Well, besides the mediocre noodle soup we had along the way and the fact that across the street from that pretty boring noodle soup was a place purported to have great coffee and waffles with homemade ice cream on top, but was closed, it was a perfect day.
We got up fairly early because we did not have the fixings for a breakfast of our own for a third day in a row and having already exchanged the free breakfast for free dinner, we just left. The mediocre noodle soup place was the first food we saw after riding past a lot of oil palm and rubber plantations as well as some road construction. I think the problem was that it was too early for soup. There was no huge pot of simmering broth which should have alerted us to beware. The Thais are not exactly early risers but that was not the case for Uncle and Aunt who ran the coffee/waffle house. We were told by their neighbor that Uncle and Aunt couldn't open (no explanation) but maybe they would in the afternoon. Even though I wanted to, we couldn't wait around. The problem was that I had seen a photo of their waffle on Google Maps. It was a perfect waffle!
In the foreground are young oil palms and behind, rubber trees.
I'm glad we had decided to stay three days at the bungalow with the best view we will ever have. I couldn't stop taking photos of the sea, fishing boats, mountains, islands and that one palm tree that was placed perfectly and had grown to the perfect height to be a most photogenic and willing subject each time I raised my camera. It was not just an amazing view every time I looked up but a spectacular view! And that atmosphere....!
But we were ready to move on down the coast. I mean, how bad could the coast of Thailand be? We encountered some road construction (widening) right away but it was good we were getting an early start because the road crew was certainly going to water down the road. The road had some red dirt all over it which would have turned our blue bikes to a muddy reddish-blue; bikes we had just scrubbed in our spare time at the paradise bungalow. Spare time! What a concept. It was dry as we sailed along laughing at the water truck as it approached because we were about to be out of the road construction zone by then. Actually there were some hills and we were not sailing up them very quickly. They were not steep however, it was just that the humidity had returned and we were not used to it. My glasses even kept steaming up! That's humid.
Road construction, oil palms and a nice stand of dipterocarpus grandiflora in the distance.
This is how rubber trees are tapped and the milky substance captured. The sap was not actually running this time of year. This is winter and lots of leaves have fallen. Sap will start flowing again in the spring and a new slice will have to be taken off the bark. The white sap you see is not actually flowing but is quite hard.
As we rode, and as I continued to count squashed snakes on the road, that waffle kept popping up in my mind. I can't remember the last time I ate a waffle but I used to adore them when I was a kid which I guess might mean that a waffle is one of my comfort foods. If only I hadn't seen that waffle photo. I also wanted to meet Uncle and Aunt because the reviews all said what nice people they were. I never would have even known there was a coffee/waffle house across the street from the mediocre noodle soup place if the soup hadn't been so lackluster. As I slurped it, and tore off lots of gristle from the pork, I played with Google Maps on my phone on the table even though it was getting splattered with gristle juice. That's when I saw that there was not only a coffee place right across the street but a really beautiful coffee place with big thick wooden tables and stools so heavy you can't move them an inch. Simply seeing the pictures of the stools and tables I knew from experience they would be impossible to budge. It looked like Uncle and Aunt had really expensive coffee apparatus as well. I wanted to go there. And then I saw that damn waffle. Because I wasn't going to be able to go there, that waffle rose in stature in my mind, I could almost taste it and it finally settled on being The Most Perfect Waffle in the World.
After lingering outside for quite some time, it finally dawned on me that they were not going to miraculously open if I kept standing there, so, reluctantly we moved on. I said to Andrea, "There was a photo of the waffle." She said, "I know, you already told me."
Uncle and Aunt's coffee and waffle house. Lots of people are fond of growing strands of what is known as Spanish moss in the American south. It's a plant that requires nothing but air and the moisture in the air. A fungus? The Thais use it as a provider of shade.
It was rather hot and without a tailwind it seemed hotter. I guess it was mostly the humidity that was getting to us. We took a little break at a temple that had locked doors. I don't understand all the locked doors we have encountered at temples. It's not as if Thailand is filled with hoodlums. This temple had an enormous reclining Buddha under construction behind it against a big hill. It had bamboo scaffolding over the entire cement thing. No one was working on it. It's amazing to me that so much money and energy is still being put into temples. This one seemed so far out in the country that I wondered where the money was coming from. I guess these building projects can go on for years as the donations trickle in. There is no rush.
We see this statue quite often in Thailand and Laos. She is known to us now as The Woman with the Hair. I'm sure there is a legend about her but it has receded in my memory.
One of the reasons we stopped at the temple was that they almost always have toilets and passers by are welcome. I walked all around the temple grounds but couldn't find the toilets. Then I saw them way off behind the crematory. Crematories, if a temple has one, are always set a bit away from the temple area. This crematory had overgrown grasses and weeds all around it and the toilets beyond made me think of snakes. I peed instead in plain sight of the big reclining Buddha and the whole time I thought I was again doing something really wrong. It seems I'm just full of sacrilege: killing an ant and now this! But the entire place, especially the crematory area, looked deserted and dead, as if there hadn't been a funeral there in years. I guess it would really come alive if there was a death. We moved on.
This was confusing to me because there really wasn't a fork in the road.
