November 16, 2006
To Pak Bara: nice road
Patrick goes to bed early and sleeps well. In the morning he is feeling better. We have cereal with cold milk, thanks to the mini fridge in our room. Tastes so much better cold!
Everything goes down in the elevator (the next best thing to having a ground floor where bikes just roll into the room). We load up in the lobby and out the dark tinted glass doors. A four lane highway with very light traffic leads us out of town. We see several runners and recreational bicyclists. Also, a couple of monks in their orange robes and a Buddhist temple or two.
After 12 km, we turn off towards Trang. It's 36km to Langlu where we'll leave the main road today. The first part is a brand new four lane highway that a plane could land on. Then we reach the road construction that intends to extend this runway. Another 15km further, we reach the "old" two lane road with a narrow shoulder. It's getting hot. We stop at a gas station and find the equivalent of Pocari Sweat in Indonesia and that is 100plus in Malaysia. This one is a bit sweet for our tastes though...but we need the electrolytes so down they go.
In Langlu, we take a short break and turn off for Pak Bara, a small town on the coast where tourists visit the islands just offshore. Again, a four lane road. What Indonesia needs in asphalt was put down in Thailand! We get to the town and settle into a nice bungalow before lunch. Across the road we have some good Pad Thai.
We walk down the one-road town scoping out our options for a possible visit to one of the islands of the National Park offshore. Maybe do some snorkeling most "mzungus' (a swahili term for white person or foreign descent, that we now use to describe tourists) hop straight on the "fast" boats that take most of them to the popular Ko Lipe and some others to Ko Tarutao where a season of Survivor series was filmed in 2002. Most agencies therefore specialize in just selling tickets. We do find a woman that can get us a long boat for the day to take us around sightseeing and snorkeling for 900 Baht each, about (US $50) total. Okay, we pay a deposit and head back to the room to escape the heat. After the daily afternoon downpour, we walk on the beach and on an exposed sandbar taking pictures of the beach, fishing boats and scenery.
Our TV has the same "star" channel we had in Jakarta. We watch two James Bond movies and a terribly bad "B" movie about Iraq, an especially bad copy of "Blackhawk Down."
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Today's ride: 61 km (38 miles)
Total: 1,520 km (944 miles)
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