March 23, 2016
Si Sachanalai to Uttadit then on to Chiang Mai
How much luckier can we get? While cycling to Uttaradit this morning, where we had originally planned to spend the night, we were discussing how good it would be if we could catch a train or bus to Chiang Mai today instead of tomorrow. The problem was that the trains ran at 9:07 and 15:10. At about thirty kms into the ride we realised that if we finished the next twenty three kms within an hour we could make the early train. We put our heads down and pulled into the station as the train did. They kindly held it up for us until we could buy tickets and load the bikes. So here we are in Chiang Mai a day ahead of schedule having managed to skip an uninteresting town.
We left Sakthong Resort too early for breakfast so we had to buy some crappy stale sandwiches (I have no idea what the filling was) and then some fried doughballs at a later stop (in South Africa we would call them "vetkoek" == fat cakes).
The route to Uttaradit was provided by a neat little offline navigation app for Android produced by Mapfactor called NavigatorFree (http://navigatorfree.mapfactor.com/en/) that uses Open Street Maps. It allowed us to choose a route that avoided main roads (you can specify criteria such as maximum speed limits etc) but still turned out to be shorter that than recommended by Google Maps. I have downloaded the maps for all four countries we plan to visit (at no cost) but can already say that I am very happy with it.
Because we were rushing to get the train, there wasn't time to buy a proper second breakfast on the road, but we managed to get Pad Thai in polystyrene soon after boarding the train.
We're staying at "New Apartments" where we stayed when we last in Chiang Mai 5 years go. Not much has changed.
We ended up having supper at the "Taj Mahal", an Indian restuarant that I knew we had eaten at before although it took Leigh a little while longer to remember. Nonetheless, a nice change in fare without resorting to crap and expensive western style food.
We have booked a car for tomorrow and plan to travel to Doi Inthanon National Park to do some birdwatching
Today's ride: 59 km (37 miles)
Total: 600 km (373 miles)
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