Phrae, Northern Thailand

I had planned to go to Phrae on Saturday, Dec 3. Phrae is the capitol city of the Phrae Province in Northern Thailand. Since this paast weekend was the Kings Birthday holiday weekend I asked the person here at Taicoon if she would call to make reservation for me. So I had a reservation for a room, but on Saturday all buses of all classes were full all day. I bought a ticket on the Green bus for the next day, no problem.

One of the reasons I wanted to go to Phrae on this weekend was because of a mini – marathon that I became aware of in a brochure at the Chiang Mai office of the Tourist Authority of Thailand (TAT). A mini marathon consists of a half marathon, a quarter marathon and a kids fun run. All the information as to place, time and registration etc was in Thai. I had translation enough to know registration was 10:00 to 17:00 Sunday and 4:00 to 5:00 AM on Monday with the Half starting at 5:30 in the morning on Monday. All I needed to do once arriving at Phrae was to find the registration place and the place for the start of the run. Well, it turned out that these were both out of town in another community about 5 km away. That doesn't sound like much but---the problem was there was no public or taxi transportation available at 4:00 in the morning. I didn't want to walk 5km before attempting to do 21.1 km; even if I could find the place by myself. It is doubtful I could find it as the next day I went for a run in the direction I thought I was supposed to go. Not.

Anyway, all for the best as my legs have been bothering me a bit the last little while, Probably the hurt results from a fair amount of air and bus travel in the last couple of weeks and running on concrete which I am not used to doing.

Phrae was once a centre for teak trade, but the teak has long since been deforested and all that remains are some houses constructed with teak lumber. These houses and the numerous Wats are about all the tourist attractions there are around here. Consequently no tourists. Especially of the pale face variety. There was a 20 something guy from Seattle staying at the hotel where I am staying and he is the only other Caucasian tourist I have seen and we ended up at the same eatery last night and he said I was the only one he had seen.

The hotel is the Tepwiman Hotel. Definitely rates 1/2 star. I got the name from some travel forum on line which only named this one and another nearby (which in fact was the one the taxi delivered me to from the bus station). Don't know quite why these hotels were singled out because I have seen others that no doubt are a bit better. Oh well such is life on the road.

Sunday nite was the 'walking street night'. That occurs on the first Sunday of each month when several blocks of Chareonmuang St (where the Tepwiman is located) is turned into an open air market. As it happened there was some kind of dance competition also; with what appeared to be high school age participants doing traditional Thai dance and modern shake your booty dance.

On Tuesday I came  back as far as Lampang and hten will go back to Chiang Mai today, Wednesday.