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travel diary – day 110

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day 106 – ryan and i took the bike and went into town. today was the only bad day during my stay at chiang mai. ryan and i had gone out on his bike again. we were going to buy my train ticket to bangkok and get the second hard drive for backing up my hyperdrive. on our way into town, police pulled us over (they were pulling over a lot of people on motorcycles) and we got a ticket. even though we were wearing helmets, the police ticketed ryan’s bike for not being registered … an $80 fine, damnit!

after ryan walked to the police station to pay the fine, i got angry at the policeman. he was just standing there being a dickhead, rather than pulling over thai drivers who were not wearing helmets. he yelled back at me, in thai, and stomped off. i probably shouldn’t have go angry … i probably could have made things worse!! lol

we continued on our way and headed to the train station. i bought my ticket to bangkok and then we went to the mall so that i could get a new hard drive for my hyperdrive (160gb) and a copy of photoshop elements 7. i konw it sounds like i’ve been buying a lot of hard drives, but it actually works out well enough – my hyperdrive has an 80gb hard drive inside. i backed it up and took the hard drive out. the hard drive was put into storage at ryan’s house. i replaced it with the 160gb hard drive. the freeagent 500gb is my backup drive, which comes with me everywhere. so it means that i have at least two copies of all photos. when i get back to australia in october, i’ll back up the hard drive again (leaving a backup with craig).

day 107 – today was another quiet day. it’s been raining a lot, so i spent the day inside editing photos and playing chess with ryan.

day 108 – today is my last day in chiang mai. i finished editing my nepal photos, meaning that all my editing is now up to date. i pulled my bag apart and sorted through everything. ryan agreed to keep some of my stuff in storage, so i am leaving a bag behind at his house. the northface waterproof bag that i bought in nepal is now filled with winter clothes, my chess set, my backup hard drive and a few other things. when i finish traveling, ryan will send it to me.

for dinner we went to a really good mexican restaurant. the food was fantastic and the portions were huge. we drank margaritas and had a good time. afterwards, we stopped at the ice cream shop again … pineapple and passionfruit smoothies are almost impossible to resist!!

day 109 - i woke up and finished packing my bag. ryan and boom were busy, so the schedule was thrown into complete disarray. boom couldn’t get back to the house, which meant she couldn’t give me a ride to the station. i got a pickup taxi into town and waited for my train. i bought some snacks, boarded the train and watched movies on my ipod until i fell asleep.

day 110 – i arrived in bangkok at 7.15 am. the train north had been two hours late, but the return train was only 15 minutes late. nice!! so i got a cab and headed straight to my hotel. after dropping off my bags, i checked my email and looked up the embassy’s website to find out what time they opened. they’d opened at 8.30 am, so i went straight there and picked up my new passport.

my new passport is pretty spiffy. it’s got a chip in it (which i hate, cause they’re not secure). it’s 64 pages and each page has a different picture on it (pretty). the whole passport design has been changed and, actually, the passport looks really good. the girl at the embassy told me it was a brand new design and had only been out for a month … i was one of the first to get the new passports. yay!!

after leaving the embassy i made a dash to southern bangkok to see a small company about my tripod. the top plate on my tripod (which is used to connect the ball head) broke during the flight from myanmar to thailand. the company i visited is a distributor for the tripod, so i was able to get a replacement. they charged me for the plate (bastards) but i was happy to be able to use my tripod again.

i was having an uber-productive day, so i kept up the productivity by buying my bus ticket to poipet (the border crossing point with cambodia), and i bought another book to read. the new book is called ‘the messenger’ by markus zusak. he’s an australian author and the book is set in australia. zusak won a bunch of awards for his previous book ‘the book thief’ (which i haven’t read).

happy to have an australian book, i went to a cafe to read it. later in the evening i met ploy and her friend for dinner (shinya was in indonesia). then i went back to my room, read some more of my book, and went to sleep.


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