Boiling Hot Now

February 24, 2015

But not if there's an island nearby

Chumphon to Ranong (bus)

Ranong to Koh Chang Noi (boat)

Dear little friends,

Besides the disappointing accommodations that Bruce has outlined, Chumphon did have two amazing markets that helped it redeem itself. The first one was the night market where we probably had the best “tray food” yet. It was hard to decide where to eat but the lady with 34 trays and pots with 34 different choices won the day. We think maybe she has a cadre of cooks who make this curry or that soup and then she goes around and gathers them up and takes them to the market. That or she is some kind of Curry Deity that can just cook 34 different things every afternoon, no biggie.

Bruce has always said that when you start seeing mangoes in the market it's time to go home. We certainly made the most of mango season while we could. Chumphon, Thailand.

This woman wins the "tray food" prize for our trip, for the most variety, quantity, and quality. Out of the photo frame are many more dishes and pots.

The second was the day market which we would never have seen if we hadn’t had to catch our bus nearby, and actually, I didn’t see it, I guarded the bikes at the station while Bruce ducked in and took a few photos. It is immense and they sell everything there and if our guesthouse hadn’t been so sucky we would have stayed another day to explore it more.

A little treasure on the bench at the bus stop in Chumphon.

We were more than a little edgy about boarding another bus, but when it was time to pack the bikes in the cargo area, it was the polar opposite of our horrible Cambodian border bus driver experience. The guy calmly picked up our diminutive bikes, tucked them standing up into the cargo hold (they fit perfectly!), had us pad them with the panniers, and we climbed aboard.

The information we had gathered about Highway 4 had been correct, it was hilly, busy, hot, and with bonus hazardous and dust-filled construction areas, so we were pretty happy about our choice. The bus was quite fancy, it had wifi aboard which we made a big deal out of. Maybe this has been going on for years. Maybe we were behaving like the first President Bush who hadn't been to the grocery store in ages and discovered in the early 90s that there were these little machines that can read barcodes and give you an itemized receipt, only a mere 20 years after the rest of us found out. Which told us that H.W. Bush apparently didn’t do a lot of the family shopping or even pop in to grab a bag of fried pork rinds (his favorite treat). And we hadn’t been on many buses lately, so like him we too were missing all the latest upgrades. In case you have missed them too, wifi on the bus rocks! Now they need to put it on planes,too, at no charge. That's the way to keep passengers meek and compliant and preoccupied. Why make seats more roomy with adequate leg room when you can hypnotize passengers instead?

So our bus ride to Ranong was swift and comfortable and air-conditioned and wired in, but... but...there's that moment when you pile out onto the blistering parking lot, pull out the bike, stand it up with the Click Stand (which has been an icebreaker nearly every time we use it), load up the panniers, put your foot to the pedal and wheel away from the taxi and tuk-tuk drivers hollering for your business . It's really sweet, really freeing, and we totally love that moment of “pedal-away”.

Like any self-respecting Thai town, Ranong has a large Tesco Lotus store on the outskirts of town. With air conditioning. And ice cream.

Ranong was hot, very hot, in our bare little fan room in Chinatown. I think each of us picked that minimalist 20’s style room for our own reasons. Well, both of us wanted a cheapo of course. It reminded Bruce of a room he stayed at in Penang in 1978. For me, it had a bunch of bare cement floor where we could pack up our bikes if we wanted to do that in Ranong instead of Bangkok. There was no hot water here either but this fan room was so atrociously hot that hot water was the last thing we wanted, and by the time we left I was up to about 5 life-saving showers a day. The hotel certainly had a lot of sleepy, oldtime ambiance, and you expected to see Humphrey Bogart in his fedora at any moment.

The Rattanasin Hotel in Ranong. There is a picture in the lobby from about 70 years ago when all of the other buildings on the street are still made of wood.

Teak staircase in the Rattanasin Hotel, Ranong.

The Rattanasin has a minimalist aesthetic.

Red lanterns were being hung, and other preparations being made for Chinese New Year, it looked like we were going to have a ringside seat! So we settled in for a few days, walking miles around the steamy streets, riding our bikes to the evening market for “bowl food”, drinking iced coffees and tea in the Burmese market down the street. Many foreigners pass through Ranong in order to make visa runs in Kawkareik, Myanmar, a short boat ride away. They certainly don’t seem to stay long in Ranong, and not in our bare-bones little hotel. The Burmese influence is certainly there in Ranong, besides the market vendors, day-trippers from Myanmar and workers from the fishing depots and fishing boats spent their days off in Ranong, and it was fun for us to see the longyis and thanaka again.

Ranong is full of these "jeepney" type trucks. They are always colorful, and usually homemade, with front ends from many recognizable late model cars.

We worked long hours on the blog, even if we were not successful at uploading more than two posts because our internet went from speedy to tortoise. I will always wonder about that, if the hotels and guesthouses advertising free wifi are paying for a certain amount of data and once we hog it all with our photo uploads the pipeline gets cut off or at least considerably slowed.

