Cambodia here we come

29^th November 2017

Pop Hostel, Trat

Hot and humid, with a breeze

Trat is the place to be if you want to take a boat to Koh Chang.  It's also the main transport hub from Thailand to Cambodia if you're using the Hat Lek border crossing.  We've been reading up on border scams which includes a fine for no passport photo (we now have 4, although what they do with them is a bit of a mystery), a bogus health inspection certificate (apparently we just ignore the request and walk straight through) and several other dubious practices that backpackers need to be aware of most of which involve the transport companies overcharging. 

We left Highway 3 for a while, travelling along the lovely coast road between Rayong and Laem Maephim and we were very pleasantly surprised to find a cycle path.  So much more relaxed, less traffic and generally greener, plus the added bonus of beautiful beaches.  Interestingly, European beaches usually have sunbeds laid out in twos, with an umbrella and table to share.  In Thailand, the deckchairs and tables are set up for families, usually 6-8 people, and eating and drinking is a favourite activity suitably catered for by the many permanent stalls on the beach, or, the travelling carts selling drinks and snacks, ringing bells to advertise their wares. 

Bike path, lasted for a couple of hundred kms

Family deckchair setup

But return to Highway 3 we must.  The road begins to undulate approx. 20kms before Trat, otherwise it's dead flat.  One particularly hot lunch time I spotted this poor guy, up a ladder, trying to fix whatever was wrong with the hundreds of wires entering and leaving this particular junction.  He wasn't even breaking a sweat.  Meanwhile, some girl guides were being led through town by a young woman, who, as a younger woman myself would have called a 'bossy moo'!  She got to wave the flag and shout a lot.

Up a ladder, in 34c, aye aye aye ......

Girl Power!

Trat is a very typical Thai city, not much for the average tourist except transport and accommodation.  There is a fabulous night market selling just about anything you could possibly wish for, and all of it so beautifully presented.  Last night we marvelled at the thousands of Mynah birds hanging around the centre of town.  We're not sure if Mynah's murmurate (is there such a word?) like Starlings, but, they were certainly gathering and making one hell of a noise.

Tomorrow we head down the narrow strip of land belonging to Thailand to the Cambodian border at Hat Lek.  On the left are the Cardamom Mountains in Cambodia, on the right is the ocean.  We are moving on .............

Laters

PS wildlife excitement, yesterday I saw a Raquet-Tailed Drongo!

Heat and grime

24th November 2017
B J Boutique Residence, Rayong
Hot and humid

We thought 5 days of relaxing in Bangkok would have set us up nicely for coming to terms with the heat of being on the road.  To a certain extent it has but when the thermometer jumps from 31 to 35, and the sun makes her presence felt in no uncertain terms, all bets are off.  Regular stops for cold drinks and a little sit down in the shade is definitely the order of the day.  We've become a bit obsessed with cappuccino frappes and our old favourite chocolate milk is back on the menu (there's scientific evidence suggesting recovering after exercise is enhanced by drinking chocolate milk).  Today I "remembered" around the 60km mark that I hadn't eaten since breakfast and started to feel a little peculiar.  Note to self: don't rely on BW to suggest food.

A cappuccino frappe

Highway 3 has been a bit of a bugger to be honest.  The further away from Bangkok we get and the closer to the Cambodian border the lighter the traffic.  We're even getting some jungle now and yesterday we saw a troop of monkeys.  Unfortunately they were picking around in a ditch of horrible trash looking for food, but still .......  In theory we have a lane to ourselves, but more often than not we share it with motorbikes coming in the opposite direction (the barrier in the middle is so high, or deep, they can't just slip across to the side they need to be, so they just ride the wrong way) also cars and trucks who have decided to stop for a drink, to buy some food or simply to have a chat.  It's all very cosy.

A cold drink stop, and we met these lovely pair

Haven't spotted a live one yet!

Highway 3, not ALL bad, some smiles along the way

New housing 'estate' on the outskirts of Rayong,

love the cheesy grin!

