Oh how plans change...

Before i start another long boring blog (and to those who read the whole lot of the last one, god bless ya, i'm never reading that much again), i should explain some changes in the plan, in case yer interested. First off: No japan. Basically, the only jobs there are in teaching english, which i'm not too hot on, and secondly, one of the "big three" english teaching companies, Nova, just went bust leaving something in the region of 25000 people with no jobs. I find it hard to get a job at the best of times, but with those odds, i think i'll skip thanks very much. Instead, and i should point out this is a very tentative plan, i'll be heading to Australia in about late March, to work until the end of july, to save money for a gigantic 10 week USA road trip me and a friend from the UK are putting together. Details are sketchy but much fun is expected. After that, i've no idea, maybe head back to OZ, maybe New Zealand, maybe canada, i've no idea. It's a long way off.

So there it is, saves me explaining in emails and phone calls, and if anyone needs a japanese work visa with the name "Brian Kelleher" and a picture of a bearded would be sumo wrestler on it, hit me up.

So where was i, ah yes. Thursday last i pack up my belongings, leave my hostel and make my way to Pai. Amazingly, the four hour bus ride costs just under two euro, and i spend it chatting with a girl from kenmare named Denise who, just a few months previously, had phoned her parents to ask if she could become a nun in thailand. Nice girl, mad stories. The bus goes up pretty far into the mountains, at one stage a quick look out either window and you could see about fifteen miles of mountains either ways. This of course being a public bus, it goes up the hills at about 4 miles an hour, but it was still a great ride. Somewhere along the way we meet up with a Canadian named Tim, and Australian named Fiona, and a Swede named Eric, and together we follow Denise down the road and across a bamboo bridge to some cheap huts she had reccomended called Family Huts. For three euro a night i get a very nice little hut with warm blankets, a fan and a light, just off the river that runs through Pai. To say pai was what i was hoping thailand would be like is putting it mildly - a small village with a handfull of traveller's needs (internet, bikes, bars), set in the hills with a beautiful river running through. The first night in, we walk up the street to find it covered in night stalls selling clothes, food, jewlery and beers. We get some really great food, find a huge bar with fire dancer guys and basketball (bizarre combination), then walk back up town (meeting a frazzled american named Aaron along the way), find a roadside booze stall, and settl in. At one point i look around and see this canadian couple that i'd already run into three or four times in thailand, bizarre yet fairly common. They come to hang out and invite me to a big party on a private island down south for christmas day. Result! After a while, Aaron shows up again and we find we had a mutual taste for cheap booze and cheaper laughs. The two of us somehow end up in some rathole bar called Bebop where terrible thai bands play terrible coverversions of recent rock hits while desperate travellers do some sort of desperate mating dance. We spend the night drinking cheap beers and laughing heartily at their expense.

The next morning i wake up not remembering much, and spend the day walking around with people coming up going "hey brian, how did you get on last night", and me smiling and nodding as if i had any clue who they were. A very common occurence in Pai it seems. Tim and i rent some scooters and head off to drive around and see what we could see. After getting fairly lost a few times, we head back to the huts in time for sundown, and meet a fairly sizeable and rowdy gang of ozzies. At some point aaron shows up and we all headed up town to see what was going on. I stop for more noodles at a street stall, and as i wait, Tim suggests i try the next stall up for 20c chicken on a stick. Never one to say no to eating some dead stuff, i buy one and walk up the street with it. Ten minutes later i walk back down and buy two more. I gather up the ozzies for a third trip to the chicken on stick stall and quickly a legend is born. The sign says they're made with garlic and peppers, i maintain it's whatever oil they're using, but either way those things are some of the best food i've ever had, and everyone agrees. One of the ozzies pledged to eat 25 in one night, and i offer him 2000 baht (about e40) if he actually does it. He would spend the rest of the weekend working up to the challenge.

For some reason, we go back to the bar which had the fire and basketball. The whole venue is actually huge, to the point where i think if you put everyone in Pai in there, it'd still be empty, so with us being the only patrons, it was cavernous and incredibly boring. Me and Aaron get pretty bored pretty quick, so we head back to that Bebop place and sit ouside a bonfire at the front door, making sign-language conversation with passing thais. One group stops for about 45 minutes, and eventually (somehow) invite us to come in with them. They sit around a short table on the top floor of the bar, pounding whiskey and taking it in turns to dance on the table. Never being one to shy away from a cultural exchange that revolves alcohol, i soon found myself full of whiskey, doing the funkey chicken (on a stick), on a table, on a balcony, with five thai guys shouting mad thai at me, and one american looking at me like "ah balls, now i have to do it". In short, we have an awesome time. When the bar closes, the thais motion something about another bar, and i run into some brits who offer to bring me up on their bike. Aaron heads off with the thais, i jump on the bike, and off we go... For about four feet until the bike falls over and i go ass over heels into the dirt. Luckily we were going 0 miles per hour at the time, and once back on the bike, we're soon at a bar called "Don't Cry" that's full of brits, americans and thais. I run into one guy from Wolverhampton who comes out with the legend "i fookin hate the brits me" and we became fast friends. More fire dancing ensus and after meeting a load of people, i head for home.

