Day: The Eleventh

Last full day with April, and we decide to ride to the top of the mountain that the monsoon drove us off a few days earlier. Its a really great ride, all bends and uphill, good surface and side except for the last 10km when the road is strictly one lane and even bikes have to get right over to let another pass. April is riding really well, with growing confidence and getting much better at picking her line through the corners.

Last time we came up here it was a Buddhist holiday festival. The place was a seething mass of the faithful, buses cars, bikes everywhere. Today there is hardly anyone and most of the stalls near the temple are shuttered. We forgot to gas up before leaving the city, so we make a stop at the shops here where last time we saw a petrol seller. I ask at a shop where they say they can sell us fuel. The lady disappears for ages. In the meantime April finds the sand we saw the day before, bottles of petrol for B40. Eventually the lady comes back with two bottles she probably syphoned out of a car, and say B50. No, we say and move to type other stand. Its not until we gas up later that day and pay B42 at the pump that we realise that the bottles of fuel that the guy had for B40 were small.... Sorry lady!

We get to the point we reached last time, and ended up waiting in the rain for an hour. This time we carry on and sure enough just a couple of km further on the visitors centre and coffee appear. Still, the little hit we stopped in last time was a good place to watch a monsoonal rain storm from and we did meet a nice Thai couple there.

We spy a dirt track leading uphill from the car park, and decide to see if we can ride any higher. The dirt quickly turns to smooth clay and the grade gets steeper. April in front comes to a halt through lack of traction, and as I am too close and the surface is too slippery to stop I try to keep going. I get about 4m more and even though my back wheel is turning, we slither backwards. I pull the bike around to try to avoid running into April, and see she has stepped away from her bike as it had decided to have a wee "rest".  Lots of laughter and a photo opportunity. The smallest of grazes on Aprils shin. It turned out the track was to some Hill Tribe peoples settlement, so it probably was better that we didn't suddenly appear in the middle of their lunch time. We took some photos for Kiwi Rider magazine, and hope to get into their small regular feature entitled "They're  Reading Our Magazine Where?".

A fab ride back down and Google maps on a smart phone does a pretty good job of getting us and the bikes back to Tonys Big Bikes. Its in the Old City, do the streets are narrow. At one stage we are stopped by a man with a whistle. These guys are employed by hotels and big businesses to step out into the busy traffic to let vehicles get out. This time its for a huge tour bus that is trying to back out of an even smaller alley. The bus is so tall and the roads so narrow that they need someone on each corner giving directions. It even had the overhead power lines twanging. Eventually it makes forward progress, and April, exercising her newfound traffic filtering skills, manages to slip through a "wafer thin gap".

We are welcomed back at Tonys by a nice Englishman called Jeff who is Tonys partner. We lets us off a few hours late fee, mainly because we had brought the bikes back full of gas, when they had been a bit low when we picked them up. He very kindly overlooked the mud from our motocrossing. A tuktuk ride took took (sorry) us back to the markets. I bought Lee her main present from an antique shop run by some Karin people. April replace her Rayban glasses that she ran over yesterday and we go home to rest before going out for a final night celebration dinner.

We find a nice restaurant that has everything on their menu that we are looking for and order. April, as usual, shows them the card she carries explaining about her allergy to seafood. They nod and say they understand, but later that night the poor wee darling spends three hours "calling for Ralph" into her hand basin. It was no use calling for Dad, he was coma'ed out, and wouldn't wake up. Sorry, darling.