Phitsanlok onward to Chiang Mai

Leaving the falls was no easy task, it was such a cool, peaceful, and beautiful landscape, but leave we did, and early. To Phitsanlok from Poi falls we covered a pleasantly flat 60k. Our ride consisted of the usual: traffic, beautiful scenery, and plenty of dogs chasing us down the road, maybe we look like giant salty steaks on bikes. For whatever reason, they catch our scent and they are after us and letting anybody in the vicinity know about us. Not really a problem, but when you're riding nonchalantly down the road, spacing out in the hills, having a little ball of fur hurtle out at you from the bushes can be awfully startling.

Originally we planned to crash for a night in Phitsanlok before catching the train to Chiang Mai, but after our initial cruise through the town, we decided to skip the night in town and shoot for an afternoon train to Chiang Mai. Since we had managed to acquire our usual fetid odor after 3 hours of riding, we decided to find a cheap hotel room to shower up and store our things until the train left at 1:30pm. This was before we actually bought the tickets. When we did purchase the tickets we found out that our 1:30 train didn't actually leave until 8:40pm, leaving us with roughly 12 hours to kill in town. The hotel room wasn't exactly posh, which left us searching for a place to spend the day.

Well, if you have 12 hours to kill in a smallish town in Thailand, what better way to spend the day than at a local mall. That's right, we spent the better part of our day in Phitsanlok at the mall. Got some shopping done (my Chaco's are sadly about to go), hit up the old internet, and of course hit up the mall arcade to play some ping-pong, it felt like middle-school all over again.

We did manage during the course of the day to make our way to the local weekend market in town, and see something closer to traditional Thai culture. The weekend market was an impressive display of meat, fish, fruit, clothing, pretty much anything you could want. If you want to buy a pigs head, that is the place to go. Plus they keep the fish fresh in basins built into the countertops. Pick your fish and that is filleted right there for you...entertaining.

After 12 highly entertaining hours in Phitsanlok we packed our bikes onto the train and proceeded on what turned out to be an uncomfortable 8 hour train ride to Chiang Mai. I know I've said it before but infrastructure in southeast asia is not meant to accomodate tall lanky white guys. 8 hours of fitful sleep later we arrived in the mountains of Chiang Mai.