Biking in the South

We left Bangkok with a purpose in mind: pedal hard and reach Phuket before Belou’s plane landed on May 17 at 9:30 AM. It was no easy task, as the unexpected visits in Bangkok with Stephane’s cousin Michel and then his cousins Laurent and Claire had delayed us considerably (But with no regrets! Only good times!). In fact, Thailand had turned into a land of reunions and family get-togethers for us! The visit of Belou was also unexpected – planned at the last minute. Belou was a long-time friend of Stephane, flying from Paris to meet us in Phuket, and we definitely didn’t want to be late!

We had two weeks to bike about 850 km. This was a challenge for us, as we usually moved at a slower speed, allowing time to visit cities on the way or to rest our weary legs. But we set our minds to it and arrived just in time, breakfasting across the way from the airfield and watching his plane land.

Leaving Bangkok, we saw poor housing areas, but the thing that surprised us most of all was that even the poor shacks had big, fancy and gleaming cars parked out front! How do they do it? Do they put four generations into debt just in order to buy the latest model car or what? We still haven’t been able to figure it out!

Our first day of biking in Thailand was not the easiest thing I’ve ever done. It was hot: 105 degrees Fahrenheit by the thermometer, and the way I figured it, about 99% humidity! But the beautiful scenery helped to compensate, and plus, the way we envisioned it, we’d have a nice breeze to cool us off in the evenings. And boy! Were we ever happy! We hadn’t camped much since Syria, and we were really looking forward to getting the tent back out again in Thailand. Visions of fresh air, peace and quiet, and a canopy of green trees filled our heads. And Thailand was like one big campground! Palm forests everywhere…we could plant our tent wherever we liked!

The first night shattered our dream into a million pieces. We camped inside a national marine park, about 20 yards from the shores of the Gulf of Thailand. All was set for a good night’s sleep. But…where was the refreshing night breeze that should have lulled us to sleep? The air was still as the dead, and it was 90 degrees inside AND outside the tent. The nights were almost as hot as the daytime! (Sure, that’s the way it was in Bangkok, too, but we figured that it would be different by the sea and out in the open…). But even by the Gulf, there was no breeze! Suffice it to say that we didn’t sleep all night, drenched in sweat and tossing and turning. We were lucky if we got maybe ½ hour of sleep.

That was a huge disappointment. We tried to camp on two or three other occasions, but it was useless. We didn’t sleep, which made it only that much harder to bike in the heat the following day. So, other than the one night that we were invited to stay with a Thai family, we resigned ourselves to staying in guesthouses, where we would at least have a fan. The guesthouses in Thailand aren’t bad. They’re generally clean and cheap – between $3.75 and $6.00 per night, with private bathroom and fan. But it wasn’t what we had expected, plus it was still money that we hadn’t planned on spending. But at least we slept better….

Because without sleep, well, I just couldn’t deal. After that first night of camping, I broke into tears at breakfast. The unbelievable heat, the oppressive humidity, the lack of sleep, and the still-there migraine that seemed never to have left even once during the last year that we’d been in hot climates all combined to make me lose it. I felt that if I had to put up with one more day of heat and one more migraine, I would go insane. Already, I’d been dreaming of Siberia for the last six months…. Luckily, it got better from that point on. It was just as hot in the daytime, but the ceiling fans in the evenings worked wonders on the morale.

And the landscape really was beautiful, by anyone’s estimation. Southern Thailand was a land of banana trees, coconut palms, pineapple fields, trees with delicate orange flowers, and teak wood houses with thatched roofs on stilts. We saw endless rows of rubber trees. The rubber drained as a liquid from the trees into little bowls that were attached towards the bottom of the trunk. It was then passed through a machine and turned out into roughly rectangular rubber mats that looked a lot like car floor mats.

Large, golden Buddha sculptures occupied the tops of many hills or mountains. For a short while, as we biked along the Gulf (east) coast, we could see the mountains of Myanmar (Burma) in the distance. We passed fishing villages along the coast, towns whose waters teemed with colorful, flag-adorned boats. A specialty in this area was dried fish, and you could see plenty of the small fish drying on boards alongside the roads. Women sewed 10-ft. palm leaves together with bamboo for their thatched roofs. Large photos of the King, the same as we had seen in Bangkok, were posted in the towns and along certain stretches of road.

A lot of the landscape reminded me of what a prehistoric jungle might have looked like thousands of years ago. The hairy palms, which had enormous spikes and hairy growths protruding from the trunks, seemed to come from a different world. I felt like Indiana Jones when I stepped off the side of the road for a pit stop. The enormous dried skeletons of palm branches looked like huge bones, and the huge coconuts scattered on the ground looked like enormous skulls.

Most Thais drive motor scooters, the women as well as the men. But pick-up trucks were also common, and if a family had a car, it was sure to be gleaming and brand-spanking new. Schoolchildren rode home from school in “buses” that were like big, rickshaw taxis. Or, in the smaller villages, they sometimes rode home on the side-cart of a motorcycle!

The day laborers often rode together in the backs of pick-up trucks, and they all wore long clothing and broad-rimmed hats, and many even wore scarves that entirely covered their faces. It was a necessity in a land where the sun kills. After a couple of days on the road, burned hands, and continual re-applying of my #60 sunblock, I also started wearing long clothing. And after 10 months in the Middle East and India, I had been so happy that the dress code in Thailand was relaxed for women and that I could finally wear shorts! Oh well, out came the long shirt. Everything was covered except the hands and the feet, and this was very difficult in 100-degree heat, but it was better than being scorched beyond recognition!

