the eighth story

a longer story, today, but it's a good one. This is from a different trip to Thailand, though probably only a few miles from the other Thailand story.
Dustin and I were in Northern Thailand, and decided to rent a motorbike. We took it up the mountain to the temple we wanted to see, and on the way back down, decided to take a side trip to a waterfall mentioned in my guidebook. My guidebook was old, though, (from the first trip) and had already lead us astray several times, so all info from it was being taken as no more than a vague suggestion. The guidebook said the park the waterfall was in would cost about the equivalent of 20 bucks to enter, and that it closed at 5h30. We got to the park, and the gate was wide open, and the gatehouse unoccupied- further, it looked as though that gatehouse hadn't been opened in years. So, we continued on in, spent some time at the waterfall, and, when we were done, started back down.
The gate was closed, and really quite locked. I figured I had some cracker packets and a water bottle, and this was rather a nice spot, anyway, but Dustin was having none of it. The gate only went over the road- on one side there was a sharp cliff going up, on the other a 45 degree gravel covered embankment going down. He thought we could get the bike by on that side. The bike was not large- somewhat bigger than a vespa, not not even comparable to a Harley, and it didn't seem impossible. We got the bike down and in front of the gate, and started trying to get it back up. Dustin started sliding down the gravel. At that point, my goal, in total, was to make sure the bike didn't crush Dustin, and I ended up managing to hook myself to a tree and lock my arms around the bike. This stopped it, but we were MUCH further down the embankment, and had proven an inability to move upwards at all. Dustin got the bike stabilized, and thought he would try to turn it on and possibly use its own power as an assist. I thought this was a terrible idea, and got out of the way. It turned out to be a great idea. When the bike turned on, it's headlight automatically came on. The police/park rangers who had just closed the gate were still at the bottom of the drive. They saw the light in the trees, and came to investigate. I saw them coming (there were as many as twenty, as few as ten) and Thought "yes! It's the police! they've come to save us!" and ran up the hill to greet them. Dustin kinda stepped behind a tree, having possibly a different impression of policemen. The police had learned much of their english from pop songs, and assured me that I was beautiful (complimentary, but not helpful) and that I should stay right where I was (surprisingly helpful pop song lyric), and went down to collect the bike. They found Dustin, assured him that he was also beautiful, and put him out of the way with me. They got the bike up the hill and, with utter disregard for the geography and very clear evidence, decided that rather than us being in the park after hours, we must have had an accident on the road (at least 100m straight downhill). They were amazed that we were ok after such a terrible crash. They taught us how to use the brakes, using only the words "beautiful" and "eyes". We thanked them profusely, and, in the spirit of things, assured them that they, also, were beautiful. And then we road our bike back to our room.