Adventures!

OK, minor adventures. We decided to go for a drive down a road that leads out of town to see what we could see. We took Thanon Samranreun (click here for maps) north figuring we'd stop at some wats (temples) along the way. It was a holiday for the King's birthday, so the streets were fairly empty and a lot of businesses were closed. Of course, once we were sufficiently far from home we got a flat tire. Haha. We walked the motorbike down to an auto shop. They couldn't fix it for us but pumped it with air and sent us down the road to a bike repair shop. When we got there we found it impossible to explain that the tire was flat and that it needed to be fixed (the poor guys there clearly thought we were nuts). They kindly pumped a bit of air in both tires and oiled the chain. We had exhausted our miming abilities and decided to just drive around until it was flat again, which only took another 20 minutes.

All was well though, with the Nan river to our right and the train tracks to our left the route was rather picturesque. We eventually came upon a huge golf course and what was apparently a military site of some sort before turning back for the day. We stopped at two of the four wats we spied, enjoying being the only visitors that day. I'm not sure the names of the temples, will try to find out this week. Pics below:

Starfruit trees outside the walls.

Old-looking wats are the coolest!

If you peruse my Flickr pages you can see I'm obsessed with wat roof spires.

Nagas guarding one of the entrances.