North on the fourth

Getting to Mae Sai, the beginning of our ride we had to go back South 90 miles to Bangkok to catch a train. A pick up arrived at 4 AM so we could avoid rush-hour traffic in Bangkok and make our 12:30 train departure. We got to the depot with about three hours to spare. Fortunately we had the extra time because symptoms of food poisoning set in. A quick trip to the ER and three prescriptions stopped the downward spiral. My total bill for the visit and prescriptions was under $20. 

When I got back to the train depot I noticed there were some students from the barber college giving free haircuts. The woman who appeared to be the supervisor assigned me a student. It all started out okay. Once we agreed to the number shoe I would like on the clipper and she started cutting. Her first cut was up one sideburn and across the top of my head and down the other sideburn. The die had been cast. I was going skin head. Maybe she mistook me for a Buddhist monk because that is the haircut I got. 

The train ride to Chiang Mai took over 17 hours. Fortunately we were able to get a sleeper car and had reasonably comfortable beds. There is something about the combination of a rocking train, jetlag and a body recovering from food poisoning that makes sleep easy to come by so I was able to sleep most of the trip. 

Chiang Mai is an old city dating back to 1296 and draws tourists from all over the world. One attraction is it's silk cloth industry. The plant we toured had a very nice display of the process from worm to loom. The process gets interesting when a worker pulls the silk thread out of the cocoon and winds it onto a bobbin. 

A few steps later the thread is made into cloth on a loom. The loom operator must coordinate both feet and hands to make the cloth. The process can only be described as brain damaging boredom and she makes about a dollar per yard.