A lot happened in the last weeks and the first 1200 km are made. The last showers of the rainy season catched up with me, with rain ongoing for days and temperatures up to 50 degree Celsius. In the night there were storms that fell trees and brought whipping, horizontal rain. I didn’t stay dry always and so I used hotel rooms and sunny squares to get the pervasive moisture out of my stuff. Still, flat land was laying before me, ricefields were followed by canefields and the Chato Praya was followed by the Ping. After a while I proceeded to sleep every night under some roof so that I wasn’t sitting in the mud every morning. Seeing that next to every field there is some shack, it was never a problem to find one. Almost every morning the farmer came to look, but it was never a problem.
In the cities Nakohn Sawan and Tak I stayed overnight. In Tak I originally only wanted to clean my laundry, but then I was invited by the owner of the shop and her neighbours to stay for a night. So I slept in the backroom of the store, was invited for dinner and breakfast respectively three times and was taken to the temple. They were very nice and in the evening the communication got easier because they invited an English speaking friend, a guy from USA who lives in the city as a teacher. In Nakhon Sawan was a big market with merchants who liked to be photographed. In this post there are just a few pictures since the markets will get their own post.
After I left Tak, the last city in the flatlands, the mountains began and they did so with 15 km of slopes. And after one mountain came just another one. The first night I stayed in the house of a very nice young man and his family. From time to time he works as a welder abroad and so he spoke some English. We sat all together upstairs in the wooden house. For dinner we had gathered and fried wild bee larva. They taste like honey and bee wax, which sticks to the teeth after the meal.
After I struggled further up the mountains, I had to accept that I’m overwhelmed by the endless slopes. So I stopped a Pick Up which took me to a valley, running at the western border of the country parallel to Myanmar. I followed this valley for several days.
After that I faced mountains even worse and I decided to change my route radically. The first step was to take a bus to Chiang Mai where I stayed some nights and planned a new route. With a new idea, I started my second month in Thailand going to the more eastern, still mountainous but not so steep, areas. Finally I will go to the eastern border and on to Vientiane, the capital of Laos.
