Lots of rain as we whack up from the Malay border to Bangkok
7th November 2005

Crossing the border is complicated but amiable
All quiet on the western coast
Not just monsoons but cold fronts, too
Cargoes on the canals

Thailand, land of smiles and squiggles

We can be relied upon to pick a bank holiday weekend for crossing into a country when we have currency that needs changing. Maybe it was because of the bank holiday or just the orderliness of the border but there weren’t even any of the usual currency hawkers badgering to change money that we had grown accustomed to in Africa and South America. Where are they when you need them? They hassle you to high heaven when you don’t have anything the change and now there are none for love nor money. Typical, I say. Maybe it’s an Asian thing. We’ve proudly been salting away a bit of money each day and we’ve got to the point of covering the port costs at Singapore, the oil change and all the souvenirs we’ve bought out of our daily allowance of £20 per day. Usually we kind of ignore these things in our auditing and so our life savings have been shrinking a little. For once we can say that we have truly covered all our expenses from our rent money and ...... it’s all in a softish currency that we apparently won’t be able to change north of the border area. Hopefully we can recoup some of this from travelers heading the other way who might be needing some Ringgits. Anyway, there we were in a new country, with no local wonga and the prospect of riding 320km without even being able to buy a cuppa. But we did find an ATM eventually.

The border crossing had been pretty straightforward with only the Thai customs officer being less that efficient. Poor lad obviously had been educated in Thai script and wasn’t too hot on entering latin script into his computer. (Be fair Pat how many Brit customs officals could cope reading a Thai registration document) As he painstakingly entered all the bike details letter by letter, I grew weary and itched to get ahead. I pointed out a couple of mistakes and he seemed confused about what I was trying to say. To help out I leant through the window and deleted and amended as needed. He seemed so delighted by all this that I ended up filling in the rest of the forms for him. Strangely all of the user interface had been written in English so there was no wonder the poor bloke was struggling.

Thai has it’s own script with 44 characters. The letters of Roman script are kind of tidy and untwiddly, what the Romans missed out on the Thais made up for. Added to which they have a German philosophy on words, where you make hugely long compound words. So the equivalent of chicken fried rice with veg becomes one enormous word of incomprehensible squiggles. I was at a loss to know even whether words read from left to right or right to left as in arabic.

Whilst Pat was doing all the officialdom, I was becoming increasingly surrounded by curious customs guys. It’s a man thing, I am sure, that one man starts looking at a bike and then the other men feel they must be missing out on something and start doing the same.

Much to my relief anything that was thought to be a place that tourists might want to go was signposted in dual script. But they did add a new obstacle to navigation by seemingly deliberately hiding signs behind huge trees.

Krabi, tsunami sufferers

I’m afraid to say that on our first day in Thailand I didn’t feel at all up to trying to negotiate for food, the script was way to alien to even contemplate pronunciation, so we made it all the way to Krabi (tourist-ville) without so much as a cup of tea. In tourist-ville, I am ashamed to say I knew that menus would be in English as well as Thai.

Krabi, had a distinct lack of tourists about it. We found a lovely room, with balcony, cable TV homey, and spotlessly clean for £3.50. We knew we could have found cheaper, but why? It was nice for a change to be in countries where we could afford to upgrade a little. We were the only guests, in discussion with the owner, we discovered that tourism hasn’t recovered since the Tsunami. The beaches around Krabi had been protected from the force by the peninsula of Phuket, but potential tourists were staying away. Looking around the town, some guest houses had already closed down and restaurants were eking a living out of a couple of tourists a day. How much longer can the businesses hold on I wonder waiting for the holiday makers to return? In theory the beginning of high season would be in a couple of weeks let’s hope. Anyway for us, the lack of tourists was great.

We’d been trying to buy some kind of malarial prophylaxis since we arrived in Singapore and at least we found a chemist who could sell us Doxycycline without a prescription. At 3 Bhat per pill, this represented a daily cost to us of 16p - a small price to pay to avoid such a nasty disease. Buying them singly does mean of course that you don’t get the papaerwork with them and the combination of a load of Thai characters with the number 2 in the middle doesn’t tell noe whether it is one every two days, two every day or even two with each meal. The pharmacist seemed to be suggesting one, twice a day with food. That sounded about right

There was a night food market, that sold all kinds of unpronouncible dishes that all looked delicious. There was a guy making teeny weeny pancakes and then filling them with unknown substances, there were noodles, and curries, fresh juice stalls, fried mussels. As you wandered around the sharp fumes from hot chilli oil stole your breath and made you gasp for air.

