February 5, 2025
Days T17-18: Back in the Big Smoke
Ending Off the Thai Trip
The decision to kaibosh a second trip to Pattaya proved to be the correct one. While landing at the old Dong Muang airport, there was going to be nearly a two hour wait for a taxi queue. Gotta love peak season. I just wasn't in the mood for any of this and so proceeded to cut the shrink wrap of the bike and simply ride out of there.
While waiting in the check in queue earlier I was looking at accomodation in Bangkok proper and was shocked at how expensive it was. Guess it goes to show that the Sananwan Guesthouse far out of town is worth the effort in constantly returning to because the prices are still a reasonable 500-700 baht a night. If you try and stay in town, good luck with that. The plan was to find something near Khaosan Road but you'd be lucky to get something for 3000 baht, or just under $100 a night. That's how expensive it has gotten in the tourist areas.
But then you need to think in terms of abundance. Bangkok is an absolutely massive city and there are thousands of hotels. Even during peak season, they're not all full. If you find areas off the beaten track then you'll find better deals. Plus with a bike you just ride on in, and you're not thinking about all this dumb shit like how close it is to a metro station or how long a taxi will take to pick you up.
With this in mind, I selected a nice hotel in Nonthaburi and then realized I could tackle all the things I wanted to do in a relatively straight line of biking distances over two days.
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A plan emerged to connect everything by biking and the plan would go like this
A --> bike to the Queen's Palace hotel from the old airport. 17km
B --> bike to Khaosan Road. 17 km
C --> bike to the Probike Shop and do maintenance. 7km
D --> bike to the F45 studio and do a cardio class. 5km
E --> bike to the massage place and have a torturous Thai massage. 2km
F --> bike back to the Sananwan palace and then store the Montague agin. 25km
For each of these hops, I had the house music blasting in the headphones and the GPS set on turn-by-turn directions so I didn't have to keep looking at the phone. It was simply a matter of bike on autopilot and be taken away by the music. This proved to be perfect because the traffic in Bangkok is always difficult to handle. The bike makes things that much easier but still. It makes you wonder why anyone would willingly want to drive a car in this congestion. As we all know, Bangkok traffic is day and night 7 days a week. There are no set times for traffic jams, just certain times when it is worse.
The Queen's Palace came up soon enough and it was bliss. It only cost 800 baht since it was off the beaten track but surprisingly it was close to a train station and a 7/11. I had a nice recovery sleep. Before that, just chilling in this glorious hotel, this was one of the best nights of trading in my entire career.
What happened was due to a mistaken speculation, I went long on crude oil expecting the price to rise due to Trump's tarriffs supposedly hampering production. Instead the opposite happened, and the tarriffs proved to have little effect. The overall pattern remained bearish due to increased supply of oil and reduced tensions in the Middle East. As a total side note to this, or maybe not, Trump came up with a wild proposal alongside Netanyahu for the US to take over the Gaza Strip. He was thinking, as he always does, from an oversimplified perspective of making deals and from his real estate mindset. In theory though, you have to admit this wild plan has something to it. Gaza is not a liveable place. It's an outdoor prison. If there's a way to make Gaza liveable then I'm all for it. The main thorn in all this is that the neighboring Arab countries don't want to take in resettled Palestinians. I'm sure I'll be learning more of all this on the next part of the trip in Dubai.
But all of this meant that crude oil prices would be rather volatile. Since I was already losing nearly $1000 I said to hell with it, let's add two more contracts and average down the loss. Then without warning the price suddenly shot up. I took advantage and quickly sold all four contracts to realize a $100 loss then turned around and shorted two more contracts. The price of crude continued to fall again so I covered it quickly and walked off with around $200 profit. It wasn't so much the profit but the fact that I was able to turn such a big loser into a winner. This really defined my trading career.
All this and more happened in the Queen's Palace and so provided a nice anchor of of comfort and confidence.
