly, a giant 7-11. Thailand, in case I have not already emphasized this, is deep in the throes of a love affair with 7-11, and with branches spreading all the way to this remote outpost, who knows what can pull it out of that spiral.

Our hotel was the site of an old Taiwanese military base. The Taiwanese had been in this region fighting against China. As you no doubt already know, dear reader, Taiwan broke away from China in 1949 when the Republic of China (now called Taiwan) lost to the communist Chinese forces. As part of the war between the two factions, Republic of China troops called Guo Min Dang had been placed here, in the north of Thailand and had built the base that later became our guest house.

There were many classes of rooms at the base turned resort, but ours, being one of the least expensive was a wooden shed, with cold running water, three firm futon-esque mattresses on the floor, a gnarly roach problem, and a stunning view of the smoke enshrouded mountains amongst which Doi Maesalong finds itself.  A rustic, yet very comfortable setup.

By then it was high time for eating. We were starving, despite the fact that we had spent most of the day sitting on vibrating metal beasts.

I thought back to how hungry the characters always seemed to be in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, and also back to a study about rats that I once came across, which suggested that merely vibrating the rats bodies stimulated their metabolisms in a way almost akin to actual exercise. I’d be the last to draw any conclusions from those two data points, but regardless, we were quite glad to find ourselves feasting at a completely empty Chinese restaurant, laying into some crispy pork and Chinese greens.

We spent the rest of that evening chatting about Thailand, the Red Shirts, AsiaWheeling, and the south-east Asian coffee industry with Dane’s friend and owner of a local coffee and cake joint called Sweet Maesalong.

We woke up in Steve (may his beard grow ever longer’s) apartment and commenced the usual maneuver, making our way up to Dane’s room, where we found him plugging away on his Mono machine, pumping out crazy techno science music.

We promptly began making coffee and plans for the day. We would need to get food, and since most cooking was outsourced in this city, that would mean venturing out to a place. Today was also to be Karona’s last day in town. She was going back to Japan, and as you can imagine the mood was somber. Scott and I had been for some time without a wheel, and were badly, badly in need of one. That was the plan for the day, but first we needed to attend Karona’s goodbye luncheon. The luncheon took place at a local establishment called the Goethe Institute. It was an interesting German enclave, sporting, among other things, a very affordable cafeteria.

For less than $2.00 we piled our plates with rice, various curries, fried eggs, Thai sausages, and fresh vegetables. The food was delightful. Saying goodbye to Karona was not. She was such a kind and pleasant woman, and I dare say all at the table were sad to see her go. We climbed on the bikes with heavy hearts and vague directions from Dane.

It was great to be wheeling again. We got onto Rama IV and found ourselves filled with energy, soaring along at the speed of traffic, whipping around the overpass, pulling a vast uber-Rauschenburg and heading toward the port of Bangkok.

We were looking for the passenger dock, from which we would be chartering a small boat across the river. We successfully made our way to the port, and wheeled up to the guards at the gate. This didn’t seem right… certainly one would not need to enter a restricted zone in order to take a small boat across the river? Regardless, we rode up to the security checkpoint and engaged the guards. They spoke no English, but seemed to recognize our butchering of the Thai name for our next waypoint. They motioned to the interior of the port and explained a fair bit to us that we unfortunately could not comprehend. We figured then, it might be time to take out a certain business card from a local nightclub on which Dane had scrawled the name of the place we were looking for. When we handed them the business card, the two guards barely even looked at the thing, before instantly apologizing to us and inexplicably admitting us into the restricted zone!

We were quite sure that this was neither where we wanted nor where we were technically allowed to be, but with the recent error in our favor, it would have been quite the squandering of an opportunity not to wheel the interior of the port on Bangkok. So for the next hour, that was what we did.

The workers seemed thrilled to have us around, smiling and waving at us, as we meandered our way through the dockyards. On our way out, the security guards gave us their best, waving and wishing us well.

Not 15 meters later, a giant sign that we had somehow missed presented itself, indicating the way to our passenger dock.

We had no problem finding a fellow who was willing to drive us across the river in his long boat for about 60 cents. So we folded up the bikes and hopped on board. The engine of the boat was connected to a great steel rod, on the end of which was the propeller.