We skirted around the main part of Pattaya and ended up staying at Jomtien Beach.  A nice, if narrow, beach in parts crammed with beds and umbrellas for tourists, and the sea was a very acceptable 29c.  Even I went in for a swim. The resort is a mix of new high rise concrete monstrosities and the old, traditional Thai hotels, bars and restaurants.  This morning I was chatting to the lovely lady who cooked our breakfast and it would appear that business has been slow for the past couple of years.  Apparently, tourists now like to go to Laos or Cambodia. We didn't see much of the "sexpats" Pattaya is known for, or at least, it wasn't evident on the streets of Jomtien.

Jomtien

We are now going to comb the outskirts of Rayong for food and a cold beer.  Wish us luck!

Laters

Arrivals and departures

20 November 2017
Quite near Bangkok airport
Raining, 32c

Today we finally left Bangkok, having settled quite nicely into the Orchid Hotel 153 for 5 nights a beautiful old Thai building on the outskirts of the Koh San Rd area of Bangkok. Our flight from Athens, via Istanbul, was uneventful, apart from the inordinate amount of time it took to check the bikes in.  Something to do with a printer not working.

These days we like to settle in to a place, take our time to familiarise ourselves with the new currency etc, and get over the inevitable jet lag.  Despite having been to Thailand many times before the sensory overload never ceases to amaze.  It’s hectic, but for the most part polite.  The smells include a combination of foods, incense, sewers, heady flowers like Jasmine and, my favourite, Frangipani and music mixed in with car horns, drumming and bell ringing from the temples.  We love it.


After 3 days of wandering around the Koh San Road area, eating lovely Thai food, drinking freshly made fruit juices and generally relaxing and sleeping when we needed to, along comes Claire from Saigon.  Claire was on holiday and decided, at the last minute, to hop on a flight from HCM to BKK to spend the weekend with us.  What a joy, we hadn’t seen each other for almost 6 months, so talk, talk, talk we must.  While Dave put the bikes back together Claire and I took a jaunt on the river, a very cool, literally, way to see Bangkok and visited the Taling Chan floating market where we ate the most wonderful prawns and mussel fritters, drank passion fruit juice and had a massage that I will not forget in a long time.  I still feel bruised, but I’m sure it will have done me good!  This morning we waved goodbye, Claire setting off on her journey back to Blighty and us towards the Hat Lek border and Cambodia.

The lovely Claire

Lotus Flowers (I think)

Beautifully presented food at Taling Chan floating market

A box of sweet and savoury pancakes

Traffic-wise, Bangkok is horrendous and the city is now huge, so plod we must.  The road we are taking towards Chon buri is an industrial corridor, full of household names like Toyota, Honda, Komatsu and Nissan, so even though we have left the madness of Bangkok behind 54 kms on it’s still incredibly busy.  The trouble with getting out of cities like Bangkok is the time it takes, but there’s nothing to be done other than just plod.  We stopped for lunch at a stall along the way and both had noodles with pork.  I had forgotten that stalls supply drinking water, you help yourself to a glass, or in this case a plastic cup, and ice from a bucket.  In the UK we might have salt and pepper, HP and Tomato sauce on the table, in Thailand there are chilli flakes, chilli paste, peanuts, sugar and chilli oil.  Our lovely lunch, with a mango shake and fresh coconut juice, cost the grand total of 150 baht (about £3).

Thousands of schoolchildren, a big event at the Grand Palace

Fixing boat engines in Bangkok

Lunch

When it stops raining we will head out to try and buy some bread to go with our peanut butter (trying to buy bread that isn’t packed with sugar is a challenge) and milk for our porridge, acquired at the Tesco Lotus in Bangkok.  That’ll be breakfast and lunch for tomorrow.

I hear it’s cold and wet in the UK.  Still, it’s nearly Christmas!

Laters

Albania, Greece and beyond

13^th November 2017

Athens Moka Hotel
A cool and rainy 16 degrees

Get yourself a cuppa, it’s going to take a while .........