One of the highlights of our trip south, for me, was seeing monkeys pick coconuts. They were trained by men, who sometimes brought them to fields of palm trees in pick-up trucks. The monkeys would do their work, and then sit in the back of the truck on top of the coconuts, alongside the men. We even saw an ancient, monkey-faced man with two monkeys riding on his bicycle stop to pick coconuts in the tree next to where we had stopped to rest. He chained one to a tree and sent the other up another tree, with words of instruction. The monkey scrambled up agilely ad twisted and turned the coconuts rapidly and deftly until they fell to the ground with a big thud.

One of the joys of visiting Thailand is eating the delicious, mouth-watering tropical fruit: pineapple, mangoes, bananas, watermelon, jackfruit, tangerines, litchis, pomelo, rambutan, papayas, passion fruit, star fruit, and pomegranate. What a treat! And let me tell you, some of this fruit has got to be among the best fruit on earth! We ate juicy pineapples that were a thousand times better than any pineapple I’ve ever eaten in the West. One time, we stopped alongside the road in order to buy a pineapple and the fruit vendor cut open two of them and decided to throw them away because, as she said, they were no good. Well, they looked okay to us, and because we were obviously disappointed to not have a pineapple to eat, she decided that she’d just give it to us instead of selling it to us. So she cut it all up for us and offered it to us, and I swear, without exaggeration, that it was the best pineapple I had ever had in my life (up until that point, because they’re all amazingly good here in Thailand)! My God, if this was a bad one, I thought, I wonder what the good ones are like!!! We could only figure that the Thais must eat the good pineapples themselves and export the bad ones to unsuspecting consumers abroad who don’t know the difference!

And the mangosteen – my God! Like Heaven on Earth! Must be the fruit of the gods. We ate kilos upon kilos upon kilos and never had enough. But they spoil quite easily and are impossible to export. Queen Victoria of England even offered a reward to anyone who could figure out how to transport a good mangosteen back to England! Unfortunately, this initiative did not meet with success, and anyone who has ever been to Thailand will cry for the mangosteen once he leaves. This delicate and sweet fruit in and of itself constitutes a perfectly good reason to visit Thailand!

If the mangosteen is called the “Queen of Fruits,” the durian is called the “King of Fruits”. But the “king” made us a bit more wary. You could smell it half a mile away – no joke. And the smell was anything but pleasant. In tourist areas in the larger towns, signs could be seen in elevators in hotels and in the airports: “No Durian!” with a picture of the durian fruit crossed out. The smell was just too horrible and too strong. Once it was introduced into a place, the smell never went away!

One thing that we especially appreciated was the village markets. In fact, the markets were held in between villages in the countryside, and villagers would come from nearby villages on their motor scooters to do their shopping. The Thais sold fruit and vegetables, fresh fish, dried fish, local fast food, grilled or fried meat, and raw meat, which sat out all day and was swarmed by flies. There was usually a stand of insects, arranged in piles under a piece of glass: grasshoppers, ants, grubs, water bugs, bamboo worms, silk worms, etc. Sometimes a pig’s head hung on a hook, its eye making me queasy and its teeth blood-red, with blood still dripping from the severed neck onto the table. Alongside the head, one could find its intestines, feet, lard, ears, and tongue. It’s been said that they eat everything in Thailand – nothing is wasted!

A wonderful Thai invention was the three-wheeled scooter taxis that doubled as food stands. Men and women drove them from village to village, selling noodles, soup, veggies, grilled meat, or cold drinks from the side-cart. Mobile food-stands – how awesome is that!

The big news is that we survived our first week of monsoon weather! Just when I thought that things couldn’t get any hotter and when I was praying for rain, the skies opened up and let loose. What a relief! For ten days, it rained off and on. At first, it rained only in the afternoons, but it came earlier and earlier as days 1, 2, 3,and 4 passed. We would be drenched after only one or two minutes in a light rain. Heavy rain was difficult to bike through. The rain would sometimes stop for short intervals, and just when you thought that you were about to dry out, it would start again with renewed force. We spent a couple of days entirely soaked through. For the first several days, I was immensely relieved. It cooled things off considerably and the clouds blocked out the intense rays of the sun. But then, after a few days of non-stop, heavy rain, I started to hope that it would stop. Whew, couldn’t we just find a compromise?

We were invited to share in a village picnic one Sunday afternoon, and the people seemed so thrilled to have us among them. It has to be said that we were on a teeny, tiny road in the middle of nowhere, far from the towns, where the locals had probably never before seen “farangs.” (foreigners). So it was a big event for them. They had already started the clean-up when we passed by. They called us over and invited us to sit down, and out came the dishes, one by one…curries, seaweed, grilled fish, spiced fish, baby corn and meat, peanuts, rice, mango, bananas, coconuts, sweets…it seemed never-ending, the succession of plates that they placed before us. What a feast!

We visited about half a dozen national and marine parks in southern Thailand, and that was a real treat. I talk more extensively about Khao Sok National Park – a real jungle experience! – in another journal entry.