#2: [06-Apr-09]

14-Feb-2002 -- Continued from 17°N 104°E.

Staying only about 80km from this one and with the previous days experience we were hoping for another day with two successful visits. From Kalasin we drove on road 214 and 23 to within 5km of the confluence, just like the map had indicated. Now we needed another road to appear and indeed we were lucky again! We turned into a small paved road and drove to a small village about 1km from the confluence. After passing through the village the road took us further away from our goal, so we turned around and tried the road we had seen when passing the village temple (see picture). This road soon left the village, brought us into the fields and even turned toward the confluence.

We parked about 200m north of the confluence and 800m outside the village. As we were starting to walk over to the spot a farmer on a small motorcycle drove up. We obviously looked out of place and he seemed curious as to what we were up to. We explained that we wanted to take some pictures and asked whether that would be ok. He saw no problem with that and started to look around and point out potential objects for our photographs. A hay stack over here, pond over there; I could not help but get the feeling that he was making fun of us city people coming out here to take pictures of the ordinary.

We arrived at the confluence at 10 am (elevation: 458ft (140m), EPE: 0ft). It is located in a rice field, which was dry except for a muddy spot right where the GPS led us in search of the Zeros! A small dirt road a few meters south of the confluence led back to the village. On the other side of the road was another little pond. We also found a snake skin at the confluence and while we didn't know which kind of snake it belonged to, it reminded us to be careful when walking cross country as Thailand is home to some of the more venomous snakes around.

After another easy one we celebrated in the next bigger village with some taro ice cream and headed straight for 16°N 103°E.

Continued at 16°N 103°E.