Roughly 4 hours and 165 beautiful kilometers of driving later, we are now in Mae Hong Son, and have all fallen in love with the city and want to move here. Many of the guesthouses were booked up with the ongoing Chinese New Year mayhem, but we lucked out and were able to find a place where we could cram our 7 people into 3 rooms. We are staying at the Lakeside guesthouse, and the view from our back window of the Burmese style temples across the small lake is stupendous! I am sharing a room for the second night in a row with Zack and Marian - a Candian dude we met at Crazy Horse, and of course my German roommate for the previous week. Last night we had a queen and a single bed, the room tonight only has a king. It's getting cozy up in here! 

Wat Phrathat Doi Kongmu:
Wats at the top of hills and mountains seem to be the most desirable to get to. Noticing a glint up on the hilltop near the sky, I see the shiny gold of a chedi glistening in the sun, or illuminated at night, and it becomes a destination with an unknown path, and a glistening gold prize at the climax of the journey! So we set out in the morning and found the old stairs that walked us half of the way to our mountain pagoda, then followed the windy over-grown dirt trail that leads us to the new path - a pristine tile walkway that we later find brings you from the top to the bottom in maximum hiking comfort. It felt great to hike a little, and not think about riding hundreds of kilometers on a motorbike! 

Nong Chong Kham Public Park:
Returning to our guesthouse after walking around the city for the past couple hours, we decide to take our activities to the fantastic park located out of the back gate of our "lakeside" guesthouse. A slackline - first 25ft, then 60ft long - a Ukulele, a sand-filled shaker egg, and Maddie's melodic voice began our backyard jam with soulful music and acrobatics, both on the line and off. We were first befriended by a Thai father who gazed curiously at us using the slacklining, and soon gifted us a bottle of his homemade Lao lao, a form of flavourful moonshine common in more rural parts of South East Asia, especially Thailand and Laos. Shortly after, we befriended a Thai fisherman who spoke in a thick Isan (Northern) accent who had just caught 3 fish in the lake - a lake where sometimes the fish swim belly up - and proceeded to help us drink up the recently gifted lao lao. He was very thirsty. At dark, I tore down my slackline, and saw Zack playing soccer with a local father and his two 10ish year old kids. One of them had just succeeded in getting the ball through the goal post past Zack, and I, thinking I was helping went to boot it back in their direction. My kick was a terrible one, and it veered hard left, bounced, bounced, bounced, and found its way into the lake where the fish sometimes swim belly up. Running to the edge of the lake, the ball was too far to reach by hand. I ran and grabbed the fishermans bamboo net, but it was too late. Someone in a neighboring house said they had a long bamboo pole, so we grabbed the 15ft long, 25lb pole, and ran to the fence bordering the lake. We were 5 feet shy of the ball, and it was drifting further away from us! I tried to offer the dad money to buy another one, but he refused and said it wasn't to worry about, and that this had happened a few times before. He may have just been acting polite, and I continued to feel terrible about my blunder. To make a long story short, some turbines started up in the lake, and suddenly the ball changed course, and within twenty minutes, we were able to fish it out with the long bamboo pole.  At this point it was time to celebrate with half a dozen different foods at the low priced night market surrounding half of the lake on Pradit Chong Kham Alley.