Thailand - Page 2

Our plan was to spend a couple of days in Bangkok to initiate the paperwork for our marriage certificate at the US Embassy and wait for Shannon - Lisa's maid of honor and my best man - to arrive a day behind us. From Bangkok we were going to take a train to Chaing Mai in the north where the wedding ceremony would take place. Shannon came just for the wedding and would be leaving us in only 5 days.

The train ride to Chiang Mai was perfect. It was comfortable, easy to get around, the food wasn't bad and we could easily load the bike into the cargo car. The tickets cost less than $30 each. The train was scheduled to leave Bangkok at 6:00 pm and arrive in Chiang Mai at 6:00 am. Due to some delay in the middle of the evening, we didn't arrive until 11:00 am which was no problem for us since we had no real plan for an early morning in a new town.

For some as yet unknown reason when we arrived in Chiang Mai, we arrived without the useful parts of our brains. We rationalized that the easiest way to get from the train station to the hotel/guesthouse area was for me to ride the tandem solo while Lisa and Shannon took a taxi. We looked at the map and decided on a meeting place - the "main square". We left at the same time. 2 hours later, after riding around the inside of Chiang Mai's moat 4 times, I finally saw Shannon sitting under a tree looking moderately irritated. Lisa had taken off on foot to find me. We all got lost at about the same point in the city and we all took some very convoluted paths to arrive at what the map called the "main square". When asked, nobody had ever heard of the main square nor did anyone have a clue how to translate it. A needle in the haystack of 160,000 people.

When Lisa returned from her search, we decided that she and Shannon should find a guesthouse. I waited under a tree for an hour and a half before they returned. I was tired, cranky, hungry and ready to take a jet lag nap. We pushed the loaded bike in the direction of the guesthouse and promptly got a pinch-flat when the tire compressed going over a curb. We changed the tube and got back on our way finally arriving at the guesthouse 6 hours after we left the train station.

Chiang mai is a very old city with a flood of new buildings, restaurants, hotels and tourist shops. The "old city" (what is now the tourist attraction part of town) is surrounded by a moat that once protected the city from invasion. Mountains to the north and west give a grand sense of scale. In Chiang mai, the old and new mingle like a beaded piece of string in a backpacker's nappy dreadlocks. It felt like a wonderful place to be married.

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