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The next morning I spent the entire time trying to update the blog, the budget, and all the events since Pai and Chiang Mai. This trip was coming to an end quickly but I wasn't worried about it. At least things were getting more and more organized and all the job stress was further and further behind in the rearview mirror.
When it was time to go, the next round of biking led me to Khaosan Road. This was on relatively quick streets. The highlight was two bridges over the Chao Phraya river and then a police checkpoint set up just before the final bridge. They were of course stopping scooters and once again the bicycle sailed through without an issue.
Khaosan Road was quiet as it was midday so I found a nice little place to stop off and grab some food.
Khaosan has always had a special place in my heart. I like to think of this street as my roots. The first trip to Bangkok was in 2003 and since then I've been coming back several times a year. All told now it would be approaching 50 trips if not more. When I first discovered Khaosan I couldn't bear to leave the place. It had everything a traveler could ever want, and this was before I started bike touring. Even now to this day it continues to bustle.
We all thought that the death of Khaosan was going to happen during the pandemic. The conservative elements of the government had grand plans to reshape the entire street and they saw covid as the perfect opportunity to kill it, along with their desire to kill Pattaya. Or in their words "purification". They got as far as doing major renovations during the pandmic to start the process but tourist business roared back post-covid. The street is more or less back to where it was before but with some nice cosmetic upgrades.
Another major difference post-covid has been the proliferation of weed shops. These are actually all over Thailand. Back during my earlier trips in the 2000s, it was unthinkable that something like this could happen. Back then if you were caught doing marijuana you'd get sent to Thai prison and nobody would dare try. They instead went to Cambodia to do all that stuff.
But as someone who has been coming to Thailand for 20+ years, one thing you can't underestimate are the conservative factions in the royal Thai government and their passion for reshaping the society into a more traditionalist form. If you're thinking that all this proliferation of weed and a massive tourism boom after the pandemic is going to lead to massive crackdowns in the future, then it would make sense. They've already tried to recriminalize it several times. One scenario is another military coup sometime in the future when they want to get rid of the current prime minister with ties to Thaksin Shinawatra. It all reminds me of the early 2000s all over again, when Thailand was in another earlier golden age.
Then again I could be all wrong with this and I hope I am. The current golden age in Thailand took decades to come to fruition. Thailand suffered incredibly in the 2010s and it was their darkest decade, topped off by the covid pandemic. Thailand does not want nor need another massive royalist crackdown or military coup. The Thai people themselves are sick of all this crap. They want to move into the future with the modern world.
That immensely satisfying walk done, it was then time to bike out to Probike. Once there the staff recognized me immediately as I've always done work on the bike here. Yes it's the same Montague that has lasted nearly 15 years. For that reason I changed my mind and didn't want to sell it after all. But since Jen had done so much to help me to this end I didn't want to flake out on her. So we agreed that she could help me sell it in Bangkok and if there was an interested buyer they could pick it up at the guesthouse.
Even so, sitting there in bike shop drinking a coffee and relaxing while they did the work on the bike was immensely gratifying. They did all sorts of stuff: change the tires (most important), chain the chain, replace disk brakes, grease up parts, tighten cables, tighten the back rack, and more. It wasn't a huge job but it was well worth the 1480 baht.
While on the way out, not one but two bike tourists pulled in. The first guy Benjamin from the US was on a multi-year and round the world tour. He would do a combination of bike somewhere, stay for a bit, make some money, then move onwards. It wasn't so much a "tour" as a lifestyle and he immediately got my attention. The other guy I forgot his name but he was doing more local tours like me and had actually ridden from Chiang Mai to Bangkok. Both of them needed some serious maintenance on their bikes designed more for touring and I gave them the highest recommendations of ProBike. They had come to the right place.