Our helmsman piloted the thing deftly, using the giant rod sometimes as a propeller and sometimes as an oar, swinging us perfectly up and alongside the dock.

We grabbed the Speed TRs and jumped ship, passing a few baht over the water. On the other side, we found ourselves in a thick jungle, where a smoothly paved road led us from small settlement to small settlement.

We just tore into it. Heading up one way, cutting across and then back down another, soon we had wheeled out of the jungle and into a small suburb of Bangkok, where we rode briefly looking for an entrance to a vast system of elevated roads that fed onto a large suspension bridge. The suspension bridge would be the most triumphant way to re-enter Bangkok after the day’s wheel, but, finally, after finding the entrance, it seemed too gnarly and fast to attempt without the help of a bike lane.

So we pulled an uber-licht and headed back, this time through the city, rather than following the raised expressway, back into the jungle. We got back to the main road just as a giant market was setting up. We could not resist getting off the cycles and taking a tour.

We encountered a particularly enticing stand frying sweet colorful pancakes and wrapping flavorful bits together in a swirl.

We ordered a dozen and quickly decimated them.

We came across a metal box of fresh fish, about to meet their fate.

As well as some fried fish, who had just recently met theirs.

We finally loaded up on drinking water and climbed back on the cycles. We were about to head back to the boat dock, when we noticed an inviting looking jungle road that we had not yet taken, so we decided to follow it. And, dear reader, we are sure glad that we did. What we discovered on the other side was a large village, the entirety of which was connected not by roads but by small raised concrete paths that wound their way over a swampy jungle.

It was one of the richest wheels of my life, so saturated was it with visual stimuli.

I am going to dare let the photos and videos speak for themselves.

Back on the longboat, making our way toward the city, we felt like kings.

So distracted by feeling like kings were we, that as Scott was climbing out of the boat,  he sliced his finger on the side of the dock. He was only mildly dripping blood, so we climbed back on the cycles and made our way to the nearest 7-11. Scott showed the woman his bleeding finger, and she promptly became very uncomfortable beginning to insist that they did not have any bandages or materials with which to aid his recovery. This seemed strange, so we hid the finger, in hope that it might snap her out of it, and began asking again. Still she indicated that there was nothing she could do. Finally, we gave up on her and found the band-aids.

Outside the 7-11 we made fast friends with a woman running a locksmith’s kiosk as we were cleaning and bandaging Scott’s finger. She later approached us with some tangerines and a big grin, offering them to us as a gift.

A fine type.

Back on the road, we made short work of the trip back to Dane’s place, thinking of that Das Racist lyric “People on the street eating chicken and meat.”

So we stopped at a street vendor outside his apartment building and examined the offerings.

The grilled beef looked especially appealing, so we ordered one up.

We retired to the vicinity of a certain street food stall that we knew to serve up amazing grilled meats, of which we procured many, with garnish.

Dane’s friend Steve, may his beard grow ever longer, had left Bangkok not long after our adventures in Sangklaburi, and had, upon doing so,  most graciously provided us with access to his apartment. So we now had a place of residence in Bangkok, and had begun to lay down roots.

What was to come would be a strange chapter of AsiaWheeling, one which was unfolding in this strange city where time seemed to have been reduced to a thin slime, one which we could not quite grasp or manipulate as we had before. Dear reader, as you may have already begun to ken, we had not been posting for each day of our adventures in Bangkok. For the most part, we chose not to post, because the days were not so extreme as to warrant relating to you. In fact many of them did not even contain more than a few kilometers of wheeling. There are reasons for this, as you will soon find out. But what matters perhaps even more is that here at AsiaWheeling we specialize in delivering the extremes of experience, raw and uncut, and to be honest, many of our days were far from raw, and often cut.

Many hours spent working (mostly for your pleasure) in Internet cafes and overpriced coffee houses with Wifi, eating large quantities of delicious food, gaining weight, getting amazing $6 massages, and visiting the Japanese ramen restaurant so often that the entire staff soon knew us well.

To be completely honest, as our time in Bangkok wore on, many of our days began to start at noon or one or even later, and extend late into the night. As we shifted from what we had come to know as the normal human schedule, we found Bangkok quite happy to accommodate. For Bangkok is a night city, a city of demons and angels, a city of terrible sin and redemption, a city that simultaneously feels safer than any I’ve been to in the US, but is also rife with dangers.

