5 weeks without flying - yes!

Kids, kids, I haven't ridden bikes as much in the past 30 years as I have in the last few weeks. First in the Seychelles, then in Bagan in Myanmar, and here in Thailand too. Now I can do it again: on bikes with and without gears, on ones that are way too small for me, and on ones that are a little too tall, on wobbly and crooked ones, on heavy and light ones.

The bike is our everyday means of transportation from temple to temple. For longer distances, we use buses, tuktuks, and Grab-Taxis (something like Uber in our country). We are now flying free for five weeks, and that's nice. The long flights and the eternal waiting at the air-conditioned and somehow isolated airports were quite annoying. Uzbekistan was the worst: in Tashkent, you don't even get anything to eat before checking in (unless you want a Snickers from the vending machine); after checking in, at the domestic flights terminal, you'll at least get Uzbek food, but at the international terminal, they serve burgers, and bad ones at that. That's when I appreciate the street stalls around the Thai bus stations or the night train from Bangkok to Chiang Mai, for which we only managed to get seats (because we wanted to be spontaneous and didn't book weeks in advance - that's what happens when you're like that), but on the other hand, flying vendors (both men and women) walk around with various delicacies.

It was on the train that we also discovered our Thai breakfast: after waking up, our neighbors unpacked a bamboo stick, peeled it like a banana, and ate the filling that was revealed. We had to try it too and went in search of it. We found it at the large market in Chiang Mai. Now we know that the filling consists of sticky rice, coconut, and sugar, often with dark beans and sometimes with sesame seeds (our favorite version), and it's grilled over charcoal. In addition, at least for us, there is always great fruit for breakfast: snake fruit (perhaps a bit too perfumed), longan, pineapple, bananas, dragon fruit (oh yes!), papaya (not quite our taste), sugar cane (or at least we think so), and finally, the incomparable jackfruit. The Thais can create a wonderfully fresh and (of course) spicy fruit salad from all these fruits, along with some vegetables and a marinade that includes fish sauce.