Slow-motion butterfly

January 15, 2020 to January 16, 2020

Hat Salung to Khong Chiam

Dear little friends,

What a pleasure to stay at a nice guest house that had nothing wrong with the plumbing. That saves us time in the morning because then Bruce doesn’t have to make a video about the foibles of the plumbing. I’m not sure what his plans are for all of that documentation because I can assure you that any video I edit will only have two seconds at most of plumbing observations and then only the most hilarious or egregious examples. In any case, we got up early and used the plumbing as it was designed to be used and packed up and hove to the eating area for our prepaid breakfast.

The large dining area of our resort. All packed and ready to roll after a very nice Thai style breakfast.

The moon and the kalae on the roof. Kalae are a design element on the peaks of northern Thai houses.

The front entrance of our guesthouse - Nat Channa Resort.

We were surprised to see that there were a couple of family groups already there, as ready for khao dom as we were. There was coffee service all set up, and the owners hauled a huge pot of the traditional broken rice soup and some nice accompaniments appeared and it was a lovely breakfast and we went back for seconds. The other family ate heartily as well and then took turns taking photos of each other in front of the enormous and beautiful bougainvillea. They seemed really nice.

It really is a great bougainvillea and we should have taken some selfies too.

In fact, they were so nice that we had a conversation as best we could about our bike ride and at the last moment Mae rushed over to our bike and affixed a huge bag of large lum yai (longans) to my rear rack, some of the best we have ever tasted. Unlike a bag of bananas, lum yai travel well, even under the hot sun and sketchy asphalt of our day.

We scored these lum yai (longans) and nibbled on them for days.

Just as we were leaving town I freaked out at this horrifying creature on my mirror. "Stay still, I have to get a photo," said my significant other while I was hyperventilating. But now I'm glad he documented it. The things I endure for art.

But before asphalt we found a little dirt back road shortcut to the main highway that avoided the unnecessary climb we would have had to take on the road from the guest house. This meant a couple of stops to recalibrate our route, and some helpful locals pointed us onward and called off their protective dogs. Birds sang happily and it was a bit dusty but a really enjoyable shortcut, as all shortcuts should be. You should feel smug when your shortcut works out and we were.

Some unmettled roads are the best unmettled roads.

We also knew it was going to be a long day for us and the forecast was grim. Hot days for the next ten days, no letup in sight. In ten days we would be a long way away from heat but for now it felt pretty formidable and I was anxious to keep moving.

Of course we didn’t keep moving because we happened upon another interesting school event, this one for high schoolers. After some confusion we realized that it was a sporting day, sort of a mini-Olympics for nearby schools, each one with a team of athletes, and accompanying marchers holding a school banner, gorgeously costumed thematic groups, and a few really pretty girls in pretty glamorous traditional wear. The school hosting had a band that played a rather dreary earworm of a march on repeat for several minutes as all the students formed a procession and we got to ooh and ah at the costumes. After the procession things sort of devolved into a lot of selfie-taking but that was fine with us because they were happy to pose for us and then we could scoot ourselves along out of there before anybody tried to rope us into VIP chairs.

We weren't expecting a runway show down on the soccer field.

Okay, so not all of the costumes were traditional unless Beyoncé lived in Thailand in a former life.

The coaches persuaded them to pose for us.

This woman snuck behind the stands to check her phone and make a call.

The moment she realized she had been caught.

We remembered this road as being pretty magical and it still is lovely but the deteriorating road surface and the rapidly rising thermometer was scrubbing some of the magic right off. At least for me. Bruce is programmed to stop and take photos no matter what, or to record the elusive “counting bird” or document the state of tapioca drying. Which, by the way, appears to be way down since last time we were last here. Nobody is drying anything on the shoulder, instead they have huge commercial drying yards. Somebody apparently put the kibosh on tapioca drying in the public sphere.

Sometimes you are on the smooth side of the road.

Tapioca chunks drying on an unknown surface. The tapioca plants are single-stem shrubby things with tuberous roots, the roots are put into chippers and cut up into these.

Yeah, there is no upcoming shortage of tapioca. The farmers make use of exposed areas of rock to dry tapioca in this part of Thailand.

There was a genial Thai cyclist going the opposite way and we gave him the lowdown. That’s always fun. As I toiled up a very hot hill I heard somebody behind me, a German bike tourist who was very lightly loaded and of course left us in the dust, which was fine because at least I could push up that hill with no embarrassment.

This is reminiscent of Alabama in the 1950's.

This really nice Thai cyclist from Chumpon, way in the south of Thailand, surprised us with his perfect English.

The ground where they were going to erect a power poles was solid rock so they made cement bases however they didn't make the bases heavy enough. This one, along with many others, eventually toppled over but no problem, they can just lie there.

A little oasis of lotus and water lilies. It's a very dry year here in Isaan.

This road was slowly turning into an unmettled road.

By 11:45 we had traveled 30 miles, sort of a record for us. And at 30 miles there is a town large enough for a twee coffeeshop so we parked our bikes in the shade across the street and stepped in for an iced one. A table of youngish Thai women, maybe in their 20s or 30s was deep in a gossipy conversation and paid absolutely no attention to us whatsoever. This is unusual but kind of refreshing to sit in a coffeeshop and be ignored just like in America. We ignored them too and thought about home. Our coffee was good and went down easy and we put the ice in our water bottles and carried on, but first we ate some of the lum yai and spit the seeds all over the place. Maybe we’ll go back there someday and lum yai trees will be growing right there where we parked our bikes. I also washed my face and reapplied the zinc sunscreen so I was quite a sight. Meanwhile another small group of women approached the coffeeshop door, looked inside, and then suddenly whirled around and took off on their motorbikes to presumably a different coffeeshop. We wondered if these were the people the first women were gossiping about. Now we’ll never know. They ignored us too. I appreciated that because I looked like a freak.

