Thailand: Day 4: The Adventure

I wake early, again, and leave Lucy getting ready while I go and return the bike to the shop a few blocks from the hotel. I am there before they open at 7:30 and drop the bike off, get my passport back, and walk back to the hotel.

We enjoy breakfast at the hotel, and chat with the very friendly hotel staff. We check out and catch a Tuk Tuk to the bus station on the north end of town.

We ask around, looking for a "minibus" that will take us to "Tha Ton", although I guess we should have been asking for "Fang", the city just before Tha ton. We finally, after several false starts, bounce our way to the the back of the bus station to a ticket booth where we purchase a ticket for "The white bus there, number 1". "Tha Ton?" "Tha Ton". "Tha Ton?" "Tha Ton". Ok we must be good. We wait for the bus to board, drinking a beer and sitting with the locals.

We get on the bus, and after some confusion where the bus was overly populated, and then half the patrons were removed and replaced by others, we start off. It should be about a 3 and a half hour ride to Fang. I sit in the window seat, my camera in the crux of my arm, snapping pictures and anything that I fancy as we fly by.

After the bus has thinned out, and we are approaching 3.5 hours of trip, we decide to inquire where we are, to see when Fang appraoches and we should disembark. We ask, "Fang?" The locals reply, "Fang? Fang far." Oh shit. We are lost. We somehow got directed to the wrong bus, and now we are in the middle of nowhere. Everyone on the bus has a good laugh at our expense and the journey continues. The last of the patrons are dropped of and we roll into a small dusty lot in front of a small hut, resembling something from a fort outpost in the old west, in a small rural village.

We approach the "bus station", where three small children are seated on a bench, and few adults are near, all on a poarch under an awning protected from the sun. We remove our shoes and enter the poarch. The 3 children all simultaneously clasp their hands in the traditional prayer pose and bow their heads to us. It was an awesome moment. We return the favor. We then proceed to ask where we are on a map. No one is able to show us, definitively. We are really rural. We finally are able to communicate that we want to buy some water, and we are put on another bus to go to Chaing Dow, where we are suppposed to be able catch another bus to Fang, as far as we can tell.

Chaing Dow is about an hour north of Chaing Mai, right where Lucy noticed that "We are leaving the 107", which should have mattered more at the time than it did. Everyone on this bus is made aware of our plight, from the one woman who sort of speaks English and is communicating with us. We stop at a rest area for a bite to eat and beg a phone call off someone's cell. We call Paulo, the proprieter of the hotel we are trying to get to in Tha Ton. We inform him of the situation, and he says, "I was at the bus station in Fang for the alst bus, but no one was there. Good luck finding a way up here now from Chang Dow". We arrive at the bus station in Chang Dow, and inquire from a bus driver there, the only bus driver there, and he tells us that there will be another bus coming in 15 minutes that will take us to Fang. What luck! We catch that bus, and begging another phone call from a local, with the help of several other locals, we tell Paulo that we are on our way!

We arrive in Fang at about 8 pm. We left Chaing Mai at 10:30. 10 hours of bus riding around rural northern Thailand. We went through several military guarded check points on our ride, indicating that we were following the boarder with Burma the entire way. Paulo is there to pick us up at the bus station, which is really just the side of the road in Fang. We tell him that we haven't eaten, and he takes us north to Tha Ton, and to a small stand where we order food. The best meal we have had in country! We are so glad to be found, and fed, we are giddy with delight.

Paulo takes us a few hundred meters further up the road to his hotel. What a hotel. It is a small but lavish resort. Only 4 bungaloes. We have a beautiful room, next to the pool that makes the center of the complex. We have TV, DVD, satelite, stereo, laundry, all complimentary. Lucy and I make it a habit not to use television while on vacation. Sitting on the poarch of our bungalo in the night, I hear strange and exotic creatures, calling "woo wee woo" in a high whisteling voice. This experience is more profound and amazing to me than hearing whales communicating underwater in Hawaii. We crawl into our canopy covered bed, and drift into wonderful and well wanted sleep to the tunes of peaceful Thai music.