A Three-Baht, Two-Soup Day

December 14, 2019

My Home guesthouse to Chat Trakan

Dear little friends,

We have been cagily avoiding hills as much as possible but eventually you have to leave the valley and there be hills to climb when you do that. Our sweet guest house offered free Nescafe and “khanom” (sweets/crackers/bread) in the morning and we sat and nursed those while watching Mae slice tiny round shallots with precision and speed.

My nephew Bailey is in an electrician journeyman apprenticeship program and we send him periodic shots of tangled wires just to blow his mind. Here we have the classic direct current wire hell, plus some water towers, a phone booth, ignorable speed signage, and an attractive bus stop. All the infrastructures in one fell swoop.

We had no papaya on hand so decided to get noodle soup in the next village, also at the foot of said hills. But first we had to ride a few miles on the dreamiest cutoff road ever, through rice fields with no traffic, clear crisp air, and lots and lots of birds. I stopped to photograph two storks and there at my feet was a one-baht coin. I haven’t found any money on this trip, an economic indicator if I ever saw one. Nobody has spare cash to lose. So I was pretty happy to find a baht, even if it’s only worth 3.33 cents USD.

There are a lot of roads like this in Thailand, we’d like to be on more of them.

One of the great joys of cycle travel is taking the time to notice small details.

Where does the seasonal smoke come from, you ask?

At the bottom of the hill we still hadn’t seen any noodle soup, but somebody directed us to a soup palace and we were thus fortified for upward travel. Oddly enough we have finally gotten ourselves in halfway decent shape and I didn’t have to bellyache that much, just ground away at the first hill and then the rest wasn’t too bad, just a lot of ups and downs and more traffic than we like. In the mountains there isn’t much smoke in the air and the breeze in our faces was blowing it elsewhere.

Bruce does brake for fried bananas and we’d stop and munch on those every so often, and in the early afternoon we saw a cafe bolan stand. You can tell because there is a stack of red-and-white carnation cans, although we still tell them “mai ao Nescafe” because they never quite believe that we want old-style Thai coffee, the kind brewed in this little cloth bag in a tin, flavored with chicory and god knows what else. We ordered two cafe bolans, sai nom (with milk), yen (iced). The boy told his sister something and she brought us one and then went on with her chopping or mixing. We broke out the fried bananas and several dogs came to watch that and look at us entreatingly. Then we realized that she had misheard her brother and only made one iced coffee and it was pretty big so we just shared it and got ready to leave. Brother said we owed 50 baht. Wow! Expensive coffee! Sister disagreed, they had a quick discussion where they discovered that they could have sold us two iced coffees but nope. We paid our 25 baht, told the dogs to forget it, and left.

There were some hills that slowed us enough to each find another baht coin. There’s considerable inner debate when you are climbing slowly and you have to stop momentum in order to pick up a nearly worthless piece of money but since I am usually stopping anyway to drink water and Bruce is usually stopping to take an interesting and beautiful photo that I wouldn’t have noticed because I’m climbing, there is ample opportunity for picking up free money, although as I said, times are hard and runaway bahts are few.

Tapioca roots have been harvested and cut up into pieces small enough for drying. If you’ve ever wondered where your bubble tea tapioca got dried out, well, it seems to be on any level surface of dirt, concrete, asphalt, tile, basketball court, you name it. These guys are turning the pieces with their bare feet.

I think this sign means “If you take a photo of Andrea in her Handmaid’s Tale sun hat protection she will radiate you with scorn and hostility”.

Chat Trakan seemed like a town that was not going to be of much interest to us. It was pretty hot when we arrived and we had the first cornetto ice cream of the trip which was surprisingly unsatisfying and not offset enough by our 3-baht riches so it may well be our last cornettos of the trip. In any case, we found a dive-y set of bungalows and chose a blue one. They often paint them these bright candy colors, maybe so people will notice them from the highway? Ours was tiled inside like the interior of a kiln, tiled platform beds, tiled this, tiled that. It was kind of fun climbing around in our tiled playhouse but these were slippery tiles so I move as cautiously as possible. Also fun was that there were outlets a-plenty, something we really value now that we travel with so many electronics.

This place wasn’t bad at all. Safe, clean, quiet, tiled.

Okay, it’s not ALL tile, some of it is finished concrete for a contemporary feel. Notice Bruce grabbed the bunk with the outlets above, the scoundrel.

You think, oh, it’s five o’clock, plenty of time to get some dinner. Not in Chat Trakan, kids. The sidewalks were rolled up and after our market foray for an enormous papaya, we found that the places we had scoped out ten minutes earlier were shut down with the metal garage doors clanged shut. The only place standing between us and Clif Bar Deluxe a la Mode was another soup place, and it was good soup, just not what we really wanted.

The biggest papaya yet. We also really like having the bikes in with us for the night, I always sleep better then.

There usually is a small flat-screen tv in these places, they seem to come with multiple baffling remotes and even if you manage to get channels they are all shopping, Korean dramas, Bollywood movies, and more shopping. Thai news is something else, they show a gory car wreck, an adorable toddler roller skating in her parents’ restaurant and they show these clips over and over and over again. Toddler skating one time: cute. Toddler skating twelve times in one news segment: kill me now. So we have been ignoring the tvs and going straight to wifi to check up on the state of domestic politics (ours) which features more toddlers skating over and over and over again.

Lights out in the kiln. There is a map profile for tomorrow that looks alarmingly peaked and I try not to think about it. Will there be baht lying around on those hills? Tune in tomorrow.

Today's ride: 32 miles (51 km)
Total: 503 miles (810 km)

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Jen RahnToddler skating .. sounds better than our news on most days!
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4 years ago

Ron SuchanekAhh, don't worry about the news here in the good old USA! Everything's great. We're in good hands. The population is very informed and pragmatic. No deranged outbursts by our leaders. Everything's just perfect.
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4 years ago