Bangkok, we would like to tip our Panama hats in respect for your beauty and might, and to pour a sip on the pavement for all the many tales that cannot be written, for all the wild rides that could not take place on a bicycle. They say a bone is stronger once it had been broken. In that same way, AsiaWheeling is stronger for its extended stay in this bizarre city.

AsiaWheeling loves Bangkok and despises it at the same time. Though it’s a great city to cycle in, for us it was, in many ways, at odds with wheeling.

One thing we know for sure, however. We are deeply, deeply indebted to a certain gentleman by the name of Steve.

We were only able to spend a few hours with this man, but the degree to which he improved our time in Bangkok by sharing his empty residence with us is immeasurable.

So, dear reader, please forgive us for the time dashes in between these next few posts. And rest assured, AsiaWheeling will resume its regularly scheduled programing in no time.

We woke up bright and early in Sangklaburi, having changed our rooms at the P. Guesthouse from the three-bed room that Hood, Scott, and I had shared to a two-man nest, with a private balcony looking out over the lake. It was the same price ($6 per night) and we were thrilled.  But of course, we missed Hood.

Today was to be somewhat of an atypical day for AsiaWheeling, in which we would rent one of the many fine handmade wooden canoes they had down by the dock at the P. Guesthouse, for a little bit of good old-fashioned AsiaPaddling.

We ziplocked our electronics, but we prayed, for the sake of the Panama hats, that none of the local fisherman who so deafeningly zipped around the lake on unbelievably fast, long, and skinny motor boats, would come so near and so parallel to us that we would take a spill.

I took the rear position, and Scott the bow as we headed out into the lake. She was a good boat, fast, silent, and true. We were rounding our first curve, past dozens of houseboats, and fields of some crop we could not quite identify, toward what we had heard was the location of a sunken temple. Sure enough, a few more curves of lake later, we found ourselves at a truly ghostly sight. As you, dear reader, no doubt remember, this was a man-made lake. Before the time of the lake, a great temple had been built in this valley. When the valley was flooded, the temple was submerged completely, but now being the dry, and therefore, low season, the top floors of the building were once again revealed from the cloudy green waters.

We paddled some of the smaller sections of the temple, before beaching the canoe and climbing out into the main building.

The floor was covered in muck, but the old stones were still visible in places, especially where the floor had cracked, revealing another completely submerged chamber beneath us.

Most of the more intricate parts of the temple were broken or ruined by years underwater, but we were still able to make out some interesting and significant features.

The arrival of some truly vicious swarms of gnats heralded our return to the boat.

We kept paddling farther down the lake, where we found more floating villages, clinging to the shore,and more of those interesting large net-fishing devices that we had first encountered being used by the fishermen of Goa. We stopped to hang out for a bit with a roaming herd of cattle, all of which sported jingling bells, and found us quite engrossing, before turning and heading back.

Our whole time in Sangklaburi, we had been noticing a giant golden temple that loomed amidst the smokey mountains across the lake. This, it seemed, would make a wise next waypoint, so we pointed the canoe toward its shimmering majesty and started paddling.

When we finally reached the shore, we beached the canoe next to an interesting agricultural operation, where they appeared to be growing a kind of Asian cabbage and beans, the cabbage spread out on the ground, while the beans arched overhead on makeshift bamboo structures. We scrambled past the farm and up a steep crumbling slope toward a road. We followed the road up and around into the forest. First we passed a large, and quite deserted facility, which remained a mystery to us until we were finally able to ascertain, upon finding a giant charred oven, that it was a crematorium. Hauntingly fascinating.

Just then, we saw a bright red fox appear from the woods and look at us. He turned around and began to trot down another unpaved and overgrown road. It seemed like our best bet would be to follow him, so we did. And sure enough, each time we came around a corner in the road, he would be waiting for us, and upon seeing us continue to trot forward. Finally he led us to the base of the great gold temple.

It was closed for business, it seemed, and the doors were barred and chained. This, however, did not seem to have kept a small village of furniture makers and wood carvers from having sprung up around it.

