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Thursday, January 20, 2011

You play with fire, you will get burned.


I have left my comfort zone once again and began the descent from Chiang Mai to Cambodia. The first leg was 100 km. I woke up bright and early to beat the hot sun and traffic. the soundtrack to the first part of my first touring ride was Rolling Stone by Bob Dylan, the perfect song for a solo dude not really knowing where he's going. The ride went well, I stopped a bunch of times for food. I got to the a town called Lampang and went to try and find a guesthouse. It is super hard to try and ask people where anything is. I have to pull out my lonely planet phrase book and point to sentences to get anywhere. Nothing is in English like it was in Chiang Mai and Bangkok. I finally found a guesthouse and took a shower. Man, a shower feels like heaven after a 7 hour ride!!

Lampang is a really sweet town, it feels like I'm the only white guy, th
eres no tuk tuk's, coffee is really great, people are nice,
temples are huge and old, theres horse drawn carriages, and the local markets are hoppin! After taking that much needed s
hower I rolled around town and stumbled into a small english teaching school. I met this woman (whose name I cannot pronounce but I can spell it) Nutjarie, her and this American dude run this small school right down the road from my guesthouse. She was totally awesome and picked me up on her motor bike and brought me around the city and let me be a tourist and take pictures of all the beautiful temples. She brought me to a bunch of awesome markets and we got noodle soup at the best spot in town!
I planned on leaving yesterday morning but I woke up with a nasty cough and sore throat so I decided to stay another day and rest. Nutjarie picked me up and brought me to get Vitamic C, Zinc, coconuts, oranges, bananas, lemons and ginger to make tea then we got some more noodle soup. I felt like crap all day. I sat around in bed watching movies and eating all kinds of tropical fruit. I made lemon and ginger tea with my camping stove.

Then she picked me up at 730 and we went out for more noodle soup, this time with chicken!! Then more coconuts and she dropped me off. I am so grateful for her picking me up and bringing me around. I got some denatured alcohol today to make tea on my camping stove. I started making tea and after I lit the stove I dropped the big bottle of alcohol and it went all over the walls and floor. I picked it up and dropped it again, spilling alcohol all over my hand. So now theres flames all over the walls, the flames are over a foot high on the floor and my hand is on fire. Adrenaline is rushing through my entire body, my pupils totally dilated. I try blowing on the flames but that just

spreads them, I think back to my military training (third grade) and remember gas fire needs to be smothered, so after slapping myself with my hand to put it out, I grab the sweet denim long sleeve shirt I bought a few days earlier for my ride to Pai and start slapping at the flames, at first it does nothing but piss them off, then I throw the whole jacket down on the flames, this seems to work so I move to the walls and I finally extinguish all the flames. A plastic bag on the shelf caught on fire and was dripping gooey globs of flaming plastic onto the floor. Oh man I thought the guesthouse was going to burn down. There wasn’t any burn marks anywhere surprisingly. Only the alcohol was burning not the walls or the tile floor. Whoa! That was a crazy adventure. My hand has 2nd degree burns on it and the blistering has already started. Whoaaa buddy. I am just grateful I didn’t burn the place down.

It is 1030 Friday morning, I just made coffee on my stove in a very mindful manner. I will only learn that lesson once (I hope). My cold feels a little better. I will pack up and hit the road, heading to a town called Wang Chin today, we will see what happenes on this adventure.

2 comments:

  1. Sounds like your having a blast Tim. I wish you continued luck on your adventures.

    Also, is that camping stove made from a Yuengling can?

    -Jesse Watkins

    ReplyDelete
  2. omg. don't do that again!!! it's like a flambe.....

    ReplyDelete