BRUCESTATS - OVERALL TRIP - Unmettled Roads

BRUCESTATS - OVERALL TRIP

BRUCESTATS

OVERALL TRIP

Duration - 90 Days

Number of days cycling town to town - 43

Number of days we felt it was too hot - 88

Average price for a night in a hotel in Thailand - $16.18

Average price for a night in a hotel in Myanmar - $20.27

Average price for a meal in Myanmar - 80 cents per person

Average price for a meal in Thailand - $1.25 per person

Total cost of trip per person including airfare - $1750. or a little less than $20 per day.

Most important new item brought along - Actually two items tied for this distinction:

1.) Mosquito Electrocution Device in the form of a tennis racket.

2.) Sawyer Mini water filter.

Each of these items had the potential to save our lives. Since we are still alive we actually don’t know!

On a menu:

“Salad of Barking Der”

Total miles ridden on our bikes from town to town - 1268

Total miles ridden on our bikes in and around towns - 200

Total miles by other transportation - 770

Total miles covered on land in Myanmar, Thailand and Laos - 2238

Total number of snakes seen squashed on the roads - 99

Total number of live snakes seen on the roads - 2

Some names of clothing stores in Myanmar:

Dinky Diana

Wish

Smile Forever

Shoe & Fancy

On a menu:

“Chicken Wings with Meat”

On a woman’s t-shirt:

“Beautiful Tonight”

Number of raindrops - 0

Number of nights we used the tent - 0

Number of stomach problems or illness - 0

Number of flat tires - 0

The thought I had often while riding - ‘I love it here.’

lovebruce

This was at a coffee stand alongside the road in Thailand in the middle of nowhere. I ordered two coffees and we got one. We left it at that and shifted our attention to the beautiful shadows on the umbrella overhead as we shared a coffee.

I think these little gardens are meant to get the vegetables above animals that would love to eat them, such as free roaming pigs.

This may be an unappealing can but the woman at this stand made the best Thai ice tea of our entire trip.

This is in Laos where possibly the biggest company in the country is Beer Lao. I guess the sign is saying, yes, drink (Beer Lao, lots of it) but don't then drive.

You can just barely see a thin cable going around both bikes. We brought two of them but only used one. Having the cable on our bikes put us at ease but it was probably never necessary. We would bring the bikes into our rooms at night whenever we could. The bikes locked together could still be easily picked up and walked away with. Buddhist countries, man. I love Buddhist countries.

There was a golf course on either side of the main road here, just outside of Vientiane, and there were several stands with boys selling used golf balls.

This is a typical fairly nice newish room in Thailand. It would cost around $17 per night.

A beautiful really old teak wood building in Khemmarat, Thailand.

These are glass highway reflective markers that are embedded into roads in Thailand. They are right between the roadway and shoulder. And often they have been smashed and we absolutely did not want to ride our tires over the broken ones. We didn't even want to ride over the ones that were not broken because they are an obnoxious bump and the tires can slide off the rounded edges too which makes them actually quite dangerous for cyclists. I don't think they use them anymore.

The only thing I can come up with is that motorists are supposed to yield to bicyclists. There sure doesn't seem to be a bike lane here.

We killed a lot of mosquitoes with this. It has become an item we must travel with in Asia.

This is the best water filter I have ever had. It's super small and easy to use. It saved us lots of money and it saved the world of lots of plastic. We rarely bought water and instead filled our water bottles with filtered tap water every evening. Usually our rooms had small refrigerators so we filtered at night and put the bottles in the fridge so we would have nice cold/frozen water the next day.

Image not found :( — The narrow spot on the Mekong River. One of my most favorite spots on the Mekong.

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Marsha HanchrowI've got to ask: zero flats is great, but what did you carry just in case? What size are those wheels, and could you replace a tire if something disastrous happened to any of the four?
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4 years ago

Andrea BrownTo Marsha HanchrowWe carry spare tubes, patches, tire levers, etc. The wheels are 20", a common tire size for children's bicycles anywhere so possible to replace without too much drama although of course not the same quality as a Schwalbe Marathon Plus. On three trips we've had one flat, and that was a tube seam failure, not a puncture, and we've ridden over nails, bolts, glass, thorns, rusty metal slats, you name it.
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4 years ago

Jen RahnDid you carry Deet or any other powerful bug repellent?

Any noteworthy bug bites?

I'm imagining myself at Camp Mosquito Cloud in Geraldine, MT .. running around maniacally with the Executioner Racket.
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4 years ago

Bruce LellmanTo Jen RahnWe do carry a tiny bottle of DEET but I know I never used it and I think Andrea maybe used it a couple of times. In the 7-Elevens in Thailand they sell Skeetolene which is as good as DEET in my opinion. We only needed that sort of thing at dusk if we were eating outside and only around the ankles it seemed.

This racket weighs nothing, it's the size that is the problem. I wish it broke down into two pieces. It barely fits in the large pannier. It takes two AA batteries and that was a bit of a hassle because every day I had to remove them so that the racket wasn't activated constantly inside the pannier and also the batteries would go dead quickly. No big deal, just another thing I had to do every morning. I never needed to replace the batteries and we used it a lot. The racket worked great inside of every room. We killed hundreds of mosquitoes over the entire trip. We were able to get rid of every mosquito in the room before we went to sleep.

Best trip ever for no big bug bites. I think they are spraying the rooms more which we don't want them to do but we have no control. The rooms were cleaner overall than any previous trip.
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4 years ago

Jen RahnSkeetolene! I'd forgotten about that. I suggested that it was a product name that required a jingle, and Ron promptly composed one:

"Them skeeters gonna treat you mean ...
Don't worry none!
Get Skeetolene!"

Now .. if you can just invent a collapsible bug zapper racket with a jingle-ready product name, we'll come up with a jingle for you and we'll all make Million$!
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4 years ago

Bruce LellmanTo Jen RahnNice jingle Ron! If I come up with a collapsable racket and team up with you jingle people I'm sure we will all become millionaires. What cyclist or camper not want one?
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4 years ago