We hadn’t done any beaching it so far and nearby there was the promise of idyllic strips of sand. It was time to get the palid flesh out into the sun. The scenery around is dramatic, huge edificies of rock thrust through the earth’s surface. Trees cling to the tops of the pillars and into the crevices.

To keep Hippy happy, I whisked her along to Ao Nang which is out on the coast proper, Krabi being up a mangrovey creek. The scenery was absolutely stunning; pillars of limestone dressed in verdant forest that did little to hide the ruggedness of the faces beneath, lush fields of all manner of crops and then the palm lined white sand beaches. Yes, this is truly the tropical paradise that so many sun worshippers flock to, returning home not disappointed.

Ao Nang beach, for all its white sanded palminess, is not the most attractive offering - somewhat linear and thronged with huge numbers of long-tail boats. The boats serve the purpose of whisking all the farangs (that’s us) off to the sea locked beaches just around the headland and so we did as everyone else and hopped aboard for a brief passage to a secluded, deserted beach. I must just explain about these boats. The boats themselves are brightly painted high prowed beasts with seating for about 10 which is fairly sraightforward. It is the propulsion system that amazed me. I’ve seen them before in documentaries and Films of the James Bond genre but never actually come across a four cylinder car engine perched on a pivot with a 12 foot scaffold pole welded onto the output shaft, trailing into the water with a prop on the end. Cooling is provided by a pair of hoses, to and from the sea. With a long tiller, the captain can tip the whole arrangement forwards and so lift the prop clear of the water, or turn the whole unit past 90 degrees to the boat for manoeuvring. Of course, turning past the right angle does present some problems for the skipper who is then precariously hanging off the side of the boat to keep hold of the tiller. All very exciting.

Regrettably, as everyone and his mother had also taken the long-tail boats out to the deserted beaches, they were no longer deserted. Indeed, they were pretty much saturated with sun worshippers, food and drink vendors, craft sellers and massage therapists. Now folk had warned that hawking is a bit in your face in Thailand but we found that although they were numerous, a polite “no thankyou” was quite sufficient to get them to leave you alone. They all came back later on the other way down the beach, but not, I feel, to hassle, simply because we probably all look alike to them and so they couldn’t remember who had said no the first time. This is not troublesome hawking. For that, go to Egypt. The scenery was even better than inland with little islands scattered hither and thither and bold exposed rock faces behind the beach. We could see why this is such a mecca for sport climbers.

Man, was the sun hot. I was hugely surprised, with it heading into autumn and us being considerably north of Singapore where although stiflingly hot the sun had not seemed so strong. Within a couple of hours, even though we were lathered up with appropriate lotions, we’d had enough and recognised the beginnings of pinkness on each other. We bailed out.

Back at the hotel we took it in turns to take cooling showers. As I lay on the bed trying to find the most comfortable position thumbing our copy of Lonely Planet, I thought I’d dip in and check on the approved dosage for doxycycline to discover to my great joy that a side effect of this drug is increased photo-sensitivity. Always reassuring to know exactly why it is that you can’t move without feeling that your skin is on fire.

Getting wet is getting habitual

Thus scorched, a second visit to the beach was unappealing and so we decided to buck up and crack on towards Bangkok and the chance of meeting up with Jon and Richard. We reserved at their hotel before we set off, figuring that having a room waiting for us in a hotel with parking in the middle of Bangkok would be a damn good idea. A whole £20 per night was not going to break the bank and judging by the hotel’s own information it did look rather swanky. (by our standards!)

Our road maps of Thailand vary quite considerably with regard to simple details such as the presence of roads. Although this may be perhaps their single most important feature, I can forgive them if the map is well out of date and we were looking to use recently built roads. There is an excellent road from just north of Krabi to Surat Thani which by appearance has been built for well over 5 years but was indicated variously on our under-5-year-old maps as entirely non-existent, part costructed or mostly upgraded. Only the rather feeble, not to scale, tourist map had it correctly identified as a multi-lane highway. Great news for our day’s progress but it did leave us a little uncomfortable about which of our plethora of maps to use in future. For once the weather was being good to us. The overcast skies remained lightly so even through my combination of sunglasses and lightly crazed visor.

We managed a couple of hundred miles without having to resort to the waterproofs; a few drops here and a few there, but always the road stayed dry which is the yardstick by which we judge whether to upgrade our protection. Sometimes the road swung towards a mucky bit of weather and then, as we approached, turned back towards vestiges of blue.

Then we came round a corner over a crest and got drenched.

It’s tricky trying to get a one piece waterproof suit on over damp clothes. And debateable whether there is any point. The rain got stronger, though, and I was happy that the dampness was limited. Once again this was the kind of tropical rain that forms a wall in front of you. even though I had now dispensed with the sunglasses, it became impossible to see more than a few feet in front. I was greatly relieved that the Thai drivers did not live up to their poor reputation for road safety and all slowed down appropriately.

