Scooters and Self Guided Treks

Where to begin... Well, I think my last two days in Chang Mai have been the best on the trip so far. I know I keep saying everything is amazing and incredible and everyone is probably thinking that I need to get a good thesaurus but at least allow me to explain before you jump down my throat. The last two days the pan-american trio, myself and Sam and Megan, rent 115cc scooters to travel around with. Megan actually opted out of the scooter today, but for the sake of simplicity in the previous sentence I'll leave it as is. I'm sure most people are thinking, Chris, do you even know how to ride a scooter, and don't they drive on the wrong side of the road there? Well, I've had limited previous experience with a scooter, and yes, they do. After being here this long though I've gotten pretty used to the other side of the road thing and as for the scooter bit, well I've done a ton of mountain biking so really it's just a matter of understanding the balance thing. Basically I figure after the first 20 minutes you are golden. Sadly the first 20 minutes are often in the city, but we were in a pretty quiet area of town so those we took it easy to start with. I had no problems whatsoever driving the scooter. Megan on the other hand managed to run into Sam right in front of the rent place with the first rev of her engine which did make the day seem a bit ominous at first. Let me back track a bit though, the main reason we actually decided to rent the scooters is because they came with insurance and even if you totaled the thing you only had to pay 1500 baht. As clearly I am currently writing this I did no damage whatsoever to it or myself and had a wonderful time that could not have been experienced otherwise.

Yesterday Sam had printed off a badly made google map of a round trip route up into the mountains, past an interesting cave, and then back to Chang Mai. I don't actually no how long it was or what it was called but we estimate it was about 250km in total. Setting off at about 10am we left the city and basically had the road to ourselves for the next 8 hours. The scenery was breathtaking and getting to rip around on what was basically a mountain bike that you didn't have to peddle through twisty mountain roads was a great. The cave that we came across was also really cool. It was probably around 2km of tunnels underground with lots of bats and other cool 'cavey' things. There was even some neat Buddha's carved out of the rocks. Sadly, for everyone else maybe, I didn't get to take many pictures as we were pretty much going full tilt the whole day to make sure we made it back before sunset: none of us really wanted to be riding at night. We did have to ride through a bit of a down pour which was interesting but surprisingly manageable.

Today Sam and I jumped back on the bikes and powered up to Doi Suthep and Doi Suthep-Pui National Park. These were some more twisty roads to head up and once again almost worth the ride on its own. Doi Suthep was a neat Wat up on top of the hill, but after having already seen so many it was nothing really special. Some people I've been told like the fact you can take a cable car up instead of the steps, but really its only about 500m so why bother. Had we taking a taxi up it probably would have been disappointing as the views were obscured by the fact we were in a cloud, but with the scooters we could stop wherever we felt like and managed to find some good pictures. It was nice to get some pictures of the country side today after not really getting a chance to yesterday. I've actually been a bit surprised by the typography of the area. It looks like Vietnam is supposed to in my mind. As for the national park, I found it far more interesting than the Wat. Aside from the fact that it cost a foreigner fee of 200 baht to get in and the trails were poorly marked, when you found where to go it was always worth the while. We basically followed waterfall after waterfall up the side of the mountain about 2km straight up. On the way down we also came across this neat and rather large spider. You'll have to excuse the slightly blurry picture as I didn't really want to get to close to it.

So maybe now you can believe why these have been the best couple of days thus far. Beaches are nice but I'd rather be trekking and both days (minus the trip to the Wat) we were basically the only people on the road or even in the general area. It was great to feel like we were getting to see the stuff that we wanted to at our own pace. Did we possibly miss out on some stuff, maybe, but somehow it feels more fulfilling not being on a tour.

One other amusing thing happened last night over some drinks. A self proclaimed hippy Buddhist American girl got into a heated argument with an Irish guy over the political state of Venezuela and Chavez. The Irish guy had actually lived there for a couple years and the girl had not. They of course were essentially arguing the same point but the American girl kept cutting the Irish guy off and telling him he was wrong because of what she had read.

Added amusement for me came from the fact that I'm pretty sure I've read everything the girl had read and I wouldn't go telling someone who had actually lived there they were wrong based on a book.
Tomorrow afternoon I'm off to Laos so I'm not entirely sure when I'll be blogging next. I expect it will still be in 2-3 days but one can't be entirely sure