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.

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.