Thaton

In the morning we watched the adventure tourist crowd arrive for breakfast, with their cowboy hats on all ready for what their driver and guide would gently place in front of them for their pleasure. The breakfast was great, pancakes and scrambled egg on a buffet. The only limiting factor was that the cowboys looked to be ex-army. The food was nice but not worth getting into a fight over!
We hit the road to the smiles of the miriad hosts of the resort and being videoed by the cowboys' guide. They even had someone to take the record of the trip!
As with the day before the traffic on the road gradually decreased. We'd decided to make for a point on our map just to the North of Fang which stated there were hotsprings. From the turn off the road was lovely with almost no traffic for the next couple of kilometres. The road went through small villages with rice paddies and fields of onions, always with someone to wave and smile to us. At the entrance to the national park that contained the hot springs we passed a thermal power station. It wasn't high season for taking the waters as we were almost the only people around. By the time we got in it was the middle of the day and already pretty warm. Even so it was really nice to feel the thick mineral laden water on the skin. It would have been nice to lounge longer but the pools were in the plane sun and the skin out of the water would have been fried as that in the water would have been boiled.
Another couple of kilometers up the road and we arrived at our destination, the point where the boats to Chiang Mai left from. We'd been hoping to get a public service boat in the morning but found that the only one left at 12:30. The only other option was to get a charter. The latter turned out not to be much more expensive than going on a public boat and allowed us to go at our own pace and stop when we liked.
N20'03.628 E99'21.689
77.19km - 3 hr 57 min - avg 19.6km/hr