Saturday was another day for the bikes, me and tim heading off early and going a two hour drive west, which goes through some great valleys and gives me some great photos. I sleep for a few hours in the day and in the evening we all headed to the offie and stocked up on booze, got fairly lairy at the restaraunt out the front of the huts, and go to a party we'd heard about in a nightclub up on a hill somewhere. There i sit around a campfire and talk for ages with this mad US guy who's parents gave him acid when he was 16. He was still pretty normal though (for an american), and we have an interesting conversation about the New World Order, the Elite, and all that kinda mad conspiracy crap that i don't really buy, but find pretty entertaining, especially when someone tries to convince you the world is run by lizards. Some other american guy asks me what the deal was with the irish and the english, and after clueing him in on 400 years of oppression, i feel it might be time to get out of there. After chatting with some more brits for a while, and listening to aaron try to convince me to come to Laos with him the next day for all of, oh, fifteen seconds, a gang of us hop in the back of a pickup truck and find ourselves in the Seven Eleven trying to figure out what meat was what in the deli.

Sunday was another mammoth bike ride, as me and tim head off into the hills and do a 120km loop of villiages and valley views. I was getting pretty confident on my little scooter at this stage and somewhere along the way decided to get up monday morning and drive through the mountains to Chiang Mai (130 miles). After another afternoon nap, i meet up again with our Family Huts gang, which has now swelled to about ten people, and we have some farewell drinks for Aaron, Fiona and an English girl named Anna, all of whom are getting a late bus to Laos. At ten we walk them up to the bus, say our goodbyes, fill up on stick chicken, and hit a street bar for some coctails. One of the ozzies hits it off with the stalls owner, and manages to convince her to let them drink for free if they'll act as greeters and pull in people off the street. She agrees and they arrange to show up monday evening and get the party going, at least on that five feet of road. We all head off down the road to some raggae bar and have a few more drinks before some of us call it a night.

Monday morning i get up, eat, say goodbye to some people who're headed south that morning, and hit the road. My bike's only got a 100cc engine, so traversing the mountains is a bit like taking a punto up everest, but eventually i make it to the top, and enjoy about an hour's worth of views. My bike's odomoter (the thing what tells you the distance you've travelled) is knackered (as is the speedometer now that i mention it), so the drive is pretty frustrating as whenever i think i'm almost there, a sign pops up that says "Chiang Mai, 75 Miles". At one stage i'm very low on fuel, so i stop at a restaraunt that points me down a road to a ghetto petrol station where an old man with three five gallon jars of petrol and some tubes fills up my tank for half nothing. After about five hours, i hit chiang mai, check into a cheap guesthouse, and sleep for a few hours.

In the evening i do some internet and decide to hit up the night market to see if i can get some chicken on a stick. While walking around i spot a familiar head of blonde dreads, and it turns out to be Mick and Anna, the kiwis i was hanging around with the first few weeks in the south. Thailand's funny like that, even in a city of a million people, you tend to bump into people. We head to a cheap bar the guys have found and have some drinks, play some terrible pool, feed some elephants, and eventually part ways after a 2am Burger King feast.

For some reason i sleep really badly and wake from a strong night tremor at around 6:30am. i have a quick shower, drop my key to reception, and hit the road at 7am. This time the drive is much easier as i kind of know where i am most of the time, and the morning mist on the hills is just amazing. I'd filled the petrol on the bike when i arrived to chiang mai the night before, but at about 8:30am i finally putter to the side of the road, completely out of petrol and about 25 miles from anywhere. When i stop and old old woman hobbles over and gives me a kind of "what in christ's name are you doing here" type motion, so i shake my water bottle, point at the petrol tank, and make a "no" motion. She give me a quick "eureka!" type finger in the air motion, scurries back into her house, and emerges a minute later with two whiskey bottles full of dark red petrol. Result! I fill up, offer her some money (which she refuses), and head off.

Now most of you are probably thinking "yeah bollocks, some old lady just happened to have two bottles of petrol in her gaff", but if you'd been to thailand you wouldn't even be surprised. Basically they have three types of petrol station over here, western stations, ghetto stations, and whiskey stations. A western station is the same as home, you rock in with the bike, give the attendant the keys, say something asinine like "fill 'er up" and go into the (US owned) forecourt station to stock up on Doritos, Wrigley's chewing gum, and some water that's inevitably been bottled by Coke somewhere. A ghetto station is basically a little stall with three upturned five gallon drums, containing (respectively) diesel, octane 91 and octane 95. The bottom of the drum has a tap with a hose, which you stick in your tank, ask for x liters, and the guy eases the correct amount of fuel into your tank. A whiskey station is generally a little counter at the side of a restaraunt where you find three piles of empty one liter whiskey bottles, containing, again, diesel, octane 91 or octane 95. Most people here drive around with a whiskey bottle full of petrol for when they run out, and possibly for when they feel like getting very drunk, very quickly.

Inanyways, i make the drive back to Pai in three hours this time, and it's much more enjoyable. After a quick breakfast at the restaraunt with the remaining ozzies (who are still insanely drunk from what i'm assured was an amazing night running their own bar), i hit my hut and sleep for about eight hours. When i emerge, everyone's crashed out on the deck of the restaraunt, watching family guy season six. We head back up town around eight for the lad's second night of work (and about ten chicken on a stick each) but seemingly everyone's left pai that day and it's quiet night. After hitting a few bars, we call it a night.

So there it is, the update. Today is the king's birthday so there's no drinking. Tomorrow morning i'm getting on my bike with a little backpack and heading off on a 700 kilometer loop from pai to mae hong song to chiang mai to pai. I think it should take about a week and i promise to post with pictures next time. Until then...