Day: The Sixteenth

Its a transit day, really. I get away from the hotel about 11, and straight away know I'm dehydrated, my new B80 belt has let me down and it's very very hot. I doubt very much that all the events were linked, but you never know. The first problem is solved, along with the third, by quickly spotting an aircon coffee shop. Along the road was a trestle table and tarp market. This belt cost me B100, ($4) so it had better last longer.

The ride to Ko Samet (or Kho Samet, or Ko Samed or Kho Samat or any combination) was pretty normal Thai countryside of small farms, but the road edge was almost continuous strip developments, small shops houses, office blocks etc, as well as about ten resort developments with the occasional random mega highrise by the sea.

I got to the Ko Samet  ferries about 3.30, and asked about taking the scoot to the island. I was told no, and it would cost B50 a day to park it. Bugger, it would cost me B300 a day to hire another scooter on the island.

The ferry was an old wooden two decker, slightly sway-backed and vaguely junk-like. The nine of us aboard occupied a small area upstairs, out of at least 60 seats. There seemed to be at least three ferry companies, all running on the hour..... So there was a bit of a rush to get out the harbour and on the way. It seemed to be there was a way for one of the companies to get a sales advantage, by going on the half hour....

About 40 min of diesel thumping later, we pulled up beside two identical ferries at a wharf on the island. This means we have to jump from one ferry to the next, in a reasonable swell, until we reach the concrete. There, it's a jumble of jetties and wharfs, old and being built, with people loading and unloading about a dozen boats. There's a big new wharf being built, by workers, almost completely covered, even faces with scarves. Arc welders are being used while only wearing sunglasses or nothing at all, grinders without eye protection, and about one in five has a hard hat.

I've found a guest house that looks interesting on Tripadviser. The owner is a Scot, called Lizzy. I've never seen reviews so polarised. It seems everyone either loves Lizzy or hates her. A ride on the back of a pickup to Baan Puu Paan (Baan-house, Puu-of, Paan-commander, The Commander's House) cost B150, over a narrow broken up strip of concrete. I'm greeted by a shortish mid-40s tanned blonde woman, with a deep Glaswegian voice, and a big smile. "I'm Lizzy, do you want a drink?"

"Actually, a room, but I'm not booked"

There's three spare rooms out of six, so I choose the more modest one, not over the water, but it looks out over the sea and is only half the price at $28 a night. Big double bed, air con, shower over toilet cubicle with only cold water (however by the time its been in the outside water tank for a while, its not that cold). I unpack, rest for a while and then walk around the building  to the restaurant for that beer.

Lizzy is there doing what she does best, pouring drinks, and telling stories. Some of the drinks she is pouring are for herself. You see Lizzy rather likes a drink. I gather it runs in the family a bit. Her birthday is 3rd january, and her mother was dead drunk at the time, from an on-going New Years party.

One of the reasons for coming here, other then the apparently outrageous (but becoming more believable by the minute) stories about the host, was the reputation of the food. Even the reviews that said don't stay here said come here to eat. The chef is a self-taught 20 yr old Thai guy who has a real talent. Lizzy gives him free rein, he orders and makes whatever he wants. I had baguette roasted with goat cheese, Moroccan Tuna Skewers, and chilli scallops spaghetti. Fan-fucking-tastic. He also makes little chilled spoon deserts which the staff give away to anyone waking past. I had a clotted cream and fudge with a mint leaf. Espresso and a Black Label mmmmmmm.

In the mean time, Lizzy is telling stories about her nine years in Thailand. Legally and morally, I probably can't repeat them in entirety, but they included lines like "and there he was with his block and tackle hanging out" and "I grabbed the blind guy's hand, rubbed it on my tits and said ta him "Even though I've got a deep voice, that's braille for woman""!!

Day: The Fifteenth

I'm going to be really boring and say not much happened today other than a visit to a doctor to get some antibiotics for my eyes. The water and grit off the road didn't do them any favours. Doctors surgery efficient and modern, set up for people with money and very western.

There's a cafe (daytime)/bar (night) nearby that I have come to frequent. The two waitresses have been a great source of information about life in Thailand. They come from the north, around where April and I were, but a bit more west. Its a poor area, with difficult conditions on small farms and many of the children leave to find work in the south to help their families. One had a mother who was Kumpuchiean, escaped from Pol Pot. They politely don't notice my red gummy eyes, and in fact help me find the doctors.

