Me sitting in a bus coming down from a mountain in Chiang Rai.

It costs only 25 baht to get down from halfway down the mountain to Chiang Rai city, but for a city kid like me, the sights and experience of being in that relic is, in the words of the Mastercard Visa ad, priceless.

The bus

You really can't take the public transport here for granted. Miss one, you can go back for a meal, take a nap, hang out a bit, then come back out for the next bus. One day will probably go by just like that for the average citizen.

The drivers are a friendly lot though. They would slow down at villages and sound their horn to pick up the people. They would wait patiently for them to come to the bus and to secure their luggage before moving off. The passengers take care of one another, too. It took no campaigns, no reminders stuck on the insides of the bus. They give up seats to those who need them, like pregnant women, or women carrying young children. Some passengers just hung at the tail end of the bus, and went the whole way like that. Compare that to our 'educated' lot.

The scenery

Moving along the sides of mountains, what else should one expect besides other mountains? Coming from a cramp city like Singapore, however, the vastness and scale of the land just reorientates the mind to the actual enormity of Planet Earth, though... Ok, so this isn't Grand Canyon, but it was great to able to see a few kilometers ahead without any concrete jarring your view. The sky extended longer into the horizon, and the spirit gets lifted that much higher. Through the simplicity of the scenes of life that enters through your eyes, life itself takes on a somewhat unadultered quality of what it was originally meant to be. That there is beauty in the random orderliness of unengineered mountains and greenery.

And that was only bus ride...