1. Selfie sticks are awesome. No, really.

Turns out there is a practical (and totally cool!) application for the reviled selfie stick. Okay, totally cool might depend a bit on your perspective, but how would I have all these awesome moped selfies to share with you without the selfie stick? I wouldn’t, and that would be a shame. It’s true that tourists in Southeast Asia seem to take the selfie stick usage to inappropriate extremes, but there are some times when this thing is invaluable. One of those times is when you’re on a moped. The other, of course, is whenever there are elephants.

2. 25 mph is a great speed to see the world.

It turns out that when you put two people on a 110 cc motor scooter you really can’t go very fast. I’m going to guess we topped out at 45 mph, if that (our speedometer didn’t work, naturally). And we went uphill slow enough to be outstripped by the local butterfly population. In fact, on steeper hills, it sometimes seemed like the person on the back should prepare to jump off and jog, although it never quite came to that. But this made me realize something — we drive too fast. And when we aren’t driving, we’re flying and that’s way too fast. We miss so much.

Sitting on the back of the motor scooter, puttering through small towns in the country side around Chiang Mai, I felt like I really saw it. I really saw Thailand. I saw rickshaw food carts clattering along at five mph, I saw warehouses selling hundreds of golden Buddhas of all different sizes, I saw restaurant stalls hawking fried crickets and chicken legs, I saw shrines with open bottles of fizzy red soda left out for the spirits, I saw water buffalo and flower gardens and banana trees — I really, really saw it. While I don’t claim to understand Thailand, by any means, I do feel like I saw something real. It’s hard to get beyond the surface in a two week trip, but going slow is a good start.

3. The journey is more important than the destination.

Cliche, but true. And something you definitely realize when you can’t go very fast anyway. Macky and I drove out to a waterfall a ways outside of Chiang Mai the other day, and while the waterfall was cool, the drive out there was even better. It was WAY out there, on a road with potholes and ruts twice the size of our little scooter. We stopped for noodle bowls ($1), we took pictures of banana trees, we dodged giant potholes and we thoroughly enjoyed every minute of our day. I think we’re all guilty of doing the travel checklist thing…you know, the whole “I have to see these ten things and do these ten things.” Sometimes we do this to the extent where we kind of forget the whole point of traveling, which is to, you know, experience new things. Not whizz through them to the next thing. Not cross them off the list. Experience them.

4. I can do this. And that means I can do other things too.

I can actually freaking do this. I can drive a dinky little moped through traffic in one of Thailand’s bigger cities without killing myself or anyone else, or, for that matter, without even really scaring anyone that badly. Our first few days in Chiang Mai were spent whizzing around in the back of a taxi truck, watching the traffic converge around us, horns blaring, brakes screeching, a tuk tuk here, a tuk tuk there, here a tuk, there a tuk, everywhere a tuk tuk. I looked at these people on motorcycles, especially the ones balancing multiple toddlers on their lap, and thought, these people are CRAZY.

And then we rented our own motorbike, and frankly, it wasn’t that bad. While the traffic is insane, nobody is going THAT fast (they physically can’t). Don’t get me wrong — driving a moped here is not safe per se, but it is completely within my skill set to do. The whole “doing things I thought I couldn’t do” has become a bit of a theme on this blog (see this post, and this one), as well as in my life. This past year I have realized that I have imposed a lot of limits on myself. Ask me what I’m “bad at” and I could give you a list twenty pages long — singing, playing musical instruments, push-ups, ball sports, keeping plants alive, rock climbing, dancing, math, drawing, doing the software updates on my computer, etc. But recently I’ve been forcing myself to think about this — WHY do I say I’m bad at these things when I’ve put zero effort into trying to be good at them? Why do I immediately assume I can’t do things if they don’t come to me naturally? If I can ride a moped through rush hour traffic in Chiang Mai, shouldn’t I be able to, with practice and effort, sing a damn harmony line? I mean, how hard can it be?

I’ve taken this to heart when crafting my New Years resolutions, so I’ve included previously considered impossible tasks, like “do a pull up” and “back up computer regularly.” I did, however, remove “get good at yoga” because it’s been on the list for four years and let’s be real, some things are just never going to happen.