The road that is, isn't, is, isn't and finally......was.

Continued from last entry: So anyway, that night it rained like crazy. I guess they call it "mango showers" or something in Thai which means typhoon like rains. It was nutty. I was lucky to be sleeping in my hammock area. Quite spacious but leaky.

But, those digs were not as good as my night in the national park....

I headed to Mae Wong national park thinking there was a road over the mountains to Umphang and I could parallel the Burma border that way without having to backtrack. But as it turns out their was a road sometime previously, but now it's just an elephant track, and would take at least two days to do on a bike. There were rumors of a team of elephants coming through later in the day that would be going to Umphang and that I could strap my bike and gear to back of one of them, but alas the elephants never materialized.

But I rode to the top of the mountain anyway to see what it looked like where the road stopped and the trail began. There was a nice campground there which was this partcular week being used by the Thailand Bureau of Public Health Annual Goal Setting Camping Outing (this name is totally my creation, but you get the idea of why they were there).

They turned out to be a fun group of people. A few of the guys had brought their guitars and we sang cutting-edge pop songs together like "Hotel California" and, of course, "Country Roads." The woman in the pic below sort of adopted me as her son; making sure my plate always full, sneaking me beers out of their cooler, and letting me borrow a tent and sleeping bag. Good times.

The next day I rode back down the mountain and headed north to Tak where there is definately a road up and over the mountains more towards Burma. The best part of riding in a national park road with only one way in and no way out is in 28km of downhill I only saw 2 cars.

Oh, and the Transplanting Dragon Fruit trees thing. I was eating lunch in a roadside cafe in a small town somewhere near Nakhon Sawan and I met a farmer whose English was pretty good. (In fact, this guy was like a renaissance man, I'd say. He studied agriculture at university but was a computer teacher and english teacher for few years but is now getting back into farming. When I told him I lived in Taiwan and studied some Chinese. He says, "Ni hao ma?" Next to computers his biggest interest is Daoism. Through learning about Daoism he'd studied some Chinese and wants to learn how to write the characters.) He and his wife had just finished eating but helped me order some veggie food and drew me a map to his farm which was right on the way I was heading anyway. An hour later I pulled into his farm just as he and his helper were pulling a dragon fruit tree out of the ground. This one had to be moved because he had just built a big metal shed to park his truck in. (Did you build that? Yeah, I got some welding books and asked my friends. And, most important, when I build I'm not in a hurry.... The freedom of no building codes!) After we moved that tree to a new place I got to sample the different fruits from his farm.

Deciding on the trees new home...

...and then a coconut in the shade.