This was like the Thai version of "The View" with a very earnest discussion.

There was a bit more hill-climbing and then there is a long long downhill stretch that is pretty fun only the road surface and a slow-moving motorcycle with a lot of gross exhaust kind of harshed the mellow of that deluxe downhill. I was overheating even going downhill. It was time for another pit stop. While I dug out cooler water from “the fridge”, which is what I call my fleece jacket in a pannier which keeps water bottles remarkably chilled and sometimes even frozen, Bruce fished out oranges and Clif bars and peanut brittle and then replaced his plumbing video time with filming a persistently friendly butterfly. He filmed it in slow-motion mode and the footage is remarkable and honestly, I don’t know why he even brings me along on these trips because all I was capable of doing at that moment was sitting in the shade, throwing down water, snacking, and hoping I would make it the next ten miles to Khong Chiam.

This asphalt is barely more than five years old and is much worse than when we were here then. Audible groans or swearing may have occurred right before this photo was taken.

It's not market day and I'm not sure this market is still in use any day.

By the way, we have probably avoided heat stroke on this trip by FINALLY catching on to using at least one electrolyte potion per day in our water bottles. They taste disgusting until you need them and then they taste life-saving, which they very well may be. I don’t know what took us so long to get smart about hydration. Plain water for somebody like me who sweats gallons per day, just doesn’t cut it.

There is one last long downhill into Khong Chiam and we knew exactly which guest house we were going to stay at and soon we were wheeling our bikes inside and just in time because I was getting faint and seeing spots. Damn, I hate that. Heat has been my nemesis on this trip and I am thoroughly over it. I peeled and showered and collapsed on the bed and Bruce immediately went out to the market to find dinner. I was still wobbly when he returned with fried chicken, sticky rice, indeterminate tray food, a papaya, a mango, some milk, a beer, and a bag of lumpy ice from the Tesco Express, which is similar to a 7-11 except that they wouldn’t give him a bag and he was juggling all this stuff.

The Mongkhon Guesthouse in Khong Chiam. We have the door right by that pickup truck.

"Wait!" said my significant other as I reached for a towel. "Let me photograph this!"

I was so grateful. The food was fine although at some point we felt skeptical about all the organ meats and such in the curry and didn’t really finish it all. We were, what, a week away from flying home and food poisoning was not going to make that a fun or productive week. But honestly, I could not have left that room to go eat and Bruce was my hero for knowing that and taking care of things. The beer tasted wonderful once the ice melted enough to fit in the glass. I slept ten hours.

There was no question about the next day, it had to be a rest day. There was a scorching hot area for me to dry clothes so I washed everything I could, including my shoes. We worked on the journal in our a/c room, nibbled on lum yai, and didn’t leave the premises until mid-afternoon to go down to say goodbye to the Mekong river. Khong Chiam’s claim to fame is the “Bi-Colored River”, where the Mun River joins the Mekong and runs along the side of it for awhile in its original green color, not mixing with the muddy Mekong for quite a while. If you find this sort of thing enthralling there is a tepid tourist town for you in Khong Chiam. But, whoops, now that the Mekong itself is green the Mun joins in with little fanfare and now it’s just a mono-colored river with a lot of empty-ish seafood restaurants along the waterfront.

It is a nice feature these days, free Nescafe and khanom (fried sweet dough) in the mornings at many of the guesthouses we've stayed at in Thailand. And refrigerators! We love those!

A poster of all the species of fish in the Mekong. It is unknown what the impact of all the dams being built on it will be on the fishery but prospects seem dire.

This is what we're dealing with here and have been for nearly the entire trip.

Khong Chiam has an avenue of spectacular trees near the river.

Two colored fish in front of a one-colored river. I like green rivers and thought the Mekong looked beautiful, but the unknown effects of such a drastic change in its turbidity is kind of ominous.

We bade the green Mekong a fond farewell, returned to the market and found somebody to make us some fresh food, went back to our room and scouted out the last ride of our trip and where we would stay in Ubon Ratchathani. Tomorrow we officially point our brave and sturdy little bicycles toward home and the brave and sturdy people waiting for us. I could hardly wait to get started in that direction.

The slow-motion butterfly eventually got tired and landed on my shoe.

Today's ride: 51 miles (82 km)
Total: 1,207 miles (1,942 km)

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Jen RahnSo glad you 2 avoided heat stroke on this trip!

And I'm impressed by the energy you both had through the heat to stop and dive into so many experiences, like today's sporting day.

This is a great lesson for me .. I might be too tempted to focus only on hurrying along to get out of the eat ASAP.
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4 years ago

Ron SuchanekYou know I love this journal, but I demand more videos of plumbing foibles! Plus, I like the word foibles.
Foibles!
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4 years ago

Bruce LellmanTo Ron SuchanekRight!!? It's all about plumbing in the end so why not dwell on it? Stories of flat tires or road conditions are boring. Plumbing is where it's at! When the toothpaste you just spit into the sink is now covering your toes you naturally think of plumbing and not, bike trip.
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4 years ago