The Honda Dream

Before today, I had never done any of the following:

-Driven a motorcycle
-Driven a motorcycle on a busy city street in Thailand
-Driven a motorcycle on the left side of the road
-Driven a motorcycle up a winding mountain road to a temple at the top of 600 stairs that overlooks an entire city
-Driven a motorcycle down a mountain while a massive thunder storm approaches
-Driven a motorcycle on a highway...with the kickstand down and scraping the pavement

Now that I've got all those things under my belt, along with a handful of near death experiences (very literally), there's not much else that scares me. Not even the cockroaches that shared my bed with me last night, or the fact that I will die if I drink tap water right now. The sights from the top of the mountain today were unbelievable. There was a storm approaching, as I mentioned, which created a sky that was half sunshine and clouds and half the most ominous black sky I've ever seen. The sky was split in half, with the beautiful city of Chiang Mai beneath it. As we were hopping on our motorcycles to beat the storm down the mountain, John literally watched a thick black storm cloud come right over the trees just a few thousand feet up the road. He appeared to be either amazed or completely terrified at the sight of this.

The motorcycle adventure today was an interesting contrast to the three days I spent in the jungle/woods prior to today. I will mention, although I am ashamed, that I was the only one from our trekking group to slip off a log bridge and into a small river. However, the bridge was aproximately .5 inches wide and I was still getting used to my new hiking boots. On top of all that, I made the mistake of stepping near the edge, which ended up being rotted, which ended up breaking away under my foot, which caused me to fall knee deep into a nasty looking river. I jumped out about a second later, but was soaked for the next day or so! I secretly waited for the next person to have a fall worse than mine, but the rest of the hiking was catastrophe free, aside from the fact that the Israeli guy we were with kept wanting to take naked pictures of all the males in the group, and sang Israeli military songs the ENTIRE time we hiked. Well, not the entire time....he actually did a cover of "Roxeanne" by the Police that lasted three minutes too long considering he knew one verse.

Last night we spent the evening with our new friends from England, Tristan and Ben. Basically the night consisted of John checking out "lady boys", as they're called here, which for those who don't know, are men who turn themselves into women and attempt to trick men into all sorts of crazy shit. It's a very big thing over here, and John is apparently pretty into it. He is the only one of the group who, for some reason, can't seem to tell a "lady boy" from a real girl. Towards the end of the night, after we thought he had finally figured it out, he came within seconds from getting on the back of a motorcycle with what he thought was the hottest girl ever. If Tristan hadn't shouted to him that it was a man, John would have vanished into the night and never been the same again. Needless to say, we spent a good deal of the night busting his balls, all in good fun of course. In his defense, he has managed to win the hearts of some lovely Thai girls since we've been here, and rumor has it that it's gone a bit further than just dancing and ironic random phrases in Thai(wink wink).

Tomorrow morning we fly to Phuket, an island off the Southwest coast of Thailand. Apparently you haven't seen beaches until you've seen these beaches, so I'm pretty excited. We'll be staying at a place that is suppposed to be two minutes from the beach, so I plan on spending at least one day lounging on the beach and catching up on some much needed rest. Last night I finally managed to get a decent night's sleep, but our days have been non-stop and I feel like it's almost caught up with me. So, now I've seen the big city, the tiny village, the small city, and tomorrow the beach. I'm completely psyched (minus a couple let-downs) with how things are panning out for us since we've been here, I feel like we're getting a good taste of many of the things this beautiful country has to offer, which are numerous and varied. For those of you who I haven't had a chance to call, my apologies, but I am alive and malaria free, although I have bites and cuts everwhere! More to come.