Day: The Fourteenth

Quiet day, finally got into the book I started on the plane. Went for a walk along the beach in the afternoon and found that a three day cultural festival was starting. At least a thousand school girls and boys dressed in national and/or regional costumes were dancing and singing in groups of about twenty. There was displays of Buddhist and Hindu material, even stuffed bears, tigers and deer. Unfortunately the singing and dancing went on quite late, and the PA system was quite impressive... The scratchy eyes I have from the rainy ride down have got worse. Dinner was Thai (wasn't else really?) fish cake filed by charcoal bbq fish. Actually, that's all I had to eat all day, but I did have a coffee in a cafe about 2. It was about the worst coffee that wasn't instant that I ever had the misfortune to drink. It was also the most expensive I have had here at B60 ($2.20). A word about the beer here. There are four main brands, owned by two companies. Liked pretty much everywhere in Asia  it's lager. Most people don't even know there's any other sorry of beer. Mostly people drink Leo if you are on a low budget (quite good, even by cheap NZ lager standard) at around $0.70¢ per individual can at the 7/Eleven, Chang which it a strong lager at 6.4 minimum (all beers are sold at minimum alcohol level; rumour had it that Chang can sometimes be much higher if your lucky...or unlucky as the case may be... Known to cause "Chang-overs".), and Singha. Singha is by far the best tasting with strong honey and fudge notes. Even by the individual bottle at the 7/Eleven it's only about $1 a small bottle and $1.70 for a big one. You can buy Thai whiskey for about $6 a bottle, but anything imported is hugely expensive. I had a Thai whiskey with a late night coffee in Chiang Mai, and it was ok. The surprising thing is I have seen very little, if any, signs of public intoxication. Expect for Khoisan Rd, backpacker central of course, and you can't blame the Thais for that.

Abed by 10

Day: The Thirteenth

Packed, paid, and ready for the scooter at 10.30. It's an attractive beastie, black, long and low. I dub it "The Luxo-Barge". There is space under the seat for two helmets, so I reduce my already minimal gear, and put just one of the two pannier bags I have with me in there. It saves having to figure out a way of protecting the nearly new bike's flanks from the pannier bag straps.

It takes nearly an hour for three staff members to map out a route for me across Bangkok and on the road south. The problem is we are on the north-west side and I need to go out the south-east side. I take three turns and immediately get lost. I make it a fair way in the general direction, but realise I could be hours asking people, but my accent makes it difficult for people to understand where I am asking about. In the end I flag down a moto-taxi (they are everywhere, bike riders wearing red vests, often with helmet-less ladies sitting side-saddle getting a lift. He guides me to the start of the road I need to take. It costs me B200 ($8), and takes about five years off my life! This guy makes a living out of getting thru Bangkok traffic as quickly as possible. In the half hour it took, had it been in NZ, I would have got at least forty tickets, been arrested six times and faced a firing squad. And it had started to rain...

I am now on the main road south. The first big place on the road is Chon Buri so this is what I have been asking for. Its about 55 km from where I now am. I know there's an expressway, but I can't use a motorbike on it. That's why it took the lovely people at the inn so long to plan my (long abandoned) route across the city. Not long after I start on the main route I see a sign for Chon Buri, and follow it. Next thing I'm up on the expressway...where I'm not supposed to be... The first toll booth I arrive at, all hell breaks loose. There's revolving red lights all over the place and a siren is blaring. I think "ok, we are about to play a new game; fine the stupid tourist". The lady in the toll booth just looks at me, aghast. An angry man runs over, yells at me in Thai and points to the next off-ramp. Whew, got off lightly.

When I get back down to ground level, I finally work out the signage. Green for low level roads, blue for upper level. Its an amazing road. The expressway is mounted way up high on single centred slender Y-shaped legs under the six lanes roadway. It's so high up that it haas to be at least ten, maybe fifteen meters above the ground. Directly underneath there are two lanes in each direction, with entry ramps onto these lanes every 1.5 km. In the middle there are links to the two lanes going back the other way. Outside those two lanes there are two more lanes that have all the feeding side roads, businesses etc. Bikes and trucks etc are all on the lower roads. This went on for more than 50 km!! The good thing for me about being under the expressway was that it was wider than the road I was on, and it was pouring rain. I stayed dry! Until it ended.... Then I got really wet.

Getting wet in a tropical country is a different  experience. The water is warm and in some ways it's pleasant. However, mix that with four lanes filled with thousands, trucks and overloaded utes weaving between lanes, and throwing up masses of spray, and its seriously scary. Add to that, after the end of the expressway, the traffic is mixed and the road is made of concrete with some damaged sections and lots of longitudinal seams. In a car this is no problem, but on a bike the tyres trend to get rut-bound in the seams. I only had the open face helmet supplied with the bike, so my glasses were covered in spray and road grit, making it hard to avoid the seams. With the heavy rain the road was a bit slippery, so I had three heart-stopping moments when the bike got into a seam, then crossed up and a got a bit sideways. Being completely surrounded by trucks meant that there were definitely times I questioned what I was doing.(!)