It was the hottest part of the day, and most people appeared to be napping. In fact, it was so strangely deserted as to elicit some activity in that  part of the brain that is cultivated during the viewing of zombie films. So, you might forgive your humble correspondent’s mild alarm when a strangely loping child appeared as if from nowhere and began running at Scott. His body, poor thing, had grown unevenly, likely due to malnutrition and disease. He appeared to have a great deal of trouble seeing, but had locked onto Scott and made a direct hit, promptly embracing him in a prolonged bear hug.

As the duration of the hug lengthened, Scott began to grow uncomfortable. Finally, and quite gently, Scott disengaged himself from this child and we moved on, continuing our exploration of the temple grounds and the surrounding village.

Back in the canoe, we were getting hungry, and it seemed high time that we return to the city proper and find some food.

After settling up for the canoe rental, we headed into the town, where we feasted on street food: grilled pork on a shard of bamboo,

accompanied by a bag of fresh cabbage, basil, and hot peppers,

delicious northern sausages filled with rice and meat,

and spicy sweet shredded papaya salad, mashed to perfection with a large wooden mortar and pestle.

The next day, we saddled up to the counter at the P.Guesthouse in Sangklaburi, and began the arduous process of procuring bicycles for the entire nine-person team. With the Speed TRs always around, Scott and I had forgotten how much time we had spent during the pilot study finding bicycles. And how piss-poor the cycles usually were.

Three guest houses, a few repairs, and many rejected cycles later, we took off, all in a great mass, headed for the town.

We were quite a squadron, most of us on cycles that were too small for us, and almost all of us riding bikes that moaned and squawked with each pedal. Our first waypoint was the van station, where some of the team was to purchase tickets to go back that evening. Scott and I would be staying for a few more days, so we took that opportunity to acquire a few cups of iced coffee from a delightful local vendor, which while she spoke no English, took very good care of us, providing us with strong iced coffee, made with freshly ground beans in an old plastic espresso machine, and giving us a plate of friend banana pieces, which were sugared and spiced in a most intriguing way.

With tickets purchased, we got back on the cycles, and set into the wheel. The sun was hot, and we were an ungainly group. We quickly made our way out of town, not so much because of the speed of our wheeling, but because the town itself was rather small. Soon we were wheeling along the fantastic, rarely trafficked roads of rural Thailand.

The road was made of bright pieces of poured concrete, and wound among the steep hills that make up this landscape. This time of year, the air is thick with the smoke from slash-and-burn farming practices, so we were unable to see very far. But the presence of the smoke gave the entire experience a kind of mystical feel, which might be directly related to computer games that I played in my youth, such as Bungie’s Myth Series, which due to my slow graphics card, would need to save memory by shrouding the world in smoke.

We were rolling deep, manhandling the rusty old iron cycles, and sweating in the bright sun, which, even filtered through the smokey air made sunglasses essential. We had burned down a long slanting straight-away, when we suddenly we came to a large concrete bridge over a section of the man-made lake, followed by a giant uphill section, which we could see from the surrounding morphology would be long and arduous. I called a waypoint and we turned to the group. We were sort of between a Newtonian rock and a hard place, having already descended a fair way down  the recent straight-away. Our goal was to wheel across to the Mon village on the other side, to eat a little Mon food for lunch.

The Mon are an ethnic group from Myanmar, living mostly in Mon State along the Thai-Myanmar border. Things in Burma had grown tough for the Mon, as well as for many other people as the junta grew in power and activity. One of the earliest peoples to reside in Southeast Asia, the Mon were responsible for the spread of Theravada Buddhism in present-day Burma and Thailand. In Myanmar, the Mon culture is credited as a major source of influence on the dominant Burmese culture. Regardless, the Thai side of the border is full of small Mon villages, some of which double as brick and mortar refugee camps. One of these was to be found across the river, and was only one giant climb (and presumably a subsequent descent) away.

Back in Sangklaburi, we called a brief meeting of the team and finally decided we would go for the ascent.

