Phitsanalok...better than you think

We arrived in Phitsanalok in the hot evening air after a long, but pleasant bus ride. It's a large city in north-central Thailand and we really had no intention of staying for any length of time, as it was a stopping point on our way to Loei. When you get off a public bus at a bus station in Thailand, you are a piece of fresh meat to the hungry dogs known as tuk-tuk drivers. They can smell you from about 10 km away and they look for white people in the windows of the bus as it approaches. Before your feet even hit the pavement, they are in your face, offering you rides and grilling you with questions. "Where you go?" Sometimes I want to say, "That's none of your damn business, man." Julija says I'm getting to be a more patient and tolerant person in these situations, but after you've been on a bus for the whole day, I sometimes have a short fuse with these guys. The first room that our guesthouse showed us was so creepy that we both looked at each other and walked out--it had this one-way mirror looking thing on the back wall and I couldn't stop thinking about someone on the other side. The room we ended up at the Lithai GH was fantastic; the nicest one we've had yet, like a Best Western in the states. That night we walked along the riverfront and stopped at one of the 20 plus bars (most of which were empty--bizarre) where Julija ordered a whisky and coke, but the guy came back with the full set: a pint of whisky, a bucket of ice, two cokes, and two glasses. We enjoyed this little miscommunication and stumbled back home after a while.

After renting a motorbike that was total crap which we named Ducky--the horn made a sick duck sound, none of the gauges worked, and the thing was basically falling apart; we packed a bag and headed out towards Phu Hin Rong Kla National Park along the Green Route to do some exploring and some camping. This park is set in some beautiful mountains about 150km away from the city and was once the headquarters of the Communist party rebellion in Thailand. These guys were pretty ruthless characters and after the government killed a bunch of student protesters in Bangkok in 1976, many students joined the party and there were camps all over the mountains. We cruised Ducky all over the park, checking out the crazy air-raid shelter that the commies had built into the cracks in the limestone (the land was geologically folded so there are these huge fields of exposed limestone with giant, deep cracks going down into the earth. Julija got nervous when I was jumping across them, but I made her jump a couple, too). They advertise 4 amazing waterfalls, but none of them seem to exist in the dry season. We hiked for hours through the jungle in a futile effort to find two of them, but found nothing but dried creek beds. Kinda funny. We camped in a rented tent and then went back to town the next day, stopping at Kaeng Sopha waterfall (and some others that were crawling with Thais), which was gorgeous, along the way. To see that waterfall during the rainy season must truly be a sight, because the rock formations around it are massive.

When we got back, we wanted to chill out with some beers and watch a movie, but we got an unexpected knock on the door. It was the girl from the front desk telling us that she had a "special promotion", which actually turned out to be a new bed. After some confusion, I realized that she wanted us to leave our room for 15 minutes while she and 5 guys came in and replaced the current bed with a new one. When Julija asked why, the girl pointed to her arm and said "bugs." Thanks for that, guys. We hung out around town and went down to the riverside to watch the drunk "falangs" get setup with fake boobs and dildos and then put on stage to catch (on a plate) the famous local flying vegetables, which are thrown from a hot frying pan in the kitchen. The place is always packed with dorky tourists, and it's funny to watch from a distance. The next day, we packed up and headed for Loei.

---

---