Clickety-clack Going Down the Track

February 7, 2015

Heading south and slowing down

Siem Reap to Aranyaprathet 6

Aranyaprathet to Prachuap Khiri Khan 0

Dear little friends,

Except for a brief gong- buying adventure in Kong Chiam and a few small river ferries, it has been nonstop bicycling since Luang Prabang, which seems like a million years and miles ago. After spending several days in Siem Reap doing I have no idea what, we had run up enough of a food and drink tab at the Happy Guesthouse to think about skipping town. Well, of course we paid our bill, we're not scofflaws.

Smoke-free for the moment at the Happy Guesthouse.

The Happy Guesthouse was one of the best guest houses we have ever stayed at, in that they were brilliant at what they did. Their rooms were cheap, but they made it very easy to spend money on their good food. There was no wifi in the rooms, only in the dining area, a really smart move if you want your guests to spend money on food and drinks. There were at least four 3-prong electrical outlets near each table, which, after spending over a hundred nights in guest houses with one outlet somewhere near the fan and maybe another one ten feet above the floor and it'll be the kind where your plug just falls out of, we had a huge appreciation for.

We were really trying hard to catch up on our blog, but the pleasant atmosphere brought in people from other guesthouses to eat and smoke and talk in French and slow down the internet as they played online games and Facetimed their friends back home. The smoke was really, really getting to us, by the way. I grew up in a smoking home, my parents quit long ago, but the smell of it still makes me sick, and it also makes me sick to see healthy, beautiful, seemingly intelligent young people smoking like morons.

Siem Reap is good for providing things we haven't seen much of lately, like pizza (not good pizza, but pizza), yogurt, and papayas. We would escape the smoke den at Happy and go to the market or to Pub Street, but eventually we were ready to hit the road, despite being foiled at actually getting caught up on the blog or anything else except laundry. We may have oiled a chain or two, though. We slept ten hours every night.

The road to the border is long, hot, and boring, we've been on it before. So we bought bus tickets, hassled our way onto a bus, and off to the border we went. This particular border is famous for lots of nice things like human trafficking, casinos, prostitutes, and government corruption. So we knew we had to have a certain attitude of fortitude. The other passengers had bought tickets all the way to Bangkok and maybe we should have also but I think trains are a better way to go, and if we had had to deal with the bikes on yet another bus we might have lost our minds.

So, approaching the border, the bus stops at a big traffic circle, the driver puts a sticker on all the people transferring to the Bangkok bus, and then he had us all get our stuff out of the cargo area, all 450 tons of backpacks and our poor little bikes with no front wheels under it all. Plus our 8 panniers, one handlebar bag and Bruce's backpack. We had a mountain of gear in the middle of a boiling hot traffic circle lane, with all sorts of huge buses, trucks, motorcycles, and push carts all around us. We hastily replaced the front wheels, dragged our panniers and the bikes to a nearby curb, and put ourselves back together. There were at least 150 backpackers from several different buses standing in the immigration line by then. A dapper officer told us we had to park our bikes with a bunch of motorcycles and go stand in line, uh no. ONE of us would go stand in line, then the other, thank you very much. Officer Dapper lowered his voice and muttered "VIP- five dollars". When we refused he told us we would have to go stand in line, then.

For some reason we thought our ordeal would end in Cambodia but no, the Thai side was just as bad and even slower. Incoming visitors have to climb a huge set of stairs and then wait in a very long line, which we didn't know before I sent Bruce to go in first. After an hour he returned and said he was only halfway through the line and I should come up too. So we locked the bikes and asked Mr. Thai Immigration Form Guy to watch them. When we came back an hour later another guy had taken his place and the bikes were getting the pavement around them squirted off, probably a refreshing little change for them since it was still boiling hot.

So you can imagine how wonderful it felt to finally be free to get on our bikes and ride the 5 miles into Aranyaprathet, past dozens of delicious smelling Thai food stands. We went straight to the train station but had missed the afternoon train by 20 minutes. So we found a funky cheap hotel, 70s style, and some great tray food that we ate out of our bowls, and just reveled in being back in Thailand.

Dang. The train to Bangkok left twenty minutes ago. Aranyaprathet, Thailand.

This was our last month of the trip and it was now REALLY going to be vacation time, because we were going to be heading south of Bangkok and beach-hopping.

Bruce spent his teens in Florida a block from the ocean but I am a native landlubber and have only swum in the ocean maybe five to six times in my entire life. On the Oregon coast the water is 47 degrees or so and the wind will blow the hair off your head so not all that pleasant, to me, at least. In all of our trips to SE Asia we had never once gone to a beach or island so it was time to remedy that.

The train from Aranyaprathet leaves at 6:40 am and it's a third-class hard seat, open window kinda deal. It stops at every single station whether the dog there is awake or not. Rice field burning was going on like gangbusters, including flames lapping at the wheels of our train where the engines were, not a pleasant thing to think about. Cinders rained in. In Bangkok we transferred to another third class train car, about eight cars away from the cargo car where the bikes were. We knew our station in Prachuap Khiri Khan was a small one, with a very short stop. Much worrying went on about this.