As we all climbed back on the cycles, most of which had gears, few of which had the ability to change between them, and began to hump them up the hill, it occurred to me that you, dear reader, might be wondering who are these people we’re rolling with? Well, let me tell you:

Hood — A Thai fellow of Chinese descent, Hood is a comedian and a party animal. He is a warm person, and a loyal friend, notorious for his Photoshop prowess, and ability to create imaginative depictions of people, transported through space and time, often with additional organs affixed to unusual locations on their bodies or the surrounding scenery. He recently got involved in a project selling posh motorcycle helmets. We wish him luck.

Dane — Our fearless Bureau Chief, he is a giant among men – literally. Despite his size, he is quite gentle and intellectual. With his recent purchase of a Mono Machine, he is also becoming quite the electronic musician. His Thai is superb, and his lifestyle consists of making many many competing plans, most of which will never come to fruition, but the few that do produce quite glorious results. These were his last few weeks in Thailand before leaving to return for a short bit to the US. Many plans to return to Asia are cooking for him.

Karona –  From Japan, she’s whip smart, caring, and a woman who counts her words carefully. One might confuse her for being meek when first meeting her, though during our time together she proved again and again to be a tough cookie, never complaining, and always going for it.

Samara — A Canadian by birth, she comes from a mixed lineage of Canadian and Burmese peoples. She was living in Thailand studying South East Asian… studies. Samara is an easy-going intellectual woman, always willing to lay into a debate, and exhibiting that oh-so-hard-to-find, but most refreshing, ability to separate an argument from a fight. The first time I met this girl, she lied to me for 15 minutes telling a fanciful tail about Bedouin camel traders and arranged marriages. Entrancing.

Nico — A laid back French dude, dating Alice, Nico is 110% bro. Cracker Jack guy, friendly, and acutely stylish. He is as quick to share his hilariously stylized diving techniques while swimming in the lake, as he is to lay into a busted iron cycle. The man works in film distribution, and was also on his way out of Thailand to go work for the Cannes Film Festival in southern France.

Alice — Alice is a spunky, logical, and delightful person to be around. She’s dating Nico, that lucky duck, and works for a French company in Thailand. She is devastatingly stylish and makes a fantastic addition to any social gathering.

Golf — Golf is a giggly, friendly Thai girl, and a helpless romantic. I first met Golf on the eve of our departure. She arrived at Dane’s apartment with well over 300 roses, recently purchased to celebrate Dane and Karona. She is a warm and caring person, whose English skills are getting better by the day, thanks to a few American teen celebrity adventure novels.

Back on the roads, we were sweating hard and reaching the top of the hill. Nico and I were the first to reach the crest, followed shortly after by Dane and Scott.

As the rest of the team made its way up the mountain, a pickup truck pulled up, and out hopped Hood. He reached into the back and swung his rusty hulk of a bicycle over the side. It seems he had lost interest in climbing the hill and just hitched his way up.  Oh Hood, you sly dog.

Now that the worst was over, we could indulge in the pleasures of a breezy downhill into the smokey valley and the Mon town. Inside the town, we found many people selling hand-made crafts, and quite a few restaurants. We tucked into a meal of pig blood soup, pork fat curry, fried chicken and rice.

We crossed back to the Thai side of town over a long snaking wooden bridge, one of the longest in the world we later learned.

Communities there had sprung up on the water, living on pontoon houseboats.

Back at P. Guest House, we took a quick dip in the lake, before bidding goodbye to our new friends and fellow wheelers. As they climbed back into the van toward Bangkok, Scott and I returned to the hotel where we could relax into the womb of free wireless there, enshrouded in smoke, in the middle of the Thai countryside along the Burmese border.

The next morning, we woke up on Dane Wetschler’s couch in Bangkok and took stock of our consciousness. Dane was already brewing some coffee in the room, pouring hot water over a cone of freshly ground beans, filling the room with a rich aroma. Scott and I were instantly brought into the present. After drinking just one 2/3 full mug of the stuff, we were just nipping to wheel.  While Dane was finishing off the coffee, Karona began making us bowls of muesli and yoghurt, taking care to stir each one lovingly, blending the cereal, milk, and fruit yogurt before giving them to us. For two hard-boiled wheelers used to the hard-scrabble streets of Tiruchirapalli, such hospitality was melting us like butter.

