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The night before I had camped in the mangrove swamp of Mu Ko National Park. In the morning when I broke camp I had ahead of me a 600km cycle to the Malaysian border which I aimed to cover in just 4 days.

This would mean cycling +140km each day and my route would take me from the Gulf of Thailand coastline, across the central highlands of southern Thailand and to the Andaman Sea coast.  My destination was the Wang Prachan Border crossing and I was not planning to stop anywhere along the way.

If you have read my post – ‘Tour cycling – my schizophrenic friend’ (if not – click here) then you will know how I approach days when I need to cover huge distances and so I will not go into it in detail here but just give a quick recap which is – eat, cycle, coffee, cycle, wifi stop to get out of the sun for an hour, cycle, coffee, eat, cycle until it goes dark, and finally sleep. The plan was to get on with this routine for four straight days which would then get me to the Malaysian border.

On the first day when I set off from the National Park breakfast was a red hot curry at 7am in the morning. Definitely one to get the sleep out of your eyes and just what was needed to fuel the next 8 hours of cycling.

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My exact destination that day was not set and I would just cycle until it went dark. My plan had been to cover +140 km but camping had put me an hour behind schedule by the time I had broken camp and the winds were howling straight in my face all day. This meant that by nightfall I had only covered 110km which I was okay given the conditions. There really is little you can do about the wind conditions and if they are against you then it is hard work. By the end of the day I was knackered.

That night I found accommodation just off the highway called Latda House in Lamae. It was ‘motel’ style accommodation – just 15 connected rooms in a row behind a Chinese style restaurant. It had all I needed – food on the door step, a shower, a fan and a bed. All for £5.

The next morning I was up at 6am and out on the road by 6.30pm determined to cover +140 km even if the winds were against me again, which luckily they were not. There was no need for a map as the road that I was taking from the Gulf of Thailand Coast to the Andaman Sea Coast was Highway 41 and there would only be one right turn in the whole of the 600 km route. This meant that I could just get my head down and get on with the job of banging out the kilometers.

I really do appreciate the breaks off the bike when covering big distances and I always look forward to the coffee stops along the way as they definitely gave me a renewed determination when I got back on the bike after a 15 minute break.

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The closer that I got to Malaysia the more the food was changing in style from fresh to stews and curry. This meant that breakfast, lunch and dinner was now curry and rice. At least you got to see what you were ordering as you basically were given a plate of rice and then helped yourself to what you fancied from the selection on offer.

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I have now eaten a fair few of these places and still have not worked out the pricing structure.  It seems to be based on how many different curries you eat, and it didn’t seem to matter about the amount you ate of each just the number of different curries eaten.

By the end of the day I had hit my target of 140km by the time I arrived at a town called Wiang Sa. Here I think I got the largest hotel room that I have had on this trip – it was huge. I asked if they had a smaller cheaper one but the lady just said ‘all same price’, so I took the biggest one.

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Once showered and I had hand washed the cycle clothes for the following day I went to find food, but as it was Sunday the whole town was shut. No food was on offer anywhere and as normally happens when you ask people will point you in a direction and I blindly follow without really knowing where I was going. I was like the pied piper being led on a merry dance and every time I gestured to people that I was looking for food they all just pointed me in the same direction. After 1 kilometer or so it became obvious where everybody in town was – they were at the night market and so I joined them for food.

The following day the rains had set in and my day really was structured around this. When it rained so heavy that it became too dangerous to cycle I would pull over and get a coffee or some food and then when it calmed down a bit I would push on until the rain again pushed me off the road.

About the most exciting thing that happened all day on the road was that I would have to actually turn. This may not sound too much to talk about but after heading down the same road for nearly 400km it was something to look forward to let me tell you.

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I could say that I was so excited that just afterwards I stopped for lunch but the real reason was that the rains had returned and so I decided to take lunch to get out of the rain. The bonus being that I had picked somewhere that actually didn’t have curry on offer, and so my personal chef made me a delicious soup which I had not seen for a few hundred kilometers and made a great change from the curry.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UYyXE7wh97U&w=500&h=400

As you can probably tell by the number of food pictures and videos I really did nothing during these few days except eat, drink coffee and sleep.  The only respite from this routine came that evening as I had arranged to stay with a teaching couple from Thailand. They lived in the provincial capital of Trang and this was the first city that I had been to since leaving Bangkok nearly two weeks before. It really was weird to see so many people walking down the road after spending so much time at the beach.