There was a garage we took the opportunity to fill up, take in a drink and wait for the storm to blow over. As the drinks seller picked nits out of her daughter’s hair I felt thankful that we had had the foresight, to eat earlier at a service station down the the road. It a wonderful meal, absolutely, no idea what it was called, and I was surprised from our aimless hand waving that the proprietors managed to prepare a wonderful repast.

When the next dowpour fell, we pulled in under a porch, being waved enthusiastically by a young lady. We felt slightly embarrassed when we realised that this was in fact their home. Luckily we had set off early enough to accommodate these downpours. We were making good time and less than 100km from our destination, on a 520km day’s drive. The weather was not letting up and we began simple ‘conversation’ with the kindly lady who had invited us to take shelter. We were struggling with communication until she suggested written correspondance. She had just finished university and had become used to reading and writing English but hardly spoke a word. To us she looked about 16, but was in fact 25, she looked so young. Was this the healthy Thai diet, the Buddhist philosophy, or a genetic complexion. Whatever it is something is keeping Thai people looking youthful. Later, in Bangkok, someone told us that Thais believe us, Westerns take on too many worries and make themselves old. They are probably right. Added to which the food here is healthy, a lot of fresh tangy soups with veg and a little meat.

It the stilted written conversation, Pat asked when she thought the ran would stop. ‘November’. Another 6 days then. Her name translated into Roman script was Tipsape (Tipsarpey) she was lovely, kind and patient with our pathetic attempts to understand the bits of Thai she was trying to teach us. It’s one of those tonal languages were it is crucial the pitch you use. It’s a whole new ethos on speech with us, and we were not coping. We laughed at our own uselessness. She laughed, too.

The rain cleared again. We set off. The rain started again. We stopped in a service station. A chap pulled up and told us that he’d driven down from Bangkok that morning in rain all the way. There was a front blowing in off the sea and it would hang around for three days. Oh, joy. With this received knowledge we thought we might as well just keep going and hope for somewhere decent to stay at the end of the day where we could dry out.

Prachuap Kiri Khan is at the limit of weekend beach locations for the Bangkokese. It doesn’t really have much of a beach, more of a sandy, muddy strip in front of the sea wall. There’s a couple of hotels along the front but they weren’t really our cup of tea. We opted for a little place in the centre of town that reminded me much of a caravanserai. The ground floor was dedicated to a restaurant and a parking area. In the parking area, folk were loading and unloading boxes of all kinds of stuff that gave the impression of a trading post. There were even a couple of bicycles sporting British flags (does a pole on a bicycle count as a jack staff, in which case they could be accurately called Union Jacks). The rooms were simple but spacious and we soon had the place filled with dripping bike paraphernalia - like usual.

As I humped the stuff up the stairs, I bumped into the cyclists, Ben and Jamie (at first we thought they said Ben and Jerry which would have been a strange coincidence indeed). They had cycled from England to Moscow, taken the train to Peking and were on their way to Singapore whence they were going to make for Australia, the Americas and so on. They were the most together pair of cyclists we’ve come across. Usually the strain of keeping pace with one another drives a wedge between groups but they seem to have kept similar levels of fitness and avoided this potential problem. Their real trump card is that they are cousins who come from quite a close family and have spent much of their childhood holidays together. This may be the healthiest way to grow up together; enjoy quality time together and then escape to home before the sibling squabble effect takes over.
They had set themselves an interesting challenge to circumnavigate the world, keeping themselves and the bikes on water and land. This means that they have the unenviable task of trying to get themselves cheap passage on ships between continents. I wish them luck.

There’s a monkey temple in town which is infested with monkeys. The story goes that a group of monkeys hitched a ride on a bus from Bangkok and enjoyed the fruit here so much that they stayed. Something tells me that this may be a load of boloney! Ought to mention that we had our first sight of a trained monkey perched atop a pile of coconuts on the back of a pickup. Seems that they are still the best method of collecting the nuts from the top of the trees. Yet to see them in action, though. Back to the monkey temple. There really are hordes of monkeys doing their usual stuff on the steps up the hill; shagging, fighting, playing with themselves, picking ticks. They say that monkeys are very like us. You could buy peanuts for feeding the little monsters and it seemed that this is having a seriously bad effect on their health. I only speculate but as all they seemed to be eating was the peanuts and the vast majority of adults suffered from the most hideous goitres, it seems that the two might be connected. Rather distressing, really. The views from the temple were rather poor because of the front blowing in and so the whole visit was a bit dispiriting.