So here we are, just about at the end of the European part of our tour (4500 kms), in Athens.  My last entry was to say that the tablet had bitten the dust, so going back to Albania and The Llagoro Pass, this is how it’s all gone since:

The Llagoro Pass in southern Albania is one of those places that people long to do, to drive, or cycle it.  It’s elevation is  only 1024 metres but the gradients are unkind and the climb is less than 12 kms.  Most of the way we saw the 10% signs, but they are either giving averages, or, they’ve lost the numbers 1-5 because BW’s computer stops recording once it’s reached 12.5% (for some unknown reason) and it was blank for most of the climb.  The weather was hot and sunny, not so great on the way up, but led to amazing views and clarity at the top and on the way down.  There is a video, which we will be posting on YouTube soon, link to follow.

The Llagoro Pass

After making it to Sarande we hopped on a ferry to Corfu, where we didn’t do very much at all.  We met a couple of Aussies, Therese and Nick, who we managed to meet again in Athens, they were also touring on bicycles and we have unashamedly taken all the information and experience they could throw at us and used it with regards to boxing up the bikes, transport to the airport etc, so thanks guys!

It's always nice to find a Bristol

From Corfu we made our way down to Lefkadis, and onto Kefallonia.  Finding ferry information in Greece is not easy. Everywhere you go there are advertisements for ferries to every corner of Greece but when you enquire there are very few, ‘that’s the summer schedule’ we heard time and time again.  The internet is even worse, but, we found enough information to know that we couldn’t get from any of the islands to Patra, despite the ferries destined to and from Italy stopping at the islands.

On the way to kefalonia

Kefalonia

Kefallonia was our favourite island.  At this time of year not very touristy, but the weather was still 24 and sunny. The geography lends itself to goats and sheep, oh, and tourism, although it hasn’t succumbed in quite the same way as other places in Greece.

From Kefallonia we took the only ferry available to us to Kyllini, on the mainland.  The cycling between Kyllini and Athens, has, for the most part, not been great.  Patras was a port town with seemingly more problems than most cities.  We watched in horror as 4 police officers in full riot gear, on 2 motorbikes, raided a café opposite the passenger ferry terminal, forcing everyone to scatter.  Young men all of them, looking for a better life.  Further down the road we came across a massive factory, empty of the thousands of workers who at some point worked there, now home to refugees and the tons of rubbish they produce.

We passed over the Corinth Canal, still impressive the second time around, but only a small vessel went through this time so no WOW photos.

Corinth canal

And so onto Athens.  Parts of the coast were beautiful but sadly now neglected.  Like any major city, the outlying towns all, eventually, begin to merge into one long suburb.  The traffic was horrendous, the pollution worse than we’ve experienced in a long time and just not the kind of cycling we wanted to be doing.

On the way to Athens

Then it was chores.  We needed to work out how to box up the bikes and get them to the airport.  Recommendations from Therese and Nick meant we sorted that one pretty quickly by contacting Marios at www.cyclelovers.gr who is boxing up the bikes (E30 for both) and Greek Economy Transfer who are taxiing us, the bikes and luggage to the airport for E58.  The other thing I had to do was get a lump in my armpit checked out. We had a bank holiday weekend to contemplate the options, in the end we headed for a private clinic armed with all the information I could glean from Mr Google and the NHS websites. After a very thorough examination, ultrasound and blood tests, I was deemed fit and healthy and the proud owner of a fatty lump, something to do with my age and being post menopausal.  Phew.  Onward and upward.

Changing of the guard

Traffic is a huge problem in Athens

The Athenian Riviera left a bit to be desired but we really enjoyed Cape Sounion.  By the time we were on our way back to Athens to deliver the bikes to Marios the weather had changed. It’s cooler (most of the time), today it rained for the first time since we’ve been in Greece and the temperature dropped to 16 at one point, but it’s still very mild.  Remember Austria in August?  Eight degrees and 4 layers of clothing; Greece is not so bad.