Em-orn and Ple, who I would be staying with, met me on the street outside their house with the biggest smiles that I had seen for ages. They could not offer me a bed as they had Kraete staying with them who is a Japanese teacher at the school where they work. Instead, I set my tent up in their garden while they went to the market to buy dinner.

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When I had first met them on the street I was slightly confused as I thought that they were police officers rather than teachers:

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Em-orn is on the left and Ple on the right. It turns out though that in Thailand there is a dresscode for different days of the week – I met them on a Monday and this was the day when people wear their official government issued uniforms. On a Tuesday it is pink, Wednesday green, Thursday is orange while Friday is Blue. Saturday and Sunday also get their own colours of purple and red respectively.

Apparently this system is based on the colour of the God who protects the day and in Thailand have become associated with birthday colours and as King Bhumibol was born on a Monday, Thailand is decorated with yellow on his birthday and everybody, and I mean everybody, wears a yellow t-shirt on this day.

Ple is a brilliant chef and whilst I was getting showered and doing my laundry, in an actual washing machine let me tell you, he was rustling up a tasty feast and we were joined for dinner by Kraete.

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After dinner we sat outside the front of the house and chatted about cycling. Both Em-orn and Ple are cycling enthusiasts and will often take cycling holidays. They are also the organisers for cycle rides in Trang province and the day before had organized the monthly ride for the area in which more than 600 people had taken part and cycled together for 40km; it was very interesting to look at their pictures and listen to their stories of the rides that they had organised.  None of the events were races but more about the community coming together as a way of promoting healthy exercise.

The other thing that they told me was something that had slightly confused me. Everywhere I have been in Thailand I constantly saw people wearing t-shirts with the slogan ‘bike for dad’. Em-orn explained that ‘dad’referred to the king as he was the father of the country and the ‘bike for dad’ was a cycling event that literally the whole country took part in to celebrate the king’s 88th birthday on the 5th of December.

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This August, the country will repeat the event but this time it will be ‘bike for mum’ as Queen Sirikit celebrates her 83rd birthday.

The other thing that Em-orn said that I should do before I left was to visit the island of Koh Lipe which lay 70 km off the Andaman coast and would be an hour and a half on a speed boat from Pak Bara pier.  This was a slight detour from my route to Malaysia but one that they said would be worthwhile and so I decided to head there when I set off cycling the following morning.

Before I set off though Ple had got up extra early and had made a full fry-up for breakfast – eggs, bacon, sausage, toast and coffee. Just what you need to kick off a day on a bike, and we were joined by another teacher who they give a lift to school each day.

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So, after breakfast instead of heading to the border I instead went to catch a speedboat to one of the most beautiful islands that I have recently been to.

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It was so amazing that I will write a separate post as it was to good just to quickly skip over here.

After a very relaxing couple of days on Koh Lipe I jumped the speedboat back, or the puke boat as it should be called. We were late getting back as the boat had broken down half way and it took them a while to work out what the problem was. This meant that we were literally dead in the water for 30 minutes and at the mercy of the waves which were rolling in and hitting us sideways. I think at least half the boat were throwing up by the end of the breakdown. Once fixed though we were back to skimming over the waves at nearly 70 kmph which bloody hurts when the boat catches the crest of a wave and takes off before slamming back down.

By the time that we eventually reached the shore and I had sorted my bags and bike out it was after midday. I knew that I would not make the border that evening as it was a good 80km away, and so instead my target would be the Thaleban National Park which is situated a few kilometers before the border; this is where I would camp one last time and where I am now sat writing this post.  This park is definitely not a quiet tranquil oasis though as the noise around me is deafening.

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The sun has just gone down and where I am camping is in the forest and next to a giant Lilly pond. The frogs are giving it 100% and being joined by the other nocturnal creatures of the forest, and the thousands of cicada that live here. It really all adds up to a cacophony of sound and am glad that I brought the ear plugs.

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I am so happy to finish my Thai adventure back in the rainforest as some of my best memories from my cycling here have been whilst camping. There really is nothing that can compare to it, and it has been a privilege to experience it first hand.

So after just over 3 weeks and nearly 1800 kilometers in the morning I shall cross the border to Malaysia to begin the next leg of my adventures. I have now covered over 2500 kilometers on my way through Vietnam, Cambodia and Thailand which seems so much but is just 10% of the total that I am aiming to cover during the next year. I just hope that I have the energy to keep up with all the adventures that are in front of me.

Hope you have enjoyed keeping up with the first 2500 km of my cycling marathon.

Cheers

Stewart

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The Run to Malaysia (Thailand)
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