Bengfort.com

Yesterday we biked from Danjia to the first bit of real civilization we’ve seen in four days, a county seat called Geng Ma. Geng Ma is populated mostly by the Dai people (derived from the Thai’s), and the name is a Mandarinized version of the local dialect which loosely translated means “a place arrived at by following a horse.” The ride was beautiful again, but there were patches of construction work and torn up road that proved to be arduous. However, the last 25 kilometers were blissfully paved, lined with flowers, trees and bamboo clusters, which made the final push rather pleasant. This is one of the nicest county seats I’ve ever been in. The town itself is relatively clean, the Dai people are colorfully dressed, the food is superb, and we found a very nice hotel that overlooks a pretty neat sugar factory. The boys are hoping to stop by the factory on our way out of town tomorrow, which would be fun. Yesterday we ate at an open air market, and had rice cooked in a clay pot over coals, which was accompanied by many small dishes of pickled vegetables, beans, garlic and pearl onions, and to which we added grill-roasted meat, eggplant, squash and tofu. It was a feast! We will probably go back again tonight, and I am on a mission to have some sticky rice, which I saw when we were eating at the market yesterday but was too full to get. I even purchased mangoes this afternoon in preparation to eat with my sticky rice. I’m looking forward to it!

On a side note, I am really tired today because last night I dreamed all night about running from and killing zombies. In an interesting twist, in my dream I could turn zombies back into regular people by spraying them in the face with this liquid solution, so I was running around with spray bottles in my hand, and at one point I was on top of a hill with a fire hose and making noises so all the zombies would run toward me and then I’d spray them with hose. Then, this morning Bethany tells me of the unfortunate behavior toward my kitty, who gets sprayed when he tries to enter my room by a guest. Was my dream some sort of weird premonition?