Every week is full of blogable moments.  I think every life is, too.  But sometimes we don’t recognize what the blogable moments are.  They aren’t generally things like “I ate a Big Mac and then went to the store to buy nail polish” although there are occasions when those moments are blogable.  The best blogable moments are the ones that provoke reflection, even just briefly.  It is within those moments of reflection that we can glimpse who we are inside, seeing our essence.

It is within those moments of reflection that we discover that our essence really isn’t any different from the essence of anyone else: we all want the same things and emanate the same feelings, just in different packaging.  Sure, our insecurities and ignorance can lead to coating ourselves in vitriol or banality, but that doesn’t change the commonality among each of us.

(philosophy lesson over)

Sunday morning Markus and I saddled up again for another ride, starting at the early hour of 6:30.  We drove north on the tollway past the old Don Meaung Airport, Rangsit Mall, and Thammasat University Rangsit campus, and wound up in a country road along some khlong, a stone’s throw away from a mega-wat that is similar (and similarly controversial) to the “Mega-Churches” you see sprouting in mid-American suburbs. 

Left: Markus in front of the now-closed Museum of Agriculture opened for His Majesty’s 50th Anniversary on the Throne, ten years ago.

The campus of this wat is a huge construction zone the results of which will be something akin to a convention center cum meditation retreat cum amusement park.  Size?  I’m not kidding when I tell you the main building appears to be about four times the footprint of Moscone Center in San Francisco.  It is really, really large.

Instead of trying to find a place to park at the mega-wat, we crossed the road to a hugely modest wat that has just a single ordination hall which appears to be in a half-finished state.  Or maybe it is in the midst of one of those never-ending remodels?  Preparations were underway by a group of university students for some event, with food being chopped, peeled, sliced and diced.  After confirming that it was okay to park there while we rode (I have yet to have someone at a wat say it isn’t okay) we started riding up the small road that parallels the khlong. 

Not too far away we came across a tiny village – two dozen houses – that were setting up a large tent across the road and arranging tables and chairs.  Already a speaker system was pumping out the popular Issan tunes (think country and western by way of Northeast Thailand) and the village drunk, reeking of cheap beer well before eight in the morning, stopped us to ask where we were going.

Which was a bit of a challenge to my Thai because I didn’t know quite how to explain that we weren’t particularly going anywhere.  We were just going.  Finally, I said, “bai, ma, bai, ma.”  (Roughly, there and back, there and back) and thanked him as we continued on.

We passed one community after another, this one Buddhist, that one Muslim.  Friendly people smiled, some saying hello and others waiting until we said sawatdii khrap first before responding in kind.  Traffic was light, rice paddies were green, and the weather was blissfully cool.

Above: The Thai version of “Field of Dreams”

Straying from the paved road we took what looked to be a disused road, the pavement of which became increasingly deteriorated until it gave out altogether and we found ourselves in a cul-de-sac of fields and nothing more than intuition and the sun’s location to give us an idea of where to continue.  In the distance, a slow moving tractor was coming towards us, inching along the edge of a rather stagnant-looking body of water.

Figuring that at this early hour he must be coming from somewhere civilized rather than going to it – especially since there was little civilization the direction we had pedaled from – we decided to follow his tracks in reverse.  Eventually we found another road and made our way back to the wat.

Right: A local tractor – definitely front-wheel drive!  Notice the umbrella over the driver that can be opened to keep the sun off him.  No risk of it being blown away as this baby zips down the road!

On the way home at a tollbooth just one exit away from our destination, a police officer pulled me over and explained in really broken English that we weren’t allowed to carry bicycles on a rack on a car on the tollway.  I started out following widely-held expat advice that you shouldn’t let on to whether or not (or how much) Thai you can speak, but our communication was so broken-down that I finally started speaking some Thai while Markus called Tawn on the phone.

Tawn spoke with the officer for about five minutes and by the end of it, it was clear the officer had been solidly beaten down.  Tawn’s argument, while acknowledging that the law is the law and we are subject to it whether or not we know what the law is, is that we had already been traveling on the tollway and had gone through multiple toll gates.  At any one of those, the toll booth workers should have refused admission if we were driving an unsafe vehicle.  By allowing us to enter or proceed, Tawn argued, they had given tacit approval.

Another officer, this one a little more fluent in English, came over and talked with us.  He was very friendly but explained that a bicycle rack was dangerous (but the incredibly overloaded pickup trucks and trucks with passengers sitting loose in the cargo area are, apparently, not dangerous).  I explained (er, lied) that we had asked a police officer from the Lumpini station and he had told us the rack was safe.

In either case, we were let off with a warning, no bribe paid, as we promised to take the very next exit and get off the expressway.  Which, fortunately, was the exit we wanted to take anyhow.

So I now have two incursions with the police under my belt and no bribes paid so far.