Benjamin had ridden from China through Vietnam then through Cambodia to here. The time in China he spent with his girlfriend near Guangzhou so we immediately had that connection and I needed to add his Chinese social media (i.e. WeChat)
The thing I like so much about this style is that it could be emulated. Let's say for example, you could bike to Pai, spend a few months there, trade, make some money, then bike to Pattaya, do the same thing, then move on to Siem Reap, you get the idea.
As for now he was on the way to Singapore. I promised I would give him some information on the road ahead as I've done that tour before, although in bits and pieces mind you. He knew that it was pancake flat to Phuket, i.e the next immediate destination. Some of the repairs he would do here in Bangkok then save the major ones for Phuket as he was confident that the shattered drivetrain would be able to last until then.
Unfortunately it was time to bounce as it always is when these really interesting chance encounters happen as you're not expecting them. There was a fitness class starting in 20 minutes and I needed to bike through the Bangkok traffic to get there on time. A taxi or bus would have taken at least an hour.
The class was epic and involved some harcore cardio. It had been weeks since last doing one and the body held out OK. With multiple stations involving burpees and plate snatches, I wasn't sure if I could make it but I did. While Pai and Pattaya have their major advantages, one thing those places lack is group fitness gyms. Like most of Thai culture, it's just not really a thing. If people go to the gym at all, they go by themselves and do self-paced exercises or they combine it with boxing, i.e. muay Thai. For that matter, almost all of the gyms are outdoors in the heat which limits the kind of intensity that you can do. The type of HIIT training that I like demands loud music and air conditioning which is not easily found in most Thai-style gyms. In fact there is only one F45 location remaining in all of Thailand now and that's the one right here in Bangkok. The others in Chiang Mai and Phuket closed down.
After the gym torture, then a tortuous Thai massage. But both were worth it, consider this necessary body maintainence.
The final bike ride would be 25km back to the Sananwan. But I didn't feel like the usual route of biking on traffic-congested Sukhumvhit Road and opted for an alternative. The GPS all along was saying I should have been biking a different route and so I tried it out for the first time. It was nothing short of epic. The GPS led me on some narrow industrial road in the middle of nowhere. It was congested with traffic and trucks at the begining but then gradually opened up. All along I was dodging trucks and motorcycles on a narrow road at night with no light, no helmet, and listening to house music at full blast. It was wild and fun.
What came up in the middle of nowhere was a massive food market so I just had to stop. Meals were found easily and cheaply for only 30 baht. There was some remaining cash I could use, and also the scan QR payment system was also working so it was a fallback plan that I was getting better at since I had now successfully linked that to my Thai bank account.
The final stretch involved a run down the main road to Samut Prakan province, but this wasn't the Bangna Trat highway, it was the parallel road. It wasn't really any easier or safer, as there were a lot more cars parked on the side of the road, but there were less things to stop for.
The highlight involved two young dudes on a motorcycle pulling up and giving a massive thumbs up and other signs of encouragement. Anywhere else in the world you'd think they would jump you or rob you. But not here in Thailand, it really is the land of smiles.
One last smile was to come at McDonald's. While looking like an idiot trying to use the QR code scanning system, the friendly lady at the counter walked over and showed me how to use it properly. She got a tip for that.
Finally it was home sweet home and a small stint of trading when the US market opened, but it was rather quiet and nothing like the wild ride of the night before at the Queen's Palace.
While the markets were taking off very well, it also made me realize that I mistakengly sold call options for SMCI stock which had now taken off like gangbusters. So a decision had to be made: get rid of the option and lose money or keep the option and risk having my shares get called away at a bigger loss. Thankfully there's two weeks to decide and so I figured it best to wait. What I was now hoping for is this unexpected bull run would taper off and the stocks would pull back. Selling calls is more a bearish move than anything else. Such as it is with options, your trades can be very complex and rely best on certain market conditions.
But after that, the main priority was to pack for the transitional trip to Dubai the next day, keep updating the blog, and try to locate all the stuff I had left behind at the guesthouse.
Today's ride: 73 km (45 miles)
Total: 489 km (304 miles)
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