Slaving away on the blog in the Rattanasin Hotel, Ranong.

Chinese New Year came and went, the firecrackers were loud, the cars were festooned with garlands, most of the shops in town were locked tight, and the owners of our guesthouse set up a little table of treats and drinks that apparently were for somebody else because by noon that had all vaporized and the party was over. It seemed like a good time to skip town once again, so we winnowed out stuff we would not need on an island paradise, like rain coats, wool hats, helmets, bike tools and the tent, and left four panniers behind the hotel counter entrusted to the care of the manager. “Manager” is somewhat of a stretch of a description for the Burmese boy who spent most of his time on the phone or singing or dashing up the old wooden stairs a hundred times a day. But he was a good guy.

We had scoped out the jetty area where we were supposed to catch the ferry to Koh Chang Noi, which is the island most recommended to us by other travelers. There is another Koh Chang on the southeast coast of Thailand near Cambodia, that one has high-rises, an airport, full moon parties and the like. The Koh Chang we were going to is another sort altogether.

The wooden boat was full of foreigners, and a couple of Thais, and bags and bags of ice, vegetables, beer, more ice, fish, yogurt, ramen noodles, and so on. After leaving the gnarly port water of Ranong we entered island water, deep green and increasingly cleaner and clearer the closer we got to the island. We had sort of arbitrarily chosen a guesthouse to stay in, a German guy on the boat called ahead and made some casual reservations at the same place and we chimed in that we were going there too.

“Oh, and some other people are coming too!” he hollered over the drone of the boat engine. And it was done. It was only later that we discovered just how lucky we were to have gotten a room at all, much less the room we got.

After dropping off people at various beaches, all of which had a few guesthouses with bungalows, and all of which were very beautiful, we ended up at the last beach, a tiny beach with only three guesthouses that each had anywhere from 4 to 11 bungalows, all perched here and there on rocks or set back into the jungle. A group of people met the boats, and there was a lot of hustle and unloading of ice and yogurt, and us. The tide was in and very high, people waded out to the boat up to their waists and the bikes and panniers got handed down to them and off they went to be plopped down on the sand.

After splashing ashore in the balmy seawater, we were shown a room at Mama’s, and it was amazing. It was just a simple room with a bed, a mosquito net, a table, and a nice little bathroom. But it had a porch area that was three feet above the high tide line, a set of concrete steps down to the beautiful peach granite rocks, and the curving end of the beach mostly to ourselves. It was better than we could have dreamed of.

Okay, I'll tell you what he is doing. The key is attached to a cord in his pocket. One thing about Bruce, he is pretty much nonstop entertainment.

It was a new moon when we arrived on the island, and the tides were extreme. Within a few hours the water would be a quarter-mile out.

No, we don't know what this is either. It was under a beachside tree with very strange fruit (not cashews, we know what those look like).

The view from Mama's dining area (looking north).

A supply/tourist boat comes in from Ranong.

Two boats a day bring in provisions, in this case it was many cases of drinking water. Most of the guests helped bring it up to the kitchen from the beach, forming a "bucket brigade".

I was innocently reviewing the photos on my iPad, and the young man behind me, who is Burmese, stopped to see all the photos from Myanmar. Mama (Thai), on the right joined in, and the other couple, who are also Burmese, got to see photos from the old country.

Our little beach had bi-colored sand, the golden brown granite sand and black, finer sand from some other element. The waves constantly played with the sand and made endless striped patterns, it was gorgeous, and we took far too many photos of it. The food at the guesthouse was delicious, at island prices of course because everything has to come in on the twice-daily boats. There was an hour or two of solar-powered electricity in the evening, just long enough to brush your teeth by, and no wifi at all except up island so our days were spent loafing, swimming, bird watching, eating, and listening to all the Europeans chatter, smoke, and drink up in the dining room till the wee hours. Neither of us had vacationed like this in our lives and it really was the perfect way to wrap up what has been a fabulous trip.

The solar array at Mama's. Each bungalow had one dim light from 6-9 or so, if you needed to charge a device you had to go up to the dining area.

The beautiful striped beach on Koh Chang Noi.

This is what the locals call "the freeway" on Koh Chang Noi.

Bruce settles into the jungle like he lives there.

It's approximately 155 degrees F out but Bruce keeps on shooting.

It took us a few days to catch on that those hooting sounds and enormous woodpecker/dinosaur-like creatures were hornbills. HORNBILLS. We had seen hornbills in a ratty enclosure at the botanical gardens in Pyin U Lwin, Myanmar. I had tried to imagine them in the wild and now, here they are, knocking down ripe cashew fruit and sharpening their bills.

Each of these lovely sculptures is formed by a tiny crab, who lives in the center hole. During low tide they scoop up sand and form balls that they suck the nutrients out of and then toss aside. They work fast, too, the tide had only been out an hour or so.

Dolphins, hornbills, clownfish, miniscule crabs, fruit shakes, sunsets and the beautiful clear green sea lapping at our doorway. We in life lucky.

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