Thanksgiving in Phayao

Barbara booked us two nights over Thanksgiving at the Naga Tara resort in Phayao. Jason rode down and joined us. Highway 118 has a lot of construction on it, so we doubled our ride time by cutting down on riding through construction. This was Barbara's longest ride to date. The weather was perfect.

We rode through coffee growing regions and hill tribes with many, many coffee shops.

We had a lunch stop and got to the resort about 3pm. In time to enjoy the sunset and our new cat friend.

The resort served a huge "American" breakfast. We commented to the manager about the size, but he said he gets complaints from Thai tourists if he calls it an American breakfast and it isn't huge. It's our reputation in the world.

Jason picked out a couple of local attractions including a hanging rock and well number 12, whatever that is (turned out to be a spring). Barbara and I walked a while and enjoyed the great weather and good views. It turned out THE hanging rock was quite a bit further over some sketchy walking so we sent Jason ahead and settled for A hanging rock.

When we got back we had a beer in the old downtown strip. Jason hit the pool after that, but it was pretty cold and Barbara and I declined. After another spectacular sunset it was time for a Thanksgiving feast other than Starbucks coffee and Pringle knock offs.

Our second beautiful sunset at the Naga Tara Resort

We had dinner at the "so good" restaurant on the water. It lived up to its name. Every dish was amazing. They seemed to feature deep fried food and did it very well. We had stir friend rice with crab, deep fried soft shell crab, deep fried Som Tam (papaya salad), deep fried calamari and stir fried vegetables.

Friday morning we headed back. The first stop was the Tan Tong Waterfall, just off of 120.

We found this really nice coffee shop in Wang Nuea. This is the town where our route with Jason diverged and so we said goodbye to Jason. The ice cream cake was really a treat.

I noticed that the navigation said there was a route through the Chaesson National Park that was only 5 minutes longer than our route. The ride up to and through the park was beautiful. We saw coffee beans, wild poinsettias and a rather large snake on the road.

There were many beautiful scenic views on the drive, but we'll never do it again. It got incredibly steep and I ended up boiling the front brake fluid. Luckily we were only about 300 meters from a big Thai Tourist attraction, the Mae Kampong waterfall. The crowd there took control and sent someone to get a pickup to rescue us. We had a pleasant place to wait and yummy cricket chips to eat while we waited for a lift down to San Kaempheng. It certainly could have been much worse. After the truck took us the rest of the way down the mountain to a bike repair shop, the brakes were completely cooled and were fully recovered. I'll change out the brake fluid anyway before the next trip.