Chiang Rai - Day 4

After a bit of Thai French toast, we met up with our guide for the day, Sunami. All 3 of us are riding mopeds today. Chris got purple and I got hot pink. We look pretty manly, don't we? Chris is no stranger to motorcycles but I've only got about 4hrs on a 250cc dirt bike. Our mopeds were only 110cc, which is 1/10th of your typical street bike back home. They're also automatic, so they're very easy to drive. We were glad to have Sunami to guide us through the city streets and teach us the "rules" of the road. You have to drill it in that the "wrong" side of the road is now the "right". Thankfully we've had a week to adjust with the opposite traffic. After just 5min of cruising, we made it outside of town and onto rural roads where there's almost no traffic aside from the occasional moped. Gas is just too expensive for rural residents to use cars very often. We got to check out some farmers harvesting a crop of rice, which is brutal work, requiring you to be bent over all day in the muggy heat. We made a lot of stops but quickly found ourselves far outside of town where many residents relied on solar panels and batteries for power. Sumani's house was on the way so he showed us his guest house there that he's been working on for a few years. It's 3 rooms adjacent to a creek and rice fields. It's a great view, but very remote with no electricity. So remote that he can't find anyone qualified to run the place. Nobody speaks English out here. We walked down the road to a local farm with a small pond stocked with fish and several "organic" fruit trees up the hillside. We tried some local Litche, which looks like a huge strawberry with tough skin you have to first peel. It's pretty juicy, but the taste is just ok. Not really sweet or sour, just odd. We picked some other fruit that tasted like sour patch kids. Very sweet and sour, good stuff.

HOUKEAW FALLS
We were soaked with sweat from our trek into the bush for fresh fruit, so we made our way to the next stop. We rode up through a deep valley whose slopes had been cleared and populated with Oolong tea plants. It's quite a sight to see an entire steep hillside covererd in a grid work of shrubs with handfulls of farmers tending to them. Our next stop started with 10mins of very steep uphill hiking to Houkeaw Falls, which is a small tourist stop for the relatively small crowds of tourists that visit a local Akha Hill Tribe village nearby. Lots of little dogs followed us around, and Sunami pointed out that theses are the Hmong that sometimes have dog on the menu. That's one meat I won't be trying. It was a heck of a hike up a steep trail of moss-covered rock to the falls. Chris decided to try his luck walking on submerged, moss-covered slick rocks. Sure enough, he slipped and cracked his head open. A small 3/4" gash with a bit of blood but it stayed closed and no concussion. I've seen many cuts like these on the rugby field and suggested a staple at the local clinic, but he declined (It has since healed up just fine). The water was so nice after that hike, but soon enough we made our way down, stopping at a small Akha hill tribe village momentarily to buy a couple trinkets and cold water.
We hopped back on the mopeds and made our way over dirt potholed roads dodging wild dogs and children. We stopped at a Thai roadside diner, which is a bamboo hut on the side of the road. We got a local staple: Crispy pork with chili peppers, fish sauce, over rice. We also bought a big bag of candy bars to hand out to kids of remote villages we planned to pass through later in the day. The food was great and off we went to the next stop, being of all things in searing heat: A hot springs called Phasoet Hot Spa! All we could manage was a good foot soak before heading back on the road. We stopped on the hillside opposite the elephant camp we had visited 2 days before and listened to a few of Sunami's ideas for a coffee shop, etc. to set up here. Some ideas had a good start. There are a lot of opportunities in this country for english speaking entrepreurners with a bit of cash for investment. We checked out a few very remote hill tribes and handed out candy to some of the children who were brave enough to take it. These areas were extremely remote and we got a good look into what life is like in the remote areas in North Thailand.
Our last stop of the day was a cave that had a shrine to Buddha housed inside. It was pretty neat and we could hear the bats sqeaking up in the roof of the cave. We got back to the Inn around 5pm after 80km of intense motoring through city streets and washed-out dirt roads in the hills. We both thought it to be the arguably the highlight of the trip so far. We talked Sunami into taking us to dinner. He eats out for every meal, so he knows all the good spots. We hit up a Korean BBQ style place a short ride outside of town. 89baht got us all-you-can eat, but we had to pay extra for drinks. It was all locals. There was a huge buffet of both cooked and raw food. Instead of sitting at a hot plate like Behehana, you get a charcoal heated BBQ. You place meet on the top "dome" and the bottom rim is sort of a moat which you pour water to boil noodles, fish balls, etc. We loaded up on all sorts of meats, veggies, noodles and mystery items. We threw stuff onto the BBQ as fast as we could. We gorged ourselves. One particular item I tried was sour pork sausage, which is aged several days. It was a very adventurous choice, believe me. I cooked it twice as long I thought neccesary, and it ended up being pretty good with a bit of a tangy bite to it. We were barely able to move, but still managed to hork down some ice cream before heading back home to pass out. What a long, exciting day!