Before we left, we gave a little gift to Karona and Natsumi from AsiaWheeling Global Enterprises and our friends at Maui Jim. Along with the sunglasses, they had sent us a number of women’s small tee-shirts.  Being not small women ourselves, we were thrilled to find a couple on which to bestow these gifts.

Karona, Natsumi, and Dane agreed to take a taxi cab to the bike rental place. Scott and I would, of course, be wheeling there.

Dane marked the place where we needed to meet them on a map. It was a small enough Soi (the Thai word for side alley) that it was not actually shown on the map; we were wheeling toward a little blue circle in a blank part of the map on the other side of town. We would be getting there by taking one of the main Bangkok thoroughfares, a street called Rama IV. Rama IV is an English way to refer to the fourth monarch of Thailand under the House of Chakri. The current king is Rama IX. Rama IV, (his Thai name is Phra Bat Somdet Phra Poramenthramaha Mongkut Phra Chom Klao Chao Yu Hua — we dare you to look up the translation, and provide it in the comments) was the king for the better part of the 1800’s, and is also the Siamese king portrayed in that old favorite “The King and I.”

Today’s Rama IV is a boiling highway, populated with a cocktail of brand new Toyota Camry cabs and whizzing motor cycles.

It crosses the heart of the city, and always seems to have plenty of traffic. Bicycles are making a comeback in Bangkok, but are still a pretty rare sight on Rama IV.

You see, dear reader, it was not so long ago that cycles were, due to lack of funds and industrialization in Thailand, a necessarily popular form of transportation. As Thailand has developed, the new wealth has attempted to divorce itself from its poorer past in many ways. From Thailand’s worship of Japanese and Korean culture, to its embrace of fashion, flat screens, and frappes, the country is determined to show the world it’s made it. And it has. No visitor to the city can be confused about that. Unfortunately, though,  there still exists a scorn for bicycles, being seen as a vestige of poorer, harder times. But what about posh bikes, you ask? There must be a market for posh American, European, and Japanese-made bikes. And it’s true, there is. There is even a fixed gear hipster cycling scene here, but its expansion is relegated mostly to the hyper-wealthy. Due to a massive import tariff on cycles and components from abroad, most people here can only afford a heavy and poorly manufactured Thai cycle.

Rama IV is the nearest big street to Dane’s apartment, in a part of town called Sathorn, right near the giant Lumpini boxing stadium and as such would be one of our main avenues of transit in Bangkok, so we had better get used to the traffic, which while thick, was quite welcoming and none too fast (during the day at least). We took Rama IV through a number of fly overs, and stop lights, pedaling hard in the morning sun. Bangkok was surprisingly hot and humid for being the farthest north that we’d been so far. We were quite soaked by the time we made it to the old city, and began having to make turns.

We were totally unable to locate the streets that Dane had suggested, but with prudent use of our compasses and kind locals, we found the bike shop in no time.

Dane, Karona, and Natsumi were just finishing getting fitted for their bikes when we rolled up. Scott and I quickly sprung to action, teaching our new team the rules of wheeling.

After a little test run on some of the tiny Sois that ran around the bike rental place, we were ready for the real thing.

It was great to have a larger team of wheelers again. We’d had the pleasure of wheeling with Dane back in Providence, but we were most gleefully surprised to find Karona and Natsumi to be not only hard-core wheelers, but startlingly quick learners at the field commands and general rules of wheeling.

Dane took bishop and headed toward the river, where he took us off the road and onto the sidewalk (a “Mario Cart” call). When we exited the sidewalk, we found ourselves in a huge, semi-open-air market.

Here we locked the bikes and headed to find some grub. We started with some Thai rotis, stuffed with crab meat, then settled on a little restaurant.

The restaurant was a sort of point-and-eat place, and we wasted no time in pointing relentlessly. Dane had, during his time in this country, gained not only an impressive grasp of the Thai language, but also a deft sense of what to order at restaurants. “It’s much cheaper to eat out here than to cook at home,” Dane explained to us, “so I just eat out almost all the time.”

He assured us that the best was yet to come. And Thai food in Thailand was well on its way to a firmly applied AsiaWheeling seal of approval with just what we’d had already.

Our lunch consisted of a number of spicy curries, a sweet dish of meat and potatoes in a soy gravy, Thai sticky rice, a tonkastu-like piece of fried pork, a Chinese-esque garlic broccoli and chicken stir fry, and a plate of fried noodles. Paired with our rotis, it was quite the feast.

