The Detour Continues

My two nights in Mae Hong Son were an interesting mix of riding a scooter over the hills to various natural attractions and trying to be polite to our host.  My traveling companion's friend lives in a cluttered home without furniture. He cleared a spot in the storage room for us to sleep, but without a fan or mosquito net we struggled to find the right balance between opening the window for relief from the stifling heat and avoiding being eaten alive.  Our host spends eight months per year in this strange little house and the other four working at a high end wilderness lodge in Alaska.  He had long before taken all of the chairs out of his home so that his one-year old child would not climb on them and then fall off.  He babbled inanely the whole time we were in his presence.  When we left and thanked him for his hospitality he told us without apparent irony, "Yeah, I wish there were more people in the world like me."


The next stop was another suggestion from my traveling companion.  After a three hour bus ride we found ourselves at another organic farm, this one run by a Thai owner who welcomes guests, for a small fee, to come and work as much as they like, use the kitchen to prepare communal meals and, if they are so inclined, build their own bamboo hut and stay for free thereafter for as long as they like.  The place attracts a wide variety of hippys and vagabonds and there were twenty guest from all over the world when we arived, the most veteran of the bunch having already stayed for eight months.  My companion and I worked hard for one day, took it easy the next, drank a lot of local rice whiskey while a guitar was passed around the campfire, and thoroughly enjoyed every minute of this odd little place. 

Today we took the advice of the vagabonds and decided to try hichhiking.  It took us fifteen minutes to be picked up by a truck driver who spoke no English but tried hard to make conversation anyway.  He drove us almost the full two and a half hours back to Chaing Mai, dropping us off just fifteen kilometers out of town.  Within five minutes of leaving the truck, a British expat picked us up in his SUV and drove us the rest of the way.