A
tail wind, smooth roads, and a great hotel room sealed our ambitious
new plans made in the euphoria of meeting the other cyclists. "Overland
to Lhasa!" became our cheer for the day. Even as time passed and we sweated
like wet blankets, we remained convinced we could do it.
We rode the divided highway, route 4, all the way to Hua Hin, passing the Swiss after about 15km. They carried a lot more weight than we did. We should call them Team Discipline. Every morning they filtered eight liters of tap water into a large water bladder and two large bottles. So in addition to carrying 20 extra pounds, all day they drank warm, sometimes bad tasting water. They make their own breakfast of bread, muesli and Milo (an Ovaltine-like powdered drink you mix with water). And most difficult of all, they're vegetarians and don't even eat seafood.
This last is especially difficult in a country where you
can't even hope to read the menus-they don't even use the same letters
let alone words. Ordering any meal can be a long, painful chore with lots
of hand signals and empty looks and apparent understandings that turn out
to be completely wrong. We're quite thrilled if we say, "Pad Thai" and
they show a spark of recognition (though one time they returned with a
bottle of water, which is totally weird since the word for water, "Naam,"
doesn't sound anything like Pad Thai.) Trying to add "please no meat or
seafood in the Pad Thai" would drive me crazy.
They are vegetarians only because they don't like meat
or seafood, not for health or 
philosophical
reasons. So they will eat chicken in a pinch. I'm thankful that I like
seafood because that's one of the great things about Thailand.
The divided highway between Phrachuap and Hua Hin was fairly flat and mildly scenic. Tulipboy (the Dutchman we met the night before) had ridden south on the same road two days before. He searched the narrow strip between the highway and the ocean for a more scenic, quieter road just as we had done south of Phrachuap. Just like us, he spent a lot of time and failed. On his advice we road the four-lane all the way to Hua Hin. With the tail wind we averaged over 25km per hour (15.5 mph). Normally we average about 20km/hour on a fairly flat road.
We liked Hua Hin and this proves perhaps more than anything else that our burnout was officially over. Hua Hin gets too many tourists. It's a nice beach with too many people selling you stuff. Once it was a sleepy fishing village like the other wonderful towns we've seen. Now loud and sleazy tourist bars seem to be the fastest growing industry while fishing is fast declining.
The town has several of the classic old dark wooden buildings containing food stalls, hardware stores, 5&10 stores, and little kids covered with chalky white baby powder. But amid them are glitzy, well-lit fashion stores selling men's and women's suits priced in Deutsch Marks. A young man at one of the stores tried five times to get me inside, almost demanding that I come in.
Most everything cost more in Hua Hin than in other towns and the food wasn't quite as good.
So what? We had a great, huge room n the third floor of
a hotel with a big balcony. We 
walked
along the beach in the morning and in the evening. We sat on beach chairs
under umbrellas and watched night come on while people brought us beers.
So what if they cost twice what they would have elsewhere?
We stayed two nights in Hua Hin and right after sundown both nights, we headed to the Elephant Bar in the old Hua Hin Railway Hotel for Happy Hour. This is a grand old hotel in the tradition of Raffles in Singapore. We loved having Happy Hour there, even if we couldn't afford to stay there (cheapest room 3400 baht, or US$85/night). I ordered a Corona with a lime and Joan got a Heineken. It's the best beer I've had since Singapore. A woman came in and played "As Time Goes By" on the piano to open her set both nights. Both evenings were perfect, though we spent almost as much money on Happy Hour as we sometimes spend in an entire day, including lodging.
We
loved the town but like all towns we've seen in Thailand, Hua Hin had too
many loose dogs and too many loose motorcycles. In little towns the dogs
bark and fight at night, waking us up. In the larger towns the motorcycles
drag race. During our last night in Hua Hin it sounded like the Hells Angels
were having an RPM contest on our balcony. I'm still not used to the volume
of the developing world.
When we left the next morning we found a great dirt road that ran along a canal for about 30km. An expat on a motorcycle told us about it.
The road was wonderful, quiet. Little boys swam naked in the canal. This canal didn't flow black and stink like most of the drainage we've seen. It looked like a fairly clean if slightly muddy five-foot wide creek. Obviously we had no hills along the canal. Occasionally we even had shade from the trees.
The agriculture was mostly dry rice farming. The area seemed drier than even just several km south. Beyond the rice fields, wandering water buffaloes and thin tree lines, we saw 10-15 story resort hotels clustered here and there. They must have been along the beach about five km east. We also passed the occasional cactus field and even a couple of gated communities.
We entered the town of Chaam the back way. We got in a maze of windy narrow alleys. We saw old women topless, washing clothes. Some people were standing in doorways getting dressed. A drunk man came up to us happily and insisted that we do something, I'm not sure what. Riding through these narrow back streets always feels like riding through someone's bedroom.
Finally we found a train station where we carried our bikes across the tracks. The town suddenly had wide tree-lined streets.
Chaam and its beach are a popular tourist spot especially for Thais. We only stayed long enough to get some water.
The next 40 km to Petchaburi was closer to the ocean but not close enough to see it. We only saw sand and marsh. The road was flat, smooth and wide and we had a great tail wind. We passed three or four half-completed concrete skeletons of buildings that looked like they were meant to be hotels but were never finished.
We arrived at Petchaburi early in the afternoon.
Next: We meet a Peeping Tom.
