I only had to do a little bit more climbing the next day, but it was quite alright because it was Sunday morning and the road was quiet, at least for a little while. Then I had the big downhill, which brought me down out of the mountains and into the wonderfully-named town of Jeli. This was a much smaller place than I had been expecting, and one which looked and felt a lot like Iran. In fact with a mosque playing mosquey music and all of the men wearing white skullcaps and all of the women with their heads covered it looked and felt even more like Iran than Iran had.

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On my way out of Jeli towards another mountain road south I was stopped by a friendly motorcyclist who pulled alongside me and asked me if I would like a drink. By now temperatures were beginning to rise again and so I thought that was a swell idea, and joined the long-haired man at a stall just ahead of us where they were selling some sort of coconut juice. Unfortunately that turned out not to be as refreshing as it sounds, as my new friend Mano explained it was actually the sap from the coconut we were drinking. A local delicacy apparently.

Mano told me about his life; he’d recently moved back here to help his ailing mother and was trying to farm eggplant, with what I took to be varying degrees of success. He was also a cyclist, and had ridden the mountain road that I was about to attempt. He told me that after the first pass I would find that a bridge was out due to the recent heavy flooding, meaning traffic had to be diverted on a longer route, but that I could take a boat across the river. That sounded great! I’d be blessed with a section of road that had no traffic on it! It was time to get going.

“Did you like the drink?” Mano asked.

“Not really” I replied honestly.

“No, me neither” he said.

I carried on south on this road, and for about eight kilometres there was a shoulder and everything was fine. But then suddenly the shoulder disappeared and the road narrowed to an extremely dangerous width. Traffic was heavy again, and would remain so no doubt until the top of the pass, when it would be directed on the other road to get around the bridge. That meant 40 kilometres of slow progress uphill on an extremely narrow road with lots of speeding traffic. I had to ride out in the road, which meant I was absolutely relying on traffic to slow down and wait to pass me whenever there was something coming the other way, which was all the time. And that was something I absolutely did not wish to rely on, as I thought about all the twists and turns and blind corners usually involved in cycling up mountains. I don’t often consider roads to be categorically too dangerous to cycle on, but this was one of them. I just couldn’t do it, so I pulled a U-turn and headed back to Jeli.

I knew that I had another option, which was to keep heading east until I reached the coast and just follow that south. This had the disadvantage of not being as scenic as the mountain route, but it did have the advantage of being flat. The main reason why I didn’t initially plan to go out to the coast was because I thought it would be busy and therefore dangerous, and I wanted an alternative with less traffic, but having seen the alternative the coast suddenly became much more appealing. To get to it I had to take a main highway east and soon stopped at a gas station when I saw a young cycling team in lycra eating granola bars. I figured they would know all about the roads and so I asked them if this road and the coast road had a shoulder all the way. As they responded with the magic word “Yes” I felt a wave of relief wash over me, and I knew I’d made the right decision. On I went, and after nearly 400 kilometres in Malaysia