The next day we caught the 6:40 to Bangkok.

Bruce buying khao lam from market ladies, who boarded the train at one station and hopped off again a few miles later.

Khao lam is sweetened sticky rice cooked in a length of bamboo. Often there are a few sweetened beans inside for extra fun.

Another very long stop at a very dead station.

Our train was 2 hours late into Bangkok, so a guy came and hurled everything off and then it was gone. We barely had time to buy tickets to Prachuap and load the bikes and find our seats.

Bangkok is like Venice, criss-crossed with a series of canals called klongs

The train from Bangkok to Prachuap Khiri Khan, another third-class seat that was broken, so we sat in somebody else's seat and the panniers sat in ours. The domino effect was that eventually everybody was sitting in somebody else's seat. Unless it was broken.

It turns out that the train staff were also worried, so they approached us with an English translation app on their smart phone, and we came up with a plan. One of them would unlock the bikes in the cargo car and take them off, the other one would stand outside our seat window and I would hand the bags down to them, and Bruce would sprint off to the bikes. It all worked like a dream, we all buzzed around like Keystone Kops, the train pulled out of the station with passengers staring out windows, and we were free again.

In town we stopped at a guest house with a bunch of farang and their Thai girlfriends/wives out front. 70s rock was playing, Aerosmith maybe? They were full but a guy on a motorcycle stopped by to listen to Aerosmith and when he heard we were looking said one thing: "Follow me." His sister-in-law's place was a dump but it was cheap and it was 10:00 at night in a town we didn't know after 15 hours of train travel. In the morning we found another place at the quiet end of the beach. We sat on the upstairs porch looking out at the waves and the steep beautiful mountains at either end of the long curved golden beach and each other, thinking, we are here.

Ho hum, another relaxing morning in Prachuap Khiri Khan.

Another cyclist, Fritz from Germany, making five cyclists staying at a four-room guesthouse.

Prachuap Khiri Khan is where Bruce honeymooned with his first wife exactly 40 years ago but a lot had changed since then. There is a sea wall now and paved roads but it is still a quiet sort of place and it's been great for us. We ride our bikes around like a couple of geriatrics in a humid slow motion trance. We walk out into the shallow water of the beach and I sputter at the salt and waves like an idiot, but it is warm and fun. For a smallish town PKK has a million places to eat, night markets, tray food, soup stalls, seafood, you name it. It's pretty sweet.

Prachuap still has vibrant traditional Thai neighborhoods, despite the tourism of the beachfront area.

Frolicking on the beach. There is still smoke in the air, however.

For such a small city, Prachuap's street food scene is phenomenal.

When we arrived here I realized something. I do not have a swimsuit with me. I had one out while planning the trip, and it got taken on and off the pile several times but in the end put back in the swimsuit drawer. On the last trip I had worn my swimsuit exactly once. This is Thailand and people here swim in their street clothes but that didn't sound so very fun to me. I mentioned this to the French couple staying here, Pierre and Monique, and asked Monique if there was a store in town with swimsuits. Yes, she had seen one over on such-and-such street. So I was steeling myself to go try on swimsuits when Monique motioned me to follow her to their room. Yep. She had an extra swimsuit, one she had bought in Tunisia but didn't ever wear. It's a really nice swimsuit, it fits me and is what I would have tried to buy for myself, which Monique somehow had guessed. Thank you, Monique!

It's going to be hard to keep up this journal, I have to say. We are slowing down like cooling peanut butter. We have less than a month left of our trip and some miles to go yet but we are savoring, resting, moving, eating in a different way than the miles before. Finding internet speedy enough to take less than three hours per journal posting has been hard the entire trip, and now it is really starting to eat into our travel and enjoyment time. While we may be getting further and further behind, we are getting further and further ahead in our mental and physical health. One of our old friends commented that we seem to have entered some kind of time warp and he is spot on.

There is a langur preserve that we biked to outside of Prachuap. They are very sweet and polite, compared to the city monkeys in town that would probably steal your extra kidney if given a chance.

The soup lady where we eat breakfast reminds me of my grandmother. Her husband bustles around bringing condiments, a little plate of tamarind pods, ice water. He pointed at the lot across the street where coconut palms grew. "Prunee" (tomorrow). The next day instead of tamarind, a plate of fresh, juicy coconut meat with our soup, because we came back for it. It seems to be the way we have it right now, these little gifts, the sweet warm air, salty sand grinding away the rough edges on our heels, surf booming across the street all night. We come to a place and we declare that we're never going to leave but in three or four days we are ready again to put the cranks back in motion and so we do. Prunee, tomorrow, we will.

Today's ride: 6 miles (10 km)
Total: 1,464 miles (2,356 km)

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Jen Rahn Prachuap Khiri Khan looks like a pretty nice place to slow down and hang out for a few days!
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5 years ago

Andrea BrownPrachuap Khiri Khan has Grumby Hangout and Home Base written all over it.
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5 years ago