Motorbiking On Doi Suthep Mountain...This was quite a day! We both jumped on this little motor bike to take a scenic drive up this, the closest and tallest mountain near Chiang Mai city. There is a very nice temple halfway up, which had been our destination. It was a very smoothly paved road, but very windy as it climbed, and on the final curve before the temple, we skidded out... our tire had totally gone flat and we almost ate it bad! We were lucky to keep control. We were also lucky in the fact that in less than 5 minutes we were sitting down drinking a cold water while someone patched the already previously patched tire on our rental bike. It was the first business or home of any kind for 15 miles! With our tire fixed and our nerves recovered we decided to keep going up the mountain. We didn't stop at the temple due to the crowd. We did not know what we would find. There was a royal palace a bit furthur beyond the temple, but it did not seem very interesting, so we kept going up. The trees at this point changed from tropical to more evergreen trees, and the temperature dropped drastically. Paved road eventually gave way to dirt and we found ourselves at the top of the mountain! After a quick stop here, rather than turning around, we kept going down a very rapidly deteriorating dirt road. We were way out of our league on the dinky motorbike, but through the expert driving skills of Fish we did eventually make it. We found a cool coffee plantation and ran across a Hmong village on our explorations. We came down the mountain at a sweet little lake outside of Chiang Mai town. It was an insane tour through the hill country of Northern Thailand, but we made it safe and relatively unscathed, and back to town in time for the big Sunday Market on Ratchadamnoen Avenue!
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