Chiang Rai – Thoeng – Phrae

As uneventfull as yesterday was, as adventurous today was!

Today started off like any other day. We left our Happy Home and headed off towards Nan. We stopped there to haver our usual 7-eleven brunch, but for the first time since we’ve been here, we didn’t buy a bottle of water to take with us….BIG MISTAKE as we will find out later…

For the first time, we got stopped by the security guys & police at the checkpoint near the Laos border. No it wasn’t for drugs or whatever, but they just told us that we had to take the gravel road because they were working on the main road and it was too dangerous for us to take it. The guard wanted to know Seb’s name, he wanted to know the country we came from and he wrote down that we drove a Honda PCX…God knows what he wants with that info…Seb from Belgium came through here on a Honda PCX, oh yeah I heard that too! The funny thing was that they took a picture of us with their camera…

So, off we went on the bumpy road, to avoid the more bumpy one! After 45 minutes we were back on the main road.

We took a very lovely looking mountain road because the locals told us that it was the way we needed to go to Phrae (or as they pronounce it: FLAAI). In the beginning it was nice, we were mowing the lawn uphill and going downhill, mowing the lawn uphill again and going downhill again (it sounds like you are mowing the lawn when you drive up the mountain at 20 to 30 km’s an hour!). After a while it got steeper and steeper, up to the point where I had to jump off of the riding scooter because we were going downhill when we were supposed to be going uphill….Seb drove alone uphill and I walked behind him (glad I had on my good walking shoes) wearing my helmet, you never know when you fall down and hit your head!

After a fair bit off walking in the scorching heat, I climbed back on the scooter, because as the saying goes : ‘what goes up(hill), must go down(hill)’ Seb uttered the profetic words : ‘I rather go uphill, because I always feel nervous that the brakes will fail when we are going downhill!’

You can not guess what happend next! As steep as the road went uphill, as steep did it go downhill so Seb had to use his brake at the maximum so we wouldn’t end up in the ditch. We were nearly down when Seb yelled : ‘the brake is shot, get off the bike!’ I had to jump of the bike again, but this time it was because it was going down too fast and Seb couldn’t stop it. Sighhhhh!! I had to walk yet another big part of the trip because only the back brake was working!

We met some guys who told us that we just had to put some WATER on the brake pads so that they would cool down and work again. Yes indeed, the water that we didn’t take with us today! In the end it all worked out ok, we found some water on the ground, ‘fixed’ the scooter and drove to Phrae.

Pictures will be for later, as the internet connection is soooooo slooooow that it’s just not working to upload anything but text right now…