Flats and Wats

Editor's Pick Award

Our Editors awarded this travel blog entry for providing relevant information that may be useful and inspiring for other travelers.

Some of the pics that go with this are attached to the last entry. Think of it as a bonus preview!

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So we headed off on our bikes. 2km to the Bangkok train station. Everything we heard and read said NOT to try to bike out of megapolis Bangkok, so we decided to take our bikes on the train to Ayuthaya, the ancient capital of Thailand, with some cool temples and ruins.

I have a bike that I bought used from a Canadian guy who was finishing up a similar biking trip right when I arrived in Bangkok. It's a mountain type bike which could be a disadvantage, but its cheaper/easier this way and he seems to have taken good care of it... it has earned the name of "she beast" because of its bulkiness and its stubborness as you will see.

We started off going east through small towns and farm lands. The larger highways remind me of highways in the U.S., with minimarts, car shops, and some factories. The landscape inbetween is beautiful, and when we go on smaller roads we are surrounded by amazing electric green rice paddy fields and cow herders.

Every house has a small buddhist temple in front, and the businesses (all of them, such as the Nissan dealer) have large temples, in addition to really big animal statues covered in tiles and mirrors in front. We discovered fields of beautifully decorated statues that looked like temple tops, and it took us a while to realize that they were gravestones. It became quite clear after we walked up the steps of a larger temple in the middle of one of these graveyards and found ourselves face to face with an open cremation oven, with the telltale tracks and singed sooty stone around the door!

We pass through many towns and everyone is thrilled to see us. Even the 72 year old hanging out at the roadside noodle stand who said that seeing us reminded him of the Japanese soldiers that rode their bikes into town during World War II.  Everyone is bold but always nice and very smiley. The women are very bold! This strikes me after India: here women run the businesses, approach you to chat, and make a lot of the decisions. Here, running a business, even a high tech digital camera shop, is a family affair, where in India a shop would be run by a man, with a younger man or boy as an assistant.

The niceness of people is overwhelming. They go waaay out of their way to help you. Anytime we put our foot down to stop anywhere, someone is running out to us with a glass of ice water. Everyone wants to give us directions. A typical experience was when we asked a woman on a moped how to get to a waterfall that was off the road on our map. Instead of just pointing us down the right road, she called her friend on her cell, got the exact directions, then drove her moped really slowly 15km out of her way to lead us there. After she pulled away I stopped to adjust something on my bike, and she turned around again to make sure we were ok.

The second day out of bangkok we rode about 100km. Pulling into town we met a middle aged phys ed teacher and his wife who asked us to stay in their home. They had nice govt housing, we slept on the floor on mats with A/C!. They took us to the night market and introduced us to new food, talked politics, and then made us a breakfast of sticky rice, curry soup, and pork in the morning. The teacher told us he was inspired to take a bike trip through thailand himself.

Next we rode to Khao Yai national park (the country's premier park that we found by accident while looking for the aforementioned waterfall). The 40km road into the middle of the park was all steeply uphill, and after about 15km we got a park pickup to take us and our bikes the rest of the way up. (If you're keeping track that's day 1 on the train, and day 3 mostly pickup truck. Hey, gotta show the bikes some love). Highlights were swimming in a waterfall, the elephant that lumbered across the road in front of us, and the thai families giggling and playing guitars at the campground that night. The next day we rode downhill (whee!) out of the park through bands of maurading monkeys and then further east towards the border, averaging 100km per day.

The last couple of days we've dealt with some bike problems - Linda had a couple of flats and I had a swelling tire (might tear!) all in one day. Luckily we were able to sit in the shade of a local temple to fix them.  Still haven't found a great tire to replace the one that wore out so we've gotten into the habit of scoping out anyone who sells bike parts the minute we get to each town. Kind of tedious but if we fix things right hopefully we'll have lots of good biking to come in Cambodia.