Talk about death.....we passed a house that had a small screened area in their yard with large fish hanging inside. I just had to stop to check it out. That was a mistake. The fish were drying (rotting) in the heat and they had not been gutted! What! It was the most awful smell, reminiscent of dead fish that washed up on our shore of the lake I grew up on in Minnesota. My siblings and I were directed by our mother to pick up the dead fish and bury them in the garden, preferably where corn was to be planted. I will never forget the horrible smell while pushing a wheelbarrow full of dead fish up and over the hill to the garden in the heat and humidity and digging holes in the dirt while millions of mosquitoes slowed the progress which prolonged smelling the horribleness. Miserable. That odor changed me.
In this case, utmost hygiene was obviously being observed with that screening in place keeping the flies out!
These fish were neither gutted or salted which made me wonder how they could end up being edible for humans. It was nearly 90 degrees. This process was new to me but the smell was not.
Much of the day riding I spent determining where to run over the bicycling figure painted on the bike lane. It had been painted so many times with thick white paint that running over it made for a rather bumpy and therefore unpleasant time in the bike lane. Ironically, I spent most of the time riding on the road because of it. But if I had to be in the bike lane I decided that coming in at the figure at an angle at its waist effected the least amount of bump and better still if after you bump over the waist you do a little swerve to miss the arrow. The strangest thing was the suggestion that it was a bike lane at all because it was simply the shoulder. But, there you have the research if you travel here. You're welcome.
These figures may not look thick but they are and make for a bumpy ride.
We did find coffee at a cute little stand by the road but the woman who made our ice lattes must have really loved milk. Our coffees were strangely mostly milk. It was obvious as soon as she handed them to us and Andrea and I gave each other a look. The coffee was good, there just needed to be twice as much. So, the day was unusual in a lot of ways: No breakfast, some road construction, mediocre noodle soup, the possibility for a great waffle dashed, bumpy bike lane that was really a shoulder, smelly dead fish drying in the sun, an overgrown crematory and milk for coffee. These sorts of things normally don't happen in Thailand but here they were all happening on a single day! But it was Friday the 13th.
All cyclists see a lot of road kill. When we see something as beautiful as this bird we feel even sadder. But all living things are beautiful. It also warns me that death can be sudden and unexpected at anytime.
Jen RahnI would *love* to see the flower that produces waist-high seeds.
It would be even more interesting to see a tiny adult human walking around who is just 1.5x the height of a standing up sunflower seed. Reply to this comment 1 year ago
And then we were suddenly riding along Thung Wua Laen Beach and it was full of school kids who had come on colorful truck/buses. To see them all cavorting on the beach and in the water made us smile. I had to stop to take a couple of photos and during that time one of the bus drivers came to talk with us because he knew some English. He told us that they had come from Ranong which surprised us because it was straight across the country on the west coast of Thailand. I guess there aren't nice beaches anywhere near Ranoong but, wow, that's a long way to transport a whole bunch of kids (several truck loads) in sort of open-air trucks with long bench seats. I bet it's a two hour trip each way. But the kids sure looked like they thought it was worth it. They were having a blast.
We had cruised through Thung Wua Laen Beach very quickly eight years ago. The main reason being that it was inundated with foreigners. I mean it was packed and being around hundreds of tourists is not our thing. We'd always rather be out in quiet areas away from a lot of tourists and more with locals. But what turned us off more than anything, and kind of put us in a bad mood even, was that when we had stopped, just to drink some water, an older guy from either Germany or Holland on an unloaded bike stopped and immediately asked, "Why do you have so much stuff?" He didn't bother to first ask where we had been or what sort of trip we were on. He asked this question as if he was the authority on how much or how little to carry on a bike. He came across as being very rude. He had no idea that we had a tent we had used a few times or that we had started in Burma, followed the Mekong in both Laos and Thailand and ridden straight across Cambodia - nearly 2500 miles through some very rugged terrain. He knew nothing so we gave him nothing in return. We closed our water bottles and rode on. He had been the deciding factor; we were definitely NOT going to stay at that beach. Plus, when it's that full of tourists it's hard to find a place to stay and for sure it will be way overpriced as well. Instead we had ridden on to the city of Chumphon.
This time entering Thung Wua Laen Beach couldn't have been more of an opposite experience. There were no foreigners! None! What a difference eight years makes. Once the Ranong school kids left there really was no one. So we decided to stay. We quickly found a great little room right on the beach for only 600 Baht ($17), unheard of considering our room was about five steps from beach sand. It was a gorgeous, big, wide, white sand beach and we were once again in paradise. It was of a different look and feel from the last paradise but paradise all the same. From one paradise beach to another in an easy day of biking - both sides of paradise, so to speak. The weird stuff that had happened all day immediately started to fade from memory, (relegated instead to this journal). Overall, it was another wonderful day of cycling on Thailand's east coast and yet another day I am grateful to be here safe and sound, with Andrea, able to do this stuff with ease and tell you all about it.
View from the doorway of our room at Thung Wua Laen Beach. The big ceramic pot full of water is for dipping water onto your feet to rid them of sand as one comes up from the beach. We found it to be brilliant and kept sand out of our room.
