Election Day in Thailand

We are back in Chiang Mai...have been for several days after successfully completing our motorbike loop. We have been spending a large part of our time here in the city on the internet doing massive amounts of research as to where we should go after Laos. I can't stand it anymore, so I thought I'd do a blog instead...

Today is a big day for Thailand. Voting is taking place for I'm sure several offices, but the most important being for prime minister. Not sure if it is making the news back home, but for the past month there have been huge protests throughout the country trying to force the very corrupt Prime Minister to step down. He has refused, and elections are carrying on. The opposition parties are all boycotting the election in hopes of making the entire thing invalid. Starting yesterday, here in Chiang Mai, they are not serving any alcohol until tomorrow afternoon for the occasion....to keep people in their right mind and calm I suppose. Makes for quiet nights along the main streets in town.

Back to our bike trip. The rest of it was pretty uneventful. We had nice riding, and some great views. Our butts are finally recovered after a day yesterday of not doing much at all. Highlights for the rest of the ride were the best pillows EVER in a random guesthouse called Ban Farang in Khun Yuam. I'm telling you, it was heaven. For some reason good pillows are hard to come by in SE Asia. Also, we got hit with two large storms (both at night luckily) that brought lots of rain, thunder and lightening in Khun Yuam, and some wind thrown in the next night in Mae Sarieng. This made our last two days of riding much cooler and the air much fresher. The best views of the ride were coming out of Mae Sarieng and heading 'home' to Chiang Mai. So green and lush...what we were expecting from the jungle along the whole ride. After coming out of that nice, mountainous scenery, the rest of that last day was just a slog of a ride. Straighter, busier roads at higher speeds. I was happy to see our guesthouse in Chiang Mai...I think 200 km that last day. It took about 7 hours with lots of breaks.

And now we hang out here for a week doing things like getting a visa for Laos, restocking on malaria meds, shopping, figuring out where to go next (it is looking like we're headed to Africa after Laos), taking a cooking course, and lounging by our pool (yes, we of course picked a guest house with a pool!). We did the cooking class today. It was very nice, and surprisingly easy. We will be happy to cook you all up some tasty Thai food. The best today was Panaeng Curry and Mango with Sticky Rice. Yum.

Some pictures from the last half of the motorbike journey:

A precarious, brave, and oblivious cat on a roof near our guesthouse in Mae Sariang:


We didn't get any good pictures of the really great scenery, but this is a view of the tail end of it:


A nice river we took a quick rest at that runs through a national park. Notice the long sleeve shirt and pants. We were actually cold for a while! Yippee!


A 'picnic' lunch stop. Consisting of mostly deep fat fried goodies from a market we stopped at earlier. Ugh. We felt heavy after that.