Back on the road, we headed toward the more historic temples and palace district of the old city, stopping by Khaosan Road, previously AsiaWheeling’s only port of call in Thailand.  It was so over-run with tourists and touts, that we wondered why we ever would have visited such a place. AsiaWheeling was obviously lacking a Thai Bureau back then.

Dane called a coffee waypoint shortly thereafter.

Although it was not cheap, it was the most delightfully European coffee of the trip to date, produced quite masterfully by Thai hands from an Italian machine.

Before leaving the table, I applied some of Karona’s peppermint essence to my back with a pump-action spritzer, which elicited an unexpectedly intense sensation on the skin.

We kept wheeling, now meandering aimlessly though Bangkok’s old city, stopping from time to time for water or a little shape to eat, until the sun fell low in the sky.

It was time to drop the bikes back at the rental joint, since Natsumi was catching a flight that evening back to Japan. Rather than wheel back on Rama IV at night, we just folded the speed TRs and threw them into the cab. Our new Sri Lankan bungees proved invaluable in securing the trunk, which would not quite close over the Speed TRs.

As we bid farewell to Natsumi, she and Karona were already making plans to do a little Japan wheeling.

AsiaWheeling: spreading the gospel one city at a time.

Back at the Hotel Nippon, our return was met with resounding glee by the three women who worked at the front desk, and an inexplicable coldness from the manager. We had been so happy with our last room at the hotel, which, we could plainly see from the key hanging on the wall, was not occupied. So we asked for it back. But it seemed the room had magically transformed itself into an A/C room during our time in Kandy, and the manager refused to give it to us at the previous rate.

Fair enough. So we asked to be shown to a new room, after which we threw down our baggage and were preparing to relax when we noticed that not only was this room carpeted in filthy red fabric, lit only by a small greasy window, and featuring a truly unnerving cockroach infestation, but the toilet lacked the sprayer that we had come to know and love as a standard component of AsiaWheeling’s lavatory experience. This was simply too much. So we demanded a different room.

The new room was much better, with the standard tile floor rather than a carpet, and we celebrated by wiling away the rest of the evening working on correspondence, waking up the next day to bright sunlight pouring through all four of our windows, the last fragment of an Indonesian style anti-mosquito incense curl still smoldering in the room’s ashtray. Feeling so great that we dared venture out before coffee, we strode downstairs and hopped on the cycles. We were interested in buying the latest issue of The Economist, AsiaWheeling’s favorite publication, but unfortunately it was Saturday, and the only shop in Colombo that carried the magazine was closed. Switching gears, we decided that coffee and food would be vital to our continued existence in this city. So off we went, searching for a place that looked reasonably affordable, sanitary, and open for business.

Somehow, we ended up on a street full of jewel and precious metals merchants, which was protected from all non-two-wheeled traffic by a large security gate. The guards were not interested in AsiaWheeling, though, flagging us right through. Inside we found a strange little hotel (which is what they call restaurants in Sri Lanka). We entered and immediately the owner pushed the normal waiter aside and insisted on serving us himself. We ordered two coffees and two chicken and rices.

When the owner asked whether we wanted large or small coffees, though it was the first time we had been asked such a question in Sri Lanka, we thought of how hard it had been up until this point to get properly caffeinated, and responded “large.” And while the large was quite large, it was positively too sweet to drink, and gave only the weakest signs of containing coffee.

Vast quantities of sugared milk aside, the meal was incredibly tasty. I am quite sure we paid a pretty hefty foreigner tax, but in return we were given a steaming plate of freshly fried biryani rice, topped with succulent, juicy roasted chicken, with a papery crisp skin clinging to it. Ah Sri Lankan food…

As we were leaving, I noticed my bike was making some strange noises, and I wheeled back to the shelter of the hotel’s awning to investigate. As I stared into the depths of the rear tire, the owner and a few of his waiters came out to assist. It turned out to be a rock, glued by street grime to the inside of my rear fender. Easily removed. In exchange, the owner of the restaurant asked us whether we could sponsor a visa for him to come live and work in the USA. We told him that we did not know whether or not we could help, but gave him our cards and told him that if he sent us an email, we would see what we could do (unfortunately, we have yet to receive an email).