However, I got to the hotel I had booked via tripadviser. It's ok, half a block back from the beach, with a narrow view of the sea over a number of rough buildings. There's lots of seafood restaurants but the beach is covered with umbrellas, chairs and stalls. I had and very nice squid with holy basil at a seafood place out over the sea. Did I mention that it's my favourite Thai dish? (c:

I'll plot up here for a day or so, get some laundry done and then I think I'll go to Koh Samet, a little island nearby.

Day: The Twelfth

Time to take April back to Bangkok, to catch her flight home. Its been great staying at Vanilla Place, Mr & Mrs Kem are great hosts, and looked after us really well. We get out to the airport at Chiang Mai with plenty of time to spare, and soon Nok Air have us on the one hour flight to Bangkok. We have about three hours to get back to the little inn and get April luggage sorted and get her back to the international terminal. W have about 30 minutes to spare so decide to whip down the street for one last pad thai for lunch. As usual April shows them the card she had about her seafood allergy, especially after last night. She was not a happy bunny when, half way thru she finds shrimp. She immediately hits the heavy duty allergy meds, and I get her a taxi, as she thinks she will be ok. She does get home without too much of a problem as it turns out.

I do some serious blogging catch up, and repack my bags ready for the bike trip that starts tomorrow. I opt for the easy dinner of staying at the inn and eating spring rolls, and pork with holy basil, probably my favourite thai dish. I'm rally looking forward to the riding tomorrow. I have booked a Honda PCX, a scooter of the maxi-scooter style (although at 125cc its really a mini-maxi-scooter...)

Day: The Eleventh

Last full day with April, and we decide to ride to the top of the mountain that the monsoon drove us off a few days earlier. Its a really great ride, all bends and uphill, good surface and side except for the last 10km when the road is strictly one lane and even bikes have to get right over to let another pass. April is riding really well, with growing confidence and getting much better at picking her line through the corners.

Last time we came up here it was a Buddhist holiday festival. The place was a seething mass of the faithful, buses cars, bikes everywhere. Today there is hardly anyone and most of the stalls near the temple are shuttered. We forgot to gas up before leaving the city, so we make a stop at the shops here where last time we saw a petrol seller. I ask at a shop where they say they can sell us fuel. The lady disappears for ages. In the meantime April finds the sand we saw the day before, bottles of petrol for B40. Eventually the lady comes back with two bottles she probably syphoned out of a car, and say B50. No, we say and move to type other stand. Its not until we gas up later that day and pay B42 at the pump that we realise that the bottles of fuel that the guy had for B40 were small.... Sorry lady!

We get to the point we reached last time, and ended up waiting in the rain for an hour. This time we carry on and sure enough just a couple of km further on the visitors centre and coffee appear. Still, the little hit we stopped in last time was a good place to watch a monsoonal rain storm from and we did meet a nice Thai couple there.

We spy a dirt track leading uphill from the car park, and decide to see if we can ride any higher. The dirt quickly turns to smooth clay and the grade gets steeper. April in front comes to a halt through lack of traction, and as I am too close and the surface is too slippery to stop I try to keep going. I get about 4m more and even though my back wheel is turning, we slither backwards. I pull the bike around to try to avoid running into April, and see she has stepped away from her bike as it had decided to have a wee "rest".  Lots of laughter and a photo opportunity. The smallest of grazes on Aprils shin. It turned out the track was to some Hill Tribe peoples settlement, so it probably was better that we didn't suddenly appear in the middle of their lunch time. We took some photos for Kiwi Rider magazine, and hope to get into their small regular feature entitled "They're  Reading Our Magazine Where?".

A fab ride back down and Google maps on a smart phone does a pretty good job of getting us and the bikes back to Tonys Big Bikes. Its in the Old City, do the streets are narrow. At one stage we are stopped by a man with a whistle. These guys are employed by hotels and big businesses to step out into the busy traffic to let vehicles get out. This time its for a huge tour bus that is trying to back out of an even smaller alley. The bus is so tall and the roads so narrow that they need someone on each corner giving directions. It even had the overhead power lines twanging. Eventually it makes forward progress, and April, exercising her newfound traffic filtering skills, manages to slip through a "wafer thin gap".

