Another muggy day in Bangkok and the best refuge is inside an air-conditioned Internet cafe. As promised, here is the story of our ride from Chumphon to Phetchaburi, along the east coast of Thailand.
We spent the night of May 8th in Chumphon, at the noisy but cheap little guesthouse next to the bus station where our bikes were waiting for us. Although I trust the owners of the guesthouses where we leave our bikes while we make sidetrips, it's always a slight relief to see that the bikes and extra luggage is still there when we get back. Chumphon is a typical southern Thai provincial town. There is a collection of night markets where great food is available at rock-bottom prices, and where a sizeable proportion of the local population seems to eat. There are streets and streets of prosperous-looking shops. Almost every single one of them is owned by ethnic Chinese businessmen; there are Chinese ancestor shrines at the back of the shops, their outside signs are in Chinese as well as Thai, and if there is an English sign as well, the name is certain to be something like Tung Lee or Sin Lok Sung. Throughout Southeast Asia, the ethnic Chinese, many of whom have lived here for hundreds of years and now speak the language of the country rather than Hokkien or Cantonese or Hainanese, form a class of urban small merchants that dominates commerce. They are to Southeast Asia what the Indian merchants are to East Africa, or, I gather, Jewish merchants were to Central Europe before the Second World War. In Thailand the ethnic Chinese do not stand out physically the way they do in Malaysia or Indonesia, but they still regard themselves, and are regarded by others, as distinct from the rest of the population. They are reported to make up about 10 percent of the population of Thailand, compared to more like 40 percent in Malaysia, but they seem to be more numerous in the South.
The population of southern Thailand is, in fact, much more reminiscent of Malaysia than that of central Thailand. The fishermen and farmers are largely Muslims and ethnic Malays, while the towns are largely Chinese. The southernmost provinces have far more mosques and Chinese temples than Buddhist wats. The ethnic Thais seem to be present as government officials and soldiers, keeping the traditionally rebellious South in line. Many southern towns have enormous loudspeakers that blare government announcements and patriotic music at ear-splitting levels early in the morning in a propaganda offensive. I've seen the whole population of villages standing at attention for the national anthem at 7 am; failure to do so is reportedly a criminal offense. Chumphon, 500-odd kilometres south of Bangkok, is considered the northern boundary of this Muslim/Chinese area; as we cycled north, we entered the traditional Thai central heartland.
The first day of cycling, May 9th, was a rude shock for Joanne. After three days of flat riding south of Chumphon back in April,, I had expected this to continue north of the city. Instead the limestone outcrops that form the central spine of the slender Isthmus of Kra extended their reach to the east to give rise to a series of low hills that made for a undulating rollercoaster ride on the first day. After 5 weeks away from cycling and unused to exercise in the tremendous heat and humidity, the 85 kilometres we did were almost too much for her. The turnoff to a little beach hotel appeared just in the nick of time amidst the endless rubber plantations that lined the road. The torrential downpour that started as soon as we arrived dampened my enthusiasm for lying on the beach, and the ankle-deep shallows that extended far offshore made swimming a near impossibility. I contented myself with taking pictures of colourful fishing boats with their prows festooned with garlands of frangipani, and a magnificent dinner in a seaside restaurant featuring the best tom kha kai (spicy chicken soup with coconut milk, Joanne's favourite) that we've had so far.
The second day was much flatter and we rolled through pleasant rice-growing countryside on quiet sideroads. Joanne and I have differing philosophies on what constitutes a good cycling road. I love small roads, devoid of traffic, meandering through the countryside and forests, allowing you to relax and ride side by side while watching birds and butterflies flutter by overhead. Joanne maintains that these roads are always longer and hillier and slower than the busy highways, down which she barrels like Lance Armstrong on a time trial, but which offer nothing in the way of scenery and assault the senses with clouds of diesel exhaust and the deafening roar of truck engines. This day was perfect from my point of view, but there was a steady muttering from Joanne about how much faster it would have been to take the highway. We found another little beach resort strip, again featuring a bay so shallow that a 3-year-old would have difficulty swimming in it, and called it an early day after 60 kilometres.
Our third day on the road saw Joanne's wishes come true as our network of sideroads finally petered out and we were forced out to Highway 4, the main road from Bangkok to the deep South. Thailand gets very skinny north of Chumphon as it shares the Isthmus of Kra with Burma. Near Prachuap Khiri Khan, our destination that day, Thailand is only 11 km wide, a narrow strip between the Gulf of Thailand and the low mountains that form the border, and there is no space for two parallel roads. Once we hit the highway, Joanne suddenly hit the afterburners and hurtled along at 27 km/h the whole way to Prachuap Khiri Khan. To be fair to Joanne's point of view, we did have an entire 3-metre-wide paved shoulder to ourselves, and the newly-paved road was noticeably smoother, making for faster cycling. Joanne maintains that the burst of speed was due to her new Ferrari-red cycling jersey and tailwinds from passing trucks. We zipped past roadside vendors selling vast piles of pineapples and enormous jackfruit, plantations of which lined the road. Somewhere along the highway, unnoticed at the time, we passed the last rubber plantation that we would see. Rubber had been my constant roadside companion since Hat Yai, 1200 kilometres ago, and the disappearance of these rather ugly plantations was a sure sign that we were leaving the South behind. Coconuts were another southern crop that seemed to be tailing off. Another indication of this was the gradual disappearance of mosques. I realized that, somewhere in southern Thailand, I must have heard my last "Allahu akbar" floating from a minaret. I had grown used to being able to set my watch by these calls to prayer throughout Malaysia; I actually miss the sound, particularly since the muezzins seem more melodic and less over-amplified than they are in the Middle East.