Quite satisfied despite the marked lack of caffeine, we hit the road and began wheeling hard for the outskirts. I do believe this is evidence, dear reader, that during our time in Sri Lanka, the AsiaWheeling team was actually beginning to wean itself from its coffee addiction. We had not even had a cup of java yet, and we were wheeling hard, with almost full lucidity.

Scott and I made our way out of the city center and into what turned out to be the Muslim quarter. We attracted a significantly higher number of looks, but none of them were threatening, and the roads were still quite good, so we wheeled on. We wheeled past the port of Colombo, where the air reeks of rotting fish, and large concrete barriers hide its inner workings from the prying eyes of roving adventure capitalists.

We stopped for a cup of Nescafe at a small bakery that appeared to be constructed mostly out of broken mirrors. The owner was happy to chat with us, but suffered from some strange eye ailment, which caused each of his eyes to wander in meandering and completely uncorrelated ways. It was one of those bizarrely unnerving situations in which one feels both compelled and dissuaded from looking.

Back on the road, we picked up a fellow wheeler for a bit, when a young Sri Lankan pulled up on his Chinese mountain bike. He gave up when we decided to tackle a large uphill and disappeared without a goodbye. Wheel safe brother. On the other side of the hill, we found ourselves at a security checkpoint bridge, on the other side of which was a totally different world, which one might call rural Sri Lanka. As we pedaled onward, the roads dissolved into crumbling pothole-ridden obstacle courses, and sported, for one reason or another, huge piles of rock spilling onto the road at regular intervals . Perhaps these were the leftovers, or the groundwork for some vast repaving project.

We had made our way pretty far from the city, and even the roadside goods sellers were beginning to peter out.

We used the vast grid-work of irrigation/sewage canals that seem to cover this whole region to help us navigate, for the roads would often wind this way and that, or simply peter out.

Our water was getting very low, and we began searching for a beverage seller, but there proved to be none around. We were driving by a large construction site, when I spotted a kind of dilapidated stand that had been erected there presumably for the purpose of selling food and beverages to the highway workers. As we wheeled over to it, a large crew of workers were finishing their cigarette and Coca-Cola break.

Without using any words that the woman who worked behind the counter could understand, we asked if they sold water. No, she replied, but they had coconuts. We looked to our left, and sure enough there was a giant cluster of golden coconuts hanging there. We ordered two.

The coconuts in Sri Lanka are perhaps a different species than we had found elsewhere on AsiaWheeling,  for they invariably appear a bright golden color. Any more data on the Sri Lankan coconut situation is more than welcome in the comments.

The coconuts were about 15 cents each, and we settled into a couple of plastic chairs to sip them through two neon straws. It seemed from the insignia on the signage and the uniforms of the employees that this was a Chinese-run construction project here to develop infrastructure by the port and expand an expressway in Sri Lanka. Just as we were speculating about the nature of the project, a van full of workers arrived, and their Chinese boss climbed out. He was on a mission to get coconuts and cigarettes for his men,  but was not in so much of a hurry that he could not spend a little time speaking Chinese with Scott. The man seemed quite thrilled at our mission, and confirmed our suspicions that they were building a highway. It was in fact a highway from the airport to the center of Colombo. As the Chinese man climbed back into his van, we slurped the last of our coconuts, reveling in what a great waypoint that had been.

From there we made our way back toward the main road that connects Colombo with the airport.

We knew its general location now, from the fact that we could see the direction of the new highway that was being built to replace it. Back on the road, we were finally able to buy water and a few snacks at a giant grocery store called “food city.”

The snacks were just barely enough to fuel us all the way back to Colombo, where we found ourselves badly in need of a savage meal. The solution presented itself as we rode past a middle eastern restaurant, which promised us that fantastic dish known as shawarma. We even made the foolhardy decision to purchase a Greek salad from them. This was of course wilted, sandy, and tough on the guts. But whatever…we were thrilled. It had been a great day, a savage wheel, and we were content with the world.  If we had been in an overly celebratory mood, it’s possible we would have purchased a four pack of The Happiest Drink in the World, “BabyCham”.