Highway to Hell (Dustin and Vida's Bike tour of Chaing Mai)

*** So just to add to this story... Vida reminded me that at a stop light she was getting a picture of me on my bike in the middle of rush hour traffic when the truck ahead of me started to go.... well ends up it was a septic truck and when it hit the gas a huge splash came out of pipe from the back of the truck and slashed a big puddle of raw sewage 1 foot from my open toed shoe. While my mind was trying to figure out what the hell flew out of the back of this truck... Vida yells EEWW! Its shit!! ***

So i know this is old but i forgot to write about it.... and it is too funny... so here it goes. So it was Vida's first day in CM and i decided to listen to the dumb ass writers in Lonely Planet (who obviously must be avid cyclists) because they recommend a nice 1.5 hr bike ride to a remote reservoir in the mountains that you can swim and stuff (i highly discourage any persons that just rode a bike when they were 12 to take this stupid ass's advice). So me and vida rent bikes from our guest house for about $1 and set out with our guidebook. The bikes have some messed up handle bars that move when the wheel doesn't... like a screw loose or something and there is grease everywhere. I am guessing that whoever "fixed" the bike thought that more grease makes a bike work better and even more grease would hold the front wheel on the 1970's bike. So in less than 5 minutes i have lost Vida who is like a bicycle savant... She was modest and said that she didn't ride that often... so i told her to not be silly... she was a natural... just like a fish on wheels. And Asia is not that bike friendly... and by not that bike friendly i mean that vida almost died 3 times before we even got past the town square. I thought about calling in quits but vida was now determined (lol... you should have heard her thoughts on the bike ride 2 hours later). So this is mid-day and hot as shit.... and these two white-ies (well one whitey and one browny) are the only two tourist stupid enough to take our BICYCLES onto the freaking highway. We get lost about 20 times and have to keep asking people for directions which is hard when no one speaks English and no signs are written in any alphabet we can understand. So we finally get on a road that we think is right because now the people we ask for directions all point in a straight line instead of all curvy shit with their hands. So about an hour into the drive i realize that there is a motor scooter that looks really familiar.... and i realize that it was one of the same dudes that we had asked for directions earlier (and this dude was headed in a totally different direction than we were going... but for sure knew where we were going because we asked for directions... but again... no English). So i tell Vida to keep an eye on this dude. He keeps passing on his scooter and then pulling over until we get ahead of him and so on for the next few miles. Vida gets scared and we decide to pull over and stop to see is he is really following us.... and he stops too!! Then turns around like he is leaving but goes and hides behind a tree. We tell a shop owner but he didn't do anything.... so then we see an army dude and start talking to him. He ends up going and talking to this dude, searching his scooter and such.... Comes back and tells us that the guy is just on his way to Huay Tung Tao (the same damn place that we were heading.... said he was meeting some friends). So the army guy asked me if i had a knife to stab the guy. WTF?? By now we are thinking this dude is going to wait until we get out in the middle of nowhere and steal all our shit. The shop owner tells us a back way and we finally lose the guy... but it is still freaking far away. By this time vida is complaining about her ass from the bike seat (which she continued to do for the next 2 days... but god knows she is a trooper cause I don't know many people who could have made the bike trip... i think that the potential robber put the fear of god in her and now she was determined to make it to the lake alive). So we FINALLY get there and are exhausted.... too tired to do anything but sit under a bamboo hut and curse. We are also super burnt... before we left vida asked if we should wear sunscreen... but i hadn't been burnt since i have been here so i said no... big mistake. So then we have to do the same damn bike ride back to town. So we tried asking every tuk tuk driver we passed if we could put our bikes in there tuk tuk (read: Go kart) but none would take us with our bikes.... so we road the whole way back. That is when we decided not to ever listen to the writers of Lonely Planet ever again.... athletic bastards. But now all we can do is laugh about it.... oh sweet jesus