On A Wild Goose Chase

Thailand - as I see it.

We started out from Chiang Mai in a rented auto.  The roads were wide enough for two cars and a motorcycle or two.  Once in a while, we saw a motor coach, modern and massive, which seemed to take up the whole road.  As we traveled, the roads got narrower, just enough room for another vehicle to get by us.  The road changed back and forth from curvy and hilly to straight and narrow.  As we continued on, the road got even narrower and we kept going up, up, and up.  We saw people working on the steep hills with machetes.  The road was getting bumpier and bumpier and smaller and smaller.  It was just some gravel and an orange looking dirt road.  It was only wide enough for just our car and the sides were so steep.  Rob was not sure we were on the right road but he had read in Thai that there was a tulip festival.  Finally we came to the end of the road a dead end, with nothing there but some bamboo sticks that used to be a flower mart.  We turned around and went back over the same scary road and in two kilometers we were on the small country road with a yellow line in the center.  It had black and white posts every so often, as well as a guardrail here and there.  We had been on an adventure, a wild goose chase.  


We went by a public toilet and it had only ceramic places to stand up and place your feet. As you go, and stand on the floor, the liquid flows out under the toilet.  What a crappy place. The public ones didn’t have any toilet paper, which is common in Thailand.  Most of the toilets are the western type but not all have paper.

Next we passed an Army truck checking for drugs because we were so close to the Burma border.  We were stopped at a police barricade and they asked Rob where we were from.   He told them Chiang Mai in Thai, and we were told to go on.  The police all had on fatigues and looked very official.