Prachuap Khiri Khan was a tidy little provincial capital disfigured by a massive road-building project. It's famous for its seafood, which we sampled liberally at lunch, and for its hilltop Buddhist wat which dominates the town. As Joanne took a siesta to recover from the day's 65 flat but hot kilometres, I rode out of town to check out the beaches north of town. There were scenic fishing villages and colourful fishing boats to photograph, and I managed to find some water deep enough for swimming. The entire Gulf Coast of Thailand seems to be very shallow, particularly, because of the tidal cycle, at this time of year. While swimming, I saw a procession of Buddhist monks making their way along the beach back to their monastery, their bright orange robes splendid in the sunlight (by some miracle, it failed to rain that afternoon). They stopped to play in the waves, and their monastic solemness fell away as they gleefully splashed each other and waded out up to their knees.
The next day, May 12th, saw us race north along the highway for 35 kilometres, then turn off towards the coast to visit Khao Sam Roi Yot National Park. This is another outcrop of limestone cliffs and pinnacles in the otherwise flat coastal plain. It's famous among Thais as the place that a nineteenth-century monarch and astronomy buff went, along with his family and entire court, to watch a solar eclipse that he himself had predicted. The eclipse was a great success, but unfortunately the whole entourage was attacked by the voracious mosquitoes of the area and the King and one of his sons soon died of malaria. Nowadays the park is famous among birdwatchers as one of the best places in Southeast Asia to watch migrating waterfowl. We rode into the park through a huge freshwater marsh full of purple herons, black-winged stilts, red-wattled lapwings and egrets. Unfortunately for the birds, local villagers have drained much of the marsh in order to establish shrimp farms, greatly reducing the bird population that can be supported. Once again, another national park in Thailand falls prey to population pressure and lax enforcement of park regulations.
We camped on the beach, and while I set off to look for birds and monkeys, Joanne took shelter in the tent from the descendants of the killers of the Astronomer King. Khao San Roi Yot is one of the only places in the world where the comical-looking dusky langur can be seen. They look like vaudeville singers with a cork-blackened faces; white eyes and eyebrows and lips contrast with the jet-black facial fur to give them a perpetually surprised expression. I saw dozens of them, along with the ubiquitous long-tailed macaques found throughout southeast Asia. The previous day, in Prachuap Khiri Khan, a gang of macaques, spoiled by people feeding them, tried to mug me for whatever I might have had in my pockets. I spotted hundreds of beautiful green bee-eaters and blue-throated bee-eaters and a collection of various bulbuls before the mosquitoes became too much for me and I fled to the mangrove swamps to escape them. The mangroves were full of huge crabs that apparently climb trees to feed on leaves at night, and kingfishers that feed on the crabs. The view from the lookout on the top of one of the limestone pinnacles capped off a wonderful day of wildlife viewing.
It was like a furnace inside the tent that night and neither of us got much sleep, so we made the next day another short one and called it a day at the hideous resort of Hua Hin. Hua Hin rivals Patong beach for general sleaziness. It's popular among German and Scandinavian men of a certain age who go there to pick up 18-year-old Thai bargirls. The town has a real atmosphere of sleaziness and, despite its hundred year history as a seaside resort for Bangkok, there is little historical atmosphere amidst the modern concrete blocks. We did find a nice old traditional teak mansion that is run as a guesthouse by a Dutchman and his Thai wife and hid out there, emerging to e-mail, watch the Austrian Grand Prix on TV and eat in the night market. I had a mussel omelette that proved to be a grave mistake, as I spent the night and the next day violently ill with food poisoning. I'm not sure whether it was the eggs or the mussels, but something was very, very wrong with that dish. Joanne, who had been campaigning for a day off, was pleased at a day of rest, even if it meant putting up with me sick; I am not one to suffer in silence when struck down with illness!
The countryside seemed to change and soften as we cycled north. The hills along the Burmese border receded toward the horizon and we headed into the endless rice-growing plain that surrounds Bangkok. The land seemed more settled, more domesticated by being lived-in for centuries. In the South, it felt as though, aside from coastal fishing villages, settlement in the interior jungles was a phenomenon of the last fifty years, and large patches of unpopulated forest still existed in the lowlands. Phetchaburi, in contrast, had temples over a thousand years old, and over this millenium the countryside seemed to have been softened and rounded and humanized.
Finally, on the morning of the 15th we rode a final 70 km to Phetchaburi, an old Buddhist centre full of historic wats that we will look at when we return to to pick up our bikes. We left the bikes at a guesthouse, took a bus to Bangkok, had the digital camera fixed at Fujifilm's offices, and spent a day looking at the Royal Palace and Wat Pho before heading off to Cambodia, leaving the country on the last possible day of my visa. The next instalment of this diary will tell the story of our trip to Cambodia.