Cape Sounion

Tomorrow we fly to Bangkok.  We have been shopping and bought a camera, I’ve decided I don’t like using the phone, and anyway, BW has the phone most of the time for navigation which is why we don’t have that many photos on the road.  BW has renewed his beard trimmer and we have a shiny, new laptop, on which I am now typing!  I can’t bring myself to chuck the foldable keyboard, so we’re going to keep it as a spare for now.  We’ve had a right good clear out too.  The little Chinese cooker (which was brilliant by the way) was dumped at the campsite at Cape Sounion, along with the coolbag, some clothes and a variety of herbs and spices and cooking accoutrements we no longer need. 

We’ve also given ourselves a good talking to. We’ve been guilty of ‘passing through’ Europe without seeing most of it as a destination.  I don’t know if that’s something to do with our mindset, we always think that Europe is very doable from the UK, just a short flight or ferry away.  Or perhaps because when we set off we always saw Europe as the ‘training ground’ for the rest of the trip.  We have now decided that everywhere is a destination to be explored!

We’re currently in dispute with Booking.com over accommodation we booked through them, and consequently have moved to a hotel, for the same price, in another part of town.  It was the Athens Marathon yesterday, meaning fewer reasonable hotel rooms available.  So we have ended up in a nice hotel, clean and basic, but in a rather grotty part of the city.  When walking to and from the hotel it’s common to see drug deals and prostitutes, but hey, I think you get that in most cities.  There are a lot of people sleeping rough too and we think part of the authorities’ attempt at moving people on and cleaning up at the same time, is to hose down the doorways early every morning.  What a life, I can’t imagine.

Rough sleeper

In the past we have felt time and/or financial restrictions, some of them perceived rather than real.  This time we have let go of the ‘budgetitis’ strings a bit and are taking things a tad easier, hence Marios  boxing up the bike and taking a taxi to the airport.  We know there will be times when we will end up in parts of the world where it’s going to be difficult to find a decent hotel, let alone a restaurant with a menu, and therefore limiting our ability to spend money.  So while we are in tourist areas, and there are nice hotels and restaurants, we are making use of them. Having said that, we still can’t find it in our hearts to use really expensive hotels/restaurants, the kinds our friends/family use on a regular basis, but we’re getting better at it!  

On the subject of touristy areas, can I just say that after several days, let alone weeks or months (as in South America), in the wilds of some continents, it’s so NICE to be in a tourist area.  There’s the obvious stuff like food, hotels and beer, the icing on the cake is meeting people who share the same language, possibly sense of humour, and, if you’re really lucky, those people are also cycle tourists!  Today, while in McDonalds (I know, tut tut, but sometimes it just has to be done, coffee and wifi E2, it was chuffing it down with rain) I overheard a guy trying to organise for his bicycle to be boxed to fly to France tomorrow.  What’s the chances of that happening?  I mean, we haven’t been in McDonalds for years!  We got chatting, were able to put them in touch with Marios and had a chat about routes and experiences.  It’s just a lovely thing meeting like-minded people, especially when we seem to be getting a bit thin on the ground.  It’ll be interesting to see how many we meet in Asia.

We were last in Thailand in 2009 and before that 1989, the differences were HUGE.  Can’t wait to see what’s happened in the last 8 years.  Good news - our friend Claire is going to be in Asia while we are in Bangkok, so with a bit of time to spare she decided to hop on a flight from HCM to Bangkok and spend the weekend with us!  Exciting or what?  We have been away almost 5 months and while we WhatsApp friends and family all the time, it’s not the same is it?  We’ve already earmarked the floating market, a foot massage and some clothes shopping; BW will probably be building the bikes!

I apologise for the lack of detail in this entry but I’m not very good at this ‘catching up’ business, I much prefer to write entries on a daily, or at least weekly, basis.  I bet you’re looking forward to that aren’t you?

Laters

All boxed up and ready to go!