Our hopes for a stunning stormy sunset were snuffed by the gathering clouds, too, and so everything was a bit depressing. It is such a relief at times like this to bump into charming company like Ben and Jamie; everything seemed so much nicer.

Probably the weather and stuff but we fell out over money as usual. I was sure we’d been saving enough to cover our night in a poshish hotel in Bangkok but Hipy said not. On further analysis it turned out that she’d not carried a one and so thought we had a hundred quid less that we actually had. Humble apology from a some time maths teacher ....... OK, point taken. The only thing that I can say in may defence is that I think I tend to overcompensate for Pat’s underestimation of our expenses. He was also unhappy that I had included the cost of shippage, which meant that we were definitely in deficit. Anyway this is not the time to bicker about it. No, I’m sure you’ll think of a better one.

There was something honest that I liked about Prachuap Kiri Khan. The stores had the patina of years of use. Wooden display cabinets lined the walls, and counters harped back to an earlier era, when the customer was not expected to cart his own stuff around the store and was waited on by the staff.

We had made ourselves enough slack in the timetable to make just on more stop before hitting Bangkok. It was only 60km out of the capital and would leave us with plenty of leeway in time and energy to cope with the promised chaos of Bangkok roads. Trucks passed us on the highway, showing their colours, iconic images of the members of the Bee Gees decorating their mudflaps.

Floating market, land-lubber customers

Damnoen Saduak’s famous for it’s floating market, the guide book had recommended that to avoid the invasion of farangs at 9am on day trips from Bangkok it was wise to stay the night and see the place early doors. Wandering around the place the night before, we discovered that the town was effectively on a swamp, with the houses built on stilts and walkways over the canals and little foot bridges connecting the homes.

We did our best to find out how to get around the market on the cheap, figuring that if this was genuinely a market used by the locals there must be an alternative to the boats offered to farangs at 450 Bhat per hour (compare this to a figure of 250 Bhat a night for a hotel room with aircon and TV). There really did not seem any option but to try to hook up with some one else and share a boat. In the morning, though, we seemed to be the only foreigners in town. We satisfied ourselves with wandering along the banks and walkways and getting snacks and the likes when the boats pulled up to the shore. The point of the market then dawned on me. It was obviously set up for the benefit of the folks who lived out along the waterways and brought their produce down to the market in their little boats. Upon reaching the market they would pull up at the shore so that the locals could buy their wares. In fact taking a tour boat and congesting the situation is probably counterproductive as it just increases the traffic. Taking pictures from a rocking boat is also less viable. We came away satisfied that we’d ‘done’ the market the right way. I guess in tourist economy terms we would have contributed more by hiring a boat but we’re just too tight. As we left, the buses began to drop off folk who had to face the barrage of boat offers. Good luck to them.

When we arrived at the market it all seemed a little low key, a few boats with veg, and breakfast wares. The floating food hawkers had the most tempting array of dishes lined up, with a wee stove to cook up those all important noodles. Women were the main vendors. Given the heat, a hat was a sensible accessory, and the traditional choice was something that looked highly practical, but shaped as it was in a lampshade style, I couldn’t really see it catching on in England. Their straw hats complimented their richly coloured attire, of maroon or indigo. As they were sitting cross-legged passing their wares to punters on the bank by way of their oars, they looked at ease and had the efficiency of those who are accustomed to the oscillations of the water. Some had been quite ingenious with their ‘stalls’ and had vertical shoe racks to display their goods, in their little boats. Maybe if we had come 20 year’s ago modernity and the tourist tat would not yet have infiltrated the market ethos. But I quite liked that fact that this was a town in flux, some vendors in traditional outfits others fashion conscious and make up wearing. What will it be like in in another 20 years, I wonder. The sad thing is that tourists are encouraged to come because they see something of the country’s culture, they do not want modernity. But as Thailand becomes more and more sophisticated it would be unnatural for things not to change. Let’s hope at least that the tourism does not end up by scaring the locals away from their own market.

At some imperceptable point in the morning the waterways had become congested with marketers selling, and tourists viewing. It all happened so gradually, one minute there seemed to be nothing happening and then without any bustle it was all busy. The on land market was getting into full swing as we left, with people disrobing rails of clothing and tourist nik-naks in time for the tourist buses to arrive. It was time for us to leave, I think.

As we packed to leave and face Bangkok, I got to chatting with a couple of Kiwis who had also tried the early morning market approach only to be a bit dissapointed. They assured me that the floating markets in Myanmar are a lot more interesting and, due to the lack of tourists, pretty pukka. Further chatting revealed that they were friends of Pete and Dianne who we met in Egypt 4 years ago. It is, as they say, a small world.