March 9, 2015
Ants and the Andaman coast: Well, it's paradise!
Although the palm oil plantations across the centre of Thailand had provided reasonably good camping they came with one major drawback – they were absolutely crawling with ants. To a man with a decent tent this would have been a somewhat minor inconvenience, but I was a man with a Red Fox tent. I only bought his tent back in Kyrgyzstan and I don’t usually review equipment on here, but if I was to provide you with a review of my Red Fox tent it would be along the lines of ‘My Red Fox tent is crap’ or something similar. I’d noticed that there were a few ants knocking about in my vicinity as I set up camp, which had led me to perform an unusually skillful bit of torch-light sewing up of my broken zipper, so as to eliminate a potential entry point. Unfortunately this made little difference to the overall ant-proof-ness (that’s a word, right?) of the tent because I had approximately one hundred little holes in the bottom of it.
Previously I had woken up in the morning to find a few ants inside the tent, which was mildly irritating but not a big deal. But this time I woke up in the middle of the night to find that pretty much an entire colony had relocated. I had piled up my battered old panniers inside and with them being so riddled with holes and rips the ants had evidently decided they were just the kind of adventurous space they were looking for. Not to mention the fact that most of these bags came coated inside with an enticing layer of cookie crumbs. The thousands of ants seemed to have a quite joyous night at this all-you-can eat buffet, me slightly less so, disturbed as I was whenever the Cooks and Columbus of the ant world intrepidly set out to explore new lands (i.e. me.)
Morning eventually came and I had the chance to fight back although this was a process made more difficult by the hundreds of ants that had decided to hang out on the inside of my tent’s fly sheet, blocking my escape. This was a new low for me - essentially I was being held hostage by insects in my own tent now. Luckily I had one of my trademark cunning plans and found a can of deodorizing spray that Dea had given me (I can’t think why) and unleashed the contents of it onto the unsuspecting ant population.
Although this spray did amass the ants on the flysheet into a sticky mess sufficiently well to allow me to escape from the confines of my canvas prison, the war was far from over. As I began the process of taking it down and packing things away the ants fought back. They were crawling everywhere all over the ground, which turned out to be a good location for them to be able to gain access to my feet and legs, which they crawled up to sink painful bites into me as soon as the opportunity arose. Naturally I was hopping around furiously and this meant I had no possibility to try and remove the ants that had moved into my panniers. Every time I put anything down on the ground more ants crawled onto it. I leant my bike against a palm tree and yet more ants crawled off the tree and onto my saddle. This was a nightmare. All I could do was put the bags back onto my bike and get out of this hell as quickly as possible. When I did finally get all of my things together and made my escape back to the relative safety of the road I was accompanied by at least one ant colony and quite possibly more.
Looking on the positives at least all of this provided me with some variation on my daily routine, and I was soon able to forgive and forget when my route took me for the first time to the beautiful Andaman coast, where large limestone cliffs rose out of clear waters next to a sandy beach. Aside from anything else this gave me a chance to empty out my panniers and wash them out in the sea, as well as diving in myself whilst muttering things like “Let’s see if you can swim you little f*ckers” under my breath.
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Now completely free of my ant tormentors I was able to thoroughly enjoy a lovely cycle south along the coast until arriving at Hat Chao Mai National Park. It cost 200 baht to enter, which I thought a little pricey, so I didn’t enter, and instead headed back towards the main road. But there soon came a sign pointing to two beaches, Hat Yong Ling and Hat Yao, which I thought were part of the National Park but that I still might be able to get to. The first of these, Hat Yong Ling, had a National Park official guarding it, so I stopped just before it and climbed through a bush to get to the beach. It was just a beach. It was nice, there was no one there, but it wasn’t worth 200 baht, so I climbed back.
Next was Hat Yao, which I just went down to see on a whim, but what a good whim it turned out to be. Hat Yao was not part of the National Park, or if it was there was no need to pay here. There were huge towering limestone cliffs rising above me as I arrived close to the beach, and I turned off into a small cluster of simple little shacks serving as restaurants and basic accommodations. There were a couple of white faces around, but this was certainly not a major tourist destination, the beach being almost deserted. One of the white faces belonged to a slender middle-aged woman, who immediately came over to say hello to me and my bike. Sita was her name, an Austrian woman who was also a cycle tourist nearing the end of a trip through Thailand and Malaysia. She was lovely, as were the other foreigners I was quickly introduced to, including a jolly Canadian man called Peter. I mentioned my plan, which was to cycle further south and take a boat to the island of Koh Lipe to do some snorkeling. “Oh, you can catch a boat to Koh Lipe from here” was the response - information that would save me a day cycling on a major highway.
Having gone to the small harbor around the corner and confirmed that there was a boat leaving for Koh Lipe the next afternoon I moved into one of the very reasonably-priced bamboo bungalows close to the beach. It was really a great deal – I could spend a day relaxing here and still arrive to Koh Lipe at the same time as I would have done by spending the day cycling on the main road. And what a great place it was to spend a day relaxing, with its long golden beach stretching for miles up the coast, almost empty except for the occasional stray dog and the tiny little crabs that made pretty spiral patterns in the sand. The huge limestone cliff rose majestically at one end of the beach, jutting out into the sea, but it was possible to swim out and around this, and arrive at a secret cove with a really very private beach where larger crabs scuttled about on the surrounding rocks. It was a little piece of paradise.
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Sita certainly liked it here, as she further explained as I joined her and the others for dinner. She’d been here for a couple of weeks, and planned to stay a couple more. The relaxed atmosphere amongst the few locals and guests residing here made it easy to understand her point of view, and were it not for my desire to hurry down towards Singapore I think I could have easily found myself staying a while too. We were joined at dinner by Peter and another Canadian man, as well as a Norwegian and his Thai wife. There was also a Scandinavian girl. She was beautiful and blonde and very tall, and she sat next to me. “You did get a good seat then” Peter remarked to me discreetly. But I didn’t really, because unfortunately it was the wrong beautiful, blonde, tall, Scandinavian girl. This wasn’t the one I wanted. The one I wanted was far, far away.
But the company was good, especially Sita, a lovely and inspiring woman, and an impressive one, having cycled extensively in Europe and in fact covered an incredible distance of more than a hundred thousand kilometres by bike. She held a youthful smile and energy, a twinkle in her eye as she told me enthusiastically about Malaysia, giving me route advice that would prove invaluable. It was a lovely evening in a lovely location. The younger Canadian man remarked that he’d been stuck at Hat Yao for nine days.
“Well, it’s paradise!” he said.
Today's ride: 50 km (31 miles)
Total: 38,768 km (24,075 miles)
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