We rode about 15km before breakfast. We stopped at the new, clean market in town and got some good Pad Thai and Pepsi.
This whole part of Bang Saphon was amazingly new, clean and empty. We saw lots of three-story shop-house buildings. They look a lot like townhouses except the street leves is for a shop and the upper two leves for the shopkeeper's house. Each building hasd about 10 shops and we saw three or four buildings. Most of the shop-houses were empty though. We talked to a guy in a computer store (always a likely place to find an English speaker).
He said people weren't moving from the old market to here because it was too expesnive. A unit in the new palace cost 1.8 million baht, or about US$50,000.
We wanted to repeat the great "Three Scotland the Brave" day we had the day before, so we tried to hunt down more back roads.
We got on one road that was in unusually bad shape. It had enormous potholes. Most roads in Thailand had been excellent, even the back roads, so I was worried that this road had been abandoned because a bridge was out. Now I think it was abandoned only because a new highway had been built parallel and only a few km away. We ended up on the new road after just about 15km on the pothole road.
The new road was a four lane, divided highway with a bike lane-sized, well-paved, smooth shoulder. It was easy going but not especially scenic. We rode this for about 15km.
At this point the highway was just 3km from the coast. We figured we could find a back road, even if it was just dirt, that went up the space between. So we wandered down the first paved road we saw to teh rght.
We really liked the road. It was shad and smooth, running through a cocount tree forest. The only indsutry between the highway and the ocean seems to be coconuts. A strong breeze blew from the south and once I heard a loud crash right behind me--a huge palm frond had blown loose and fallen about 10 feet back.
After just a couple of kms the road returned to the highway. We rode the wrong way down the southbound shoulder, looking for another side road. We quickly found one and started exploring again.
This road got smaller and smaller. It crossed the railroad tracks then turned south. We didn't want to go south. We could see a house about 100 meters away through the forest so we rode cross country toward it. The soft lumpy grass and sand soil made for slow going but eventually we found another dirt road. We must have looked pretty funny to the people in the house, showing up on bikes through the woods like that.
We found the dirt roads laid out a little like a grid with missing sections here and there. We kept going north until we got to a T, then we would go left or right until we could find another turn north. We saw some nice beaches.
Occasionally, as on many back roads in Thailand, dogs would chase us. We developed an excellent system for dealing with this. Joan rides in front, so the dogs usually go after her (they see her as the leader of the pack). She moves to the side (JOAN: this is totally unplanned, I just want to get the hell away from the thing) and then I ride at the dog. I ride with the full intention of running it over, though so far I haven't managed to get one. It scares them to see me coming at them and they jump back and leave u alone. After having dogs chase me for years and not being able to do much about it (I was riding alone) I enjoy scaring the hell out of them. (JOAN: really, this is the only sadistic side I've seen of Eric).
After an hour of riding across streams and walking the bikes through deep sand and once getting chased by five dogs, we decided that we could never make it to our destination town, Pra Chuap, this way. So we went back to the main highway and found out in all our wandering, we had only made 4km towards our goal. We got on the highway and enjoyed the tail wind and got into town at a decent hour.
In Pra Chuap we got a great surprise--the Swiss were staying at the same hotel and so was a Dutch cyclist. We had a good long dinner with the Swiss. When we got back to the hotel, Ton (rhymes with Tom) the Swiss cyclist (aka 'Tulip Boy," a nickname he picked up in the US), was sitting in the hotel lobby drinking a beer. The four of us sat around in a circle to listen to his stories.
Ton
had ridden the ride the Swiss planned to do--a similar but more ambitious
route than we had planned. He had come overland from Europe, through Turkey,
Iran, Pakistan, India and China. Our plan of flying to Lhasa, China then
riding 900km up the Friendship Highway to Nepal, and into India, had once
seemed big. Now it seemed very small.
He told us all about Iran--which he loved and had excellent roads. He said in Iran occasionally a child would touch his bike and an older man would scold the child. In Pakistan everyone would touch the bike until he said, "Please, don't touch the bike." In INdia everyone would touch the bike even after he asked them not to. They would continue to touch it even after he yelled at them not to.
Ton's stories were great. They made us all feel more confident. He had an excellent attitude. We talked about hte checkpoints in China where we heard that people reguarly get US$100 fines for no reason. He hadn't had any problems but had met several people who had. One couple spent a night in jail when they refused to pay a fine, but the next morning negotiated it down, and then got put on a bus out of town without paying anything. (JOAN: Ton's theory was that the fine was illegal, and after the policemen put the tourists in jail, he realized he would have a hard time explaining why they were there. So he was only too happy to get ride of them in the morning, even without collecting the fine).
Someone else supposedly had to pay a US$500 fine twice in two days, but Ton didn't believe the story. He said if a fine was that high, the guys should have been able to talk it down. He said the same guy exaggerated all his stories.
Ton's advice was to just keep talking and smiling when you have trouble with an official. Fining a tourist for no reason is illegal even in China so they can only carry it so far.
Sitting there in the low Thai wooden chairs in the open lobby of the hotel talking about these incredible places and rides, I felt like I didn't belong. Then I realized I did belong. Our trip was about to enter the scale of Ton's and the Swiss's trip. (Both had ridden 27,000 kms in two years, by coincidence, although Ton's was unevenly split between 20,000km the first year, and 7,000km the second year, when he fell in love twice). We were no longer on vacation, the trip is our lives now. It was a special moment and I soaked it in. A year from now our trip will probably be over. Perhaps we will never be part of such a group again.
After
the conversation, the Swiss stopped talking about "maybe" riding the overland
route to Lhasa and started talking about definitely doing it. So did we.
Ton did not wear a helmet. Instead he wore a baseball cap with a photo fo a child, his niece, pinned to it. He said it's a great ice breaker and cheers up the officials at border crossings. He also carries some photos of friends and family.
Ton packed his bike at the same time we did in the morning. He was so easy to talk to we asked him how he paid for his trip. It's a personal question and we don't usually ask but Ton seemed like he wouldn't mind and he didn't. He said he had been saving up to buy his father's grocery in Holland. Then he decided that that wasn't what he wanted to do with his life. So he went on the road and has been out for two years now, and plans two more.
He said at the beginning of his trip he met a guy who had been on the road for five years. The ugy told him he rode 20,000km the first year and only 7,000km the next. Ton did the same thing.
He told us to never say farewell, you never know when you'll meet someone again.
Next: Hua Hin.
