Motorcycle Road Trip # 1

I am the proud new co-owner of a Honda Phantom!!!! Spencer and I finally broke down and bought a motorcycle - getting tired of buses and taxis and waiting waiting waiting. Unfortunetly, we have been having camera issues, so this is a picture of a similar bike, but not ours - ours is cowboy brown, 4 years old, and still has the stickers from the previous owner, who was a Thai cop - might come in handy in parking situations - ha ha. It is 200 cc, which is huge for Thai standards.

Last weekend we went on a road trip to test the bike out - up to Phimai, a tiny town surrounding 1000 year old Khmer ruins. The ruins are very similar to Angkor Wat in Cambodia except smaller and 100 years older.

There was a Buddhist festival going on around the ruins - hundreds of people, many of them monks, sitting around a big square with people chanting over the loudspeakers. Almost everyone had a string tied around their heads, then tied to someone else, then someone else, everyone interconnected. The strings were strung all through the temple. Some type of educational celebration, but nobody could really tell us what was going on. We also spent a bit of time in my favorite National Park, Khao Yai - checked out the monkeys and took a little hike. The bike worked great and we had beautiful weather.

This picture is from when Chelsea came to visit - hanging out at the Night Market Beer Garden. Beer here comes in a tower...This was about 2 weeks before the Thai police defused a bomb here on New Years Eve.

This is a monitor lizard, related to the komodo dragon, which we spotted by the Night Market.