We are welcomed back at Tonys by a nice Englishman called Jeff who is Tonys partner. We lets us off a few hours late fee, mainly because we had brought the bikes back full of gas, when they had been a bit low when we picked them up. He very kindly overlooked the mud from our motocrossing. A tuktuk ride took took (sorry) us back to the markets. I bought Lee her main present from an antique shop run by some Karin people. April replace her Rayban glasses that she ran over yesterday and we go home to rest before going out for a final night celebration dinner.

We find a nice restaurant that has everything on their menu that we are looking for and order. April, as usual, shows them the card she carries explaining about her allergy to seafood. They nod and say they understand, but later that night the poor wee darling spends three hours "calling for Ralph" into her hand basin. It was no use calling for Dad, he was coma'ed out, and wouldn't wake up. Sorry, darling.

Day: The Tenth

Big ride day today. We did a lap of Doi Su Thep, a big mountain next to Chiang Mai. What a ride! It had everything, city madness as we left and returned, stunning scenery, corners and hills, some serious offload trial riding, even some road racing.... And a picnic! Onya April for the picnic idea. The corner store was asking huge money for your traditional kiwi picnic stuff (imported) so we cheated and bought a foot long at Subway. There are a line of roadside fruit stalls on the way out of town so I bought half kilo of rambutan, a bunch of small extra sweet ladies finger bananas (tree ripened fruit of any description is so much better then fruit picked green) and half kilo of dragon fruit which was three fruit. Rambutan look like hairy red ping pong balls and taste like lychee only better, dragon fruit are bizarre looking, pink and even more pink on the inside. They taste quite bland, a little like kiwifruit with a hint of earthy carrot. Wish I could put up a picture.

About half an hour in, we stopped for drinks, iced chocolate for April, coffee for me. The road around the mountain is made for bikes, great surface and s-bend combinations that go on for kilometres, up and down the ridges, with towering trees and graceful bamboo, small villages, farms, banana palms growing wild and not much traffic. We stopped often and took photos, and took videos while we were riding. Around lunch time I spotted a side road with potential. It was a one lane strip of concrete that ran off into the jungle for miles. Covered in moss and leaves, it was obvious that it was seldom used and in places the bikes struggled with the steep grade. There was a loud squawk from April when a small black animal almost ran into her front wheel (probably a squirrel). We ate our sandwich sitting on the ground with only the sounds of the jungle to be heard. By that I mean there were various animal noises, and I'm pretty sure one was a distant gibbon (and not one of Mums relatives!). On the animal note a bit farther on I stopped to wait for April, and there were two elephants in the trees looking at me!

There were a few other foreigners riding bikes as this is a well known loop that's a good days ride. Most were on scooters or scooter-style motorbikes like the ones we had but some had forked out the big Baht to hire bigger sports bikes. I  stopped a few times to video April riding the bends and at one point a couple of other tourists on big Kawasaki motard-style bikes came past. For those outside the biking circles, these are big bore trailbikes with road wheels, tyres and brakes, and perfect for this style of road. They passed me at the start of an uphill section and I thrashed the little Honda trying to keep up. I made up lots of ground on the numerous hairpin bends but they had heaps of power over my little 125cc Honda Steppie. By the time I got to the top of the ridge, the bike was a bit lighter, having worn away some of the ends of the footpegs! They were about 50m in front and had been looking back at me for most of the way up. On the way up we had also passed April, with one of them carving her up going into a corner and then almost turning into her. They were trying by this stage, so I took great delight in taking both of them about a third of the way down and getting to the bottom in time to get my camera out before they got there. As they went past, they didn't even smile or wave... It was then that I saw the elephants.

A bit farther on we a sign by a bridge pointing up a walking track to a waterfall. The track looked like perfect trail riding so I convinced April we should ride it. It forked a few times and we ended up in a farm compound at one point (probably some of the hill tribe people that are fairly common around here still), but after a bit of doubling back we found the waterfalls. There was three young boys swimming in the river who were a bit surprised to see two foreigners, also swimming, but in their own sweat. April was not too keen on trail riding, even before she bounced her new "Raybans"out of the front basket and ran over them.... However she replaced them with two new pairs for about $12.

We got back, and found our hotel quite easily. We were starting to learn the street layout finally. We both declared it a fine days riding, even if Aprils bike started to fart about a bit once you got it on to the main jet. My bike was named Mona on account of the hideous noises from the back brake that startled other road users off the road, thinking a truck had sneaked up on them. Aprils was christened "Chuck", in tribute to her hero Chuck Norris.