Thailand Highlights: Part #5

The last of my Thailand highlights is titled, "Our Hogs". There are many more things that I could write about Thailand, but I don't really have time to write about every single thing we did in Thailand. If you have any other questions feel free to email me. Anyways the title "Our Hogs" came from our last full day in Chiang Mai. Eric, one of the other interns, was walking by a little motorbike store and saw that you could rent motorbikes for 24 hours for 150 baht. 150 baht is about $5. At first the whole group wasn't going to rent them because of safety issues and so on, but after everyone cruised on Eric's hog for a little while, we all decided that it seemed like a lot of fun. So we all went and rented motorbikes. All we had to do was pay the 150 baht and that was pretty much it. The guy gave us a little instruction on how to drive it, but not much really. In Thailand or at least in Chiang Mai, most of the streets are one way and so there isn't too much worry about the whole left side of the street thing. After we rented our hogs we began our first little cruise of what Nate calls, "Malachi Biker Gang Part 2".

It was so much fun. We were on 100cc, but you could easily get it going about 90 to 100 km/h on the straight aways. At first we were a little worried about the speed limit, but we soon learned that there wasn't really a speed limit. In Chiang Mai, there is a part of the city (where our hotel was) that used to be an old castle or whatever and so there is a moat going around the downtown area. This moat served as our little racetrack that we zoomed around probably 50 or so times. We had a lot of fun going to and from the massage places on our hogs and feeling like a local Thai person while driving around our little motorbikes. Nate always referred to our motorbikes as "Our hogs." Normally he would warm up "his hog" with some vrooom vrooom and then we would all start laughing. (Well I did at least. I thought it was funny that he always talked about our hogs as our hogs when they are so wimpy in the motorcycle world. It was a lot of fun though.)

On our last day we took a tour of some of the local temples and got to ride our hogs up and down the mountain. That was a special treat for us because we were actually going somewhere and not just going around in one giant square. We had a lot of fun going to the night market as a biker gang and everything. When we filled up at the gas station (for about $1.25) Nate and I both decided that $7.50 was well worth the 24 hours of fun. I hope you enjoy our biker gang pictures. We are one mean bunch of bikers. Oh, the picture of the two bikes with three people on each bike is our impersonation of how the Thai ride. We didn't ride like that at all. It was pretty crazy sometimes because we would see a little kid in front, a parent driving, then another little kid, and then another parent. Four people on a bike is pretty crazy. As you can see we could barely fit three.