We stayed at a place recommended by one of Patrick's colleagues, a guy who knows Thailand well. It's called "At Niman" -- a small, very new boutique bed-&-breakfast type place, like nothing we'd seen before. The best way to describe its style is "Morocco meets Tibet in the hills of Thailand." It had a really cool layout, complete with a courtyard area, a pool, and an interesting owner who has spent his life collecting the stuff that filled it.
We'd been to Chiang Mai once before on a short vacation from Bangladesh, but we weren't just returning to a favorite spot. We had a special mission for this trip. One day last August, while sitting in Bangkok's infamous rush hour traffic, we started talking about how quickly the motorcycles and scooters can dash through traffic while the rest of us sit in gridlock. Clearly a scooter could have a practical place in our life here.
Patrick started looking around at modern scooters, but Jennifer had a better idea. She said, "For as long as I've known you -- longer, actually -- you have wanted a vintage Vespa. Why not get one now? I'm sure there's got to be someone around here who sells them." Well, Patrick didn't need much convincing after that, and got on the Internet to do some research.
There are, in fact, lots of vintage Vespas in southeast Asia. The problem is that many of the people who "restore" them do a terrible job. In fact, in the Vespa community, "Viet bodge" (i.e., a badly-restored scooter from Vietnam) is about the worst thing one can say about someone's vintage scooter. So we knew we had to be careful.
One of Patrick's colleagues, Apple, was a great help in the beginning. Her brother is a Vespa enthusiast, and one evening he and a friend of his brought by an early 1970s Vespa for Patrick to practice on. After tooling around in the parking garage and the quieter streets of our neighborhood, Patrick was convinced that a well-restored vintage Vespa was the way to go.
Eventually, Patrick found help through an Internet bulletin board dedicated to vintage scooters. One subscriber to the bulletin board put Patrick in touch with an American guy named Chad. Chad was teaching English in a city in northern Thailand and had just done six months of research on buying a scooter in Asia. The shop he settled on was in Chiang Mai. Patrick had a couple of phone conversations with Chad and decided that the one-hour flight north was worth it to check out Chad's find.
In Chiang Mai, we met Khun Suchart. His shop, just outside of downtown Chiang Mai, is chock-full of fabulous vintage Vespas. The prize of his collection was a stock 1965 Sprint, with the original engine and odometer. Although Patrick was still very much a novice rider at that point, Suchart let him take it out for a spin.
So in the end, we had Suchart do a custom rebuild for us. After a couple of months, a truck drove up to our apartment building in Bangkok with this in the back:
We've named it Pistacchio -- or Stache, for short. We've been travelling almost constantly since it showed up, so we've only been able to take it out a couple of times on the weekend. However, we are happy to report that it runs like a dream (notwithstanding driver error!). Apple's brother came by one evening to test-drive Stache and was extremely impressed. So every time we jump on, we have Chad and Suchart to thank for setting us up with a great ride!
Action photos will follow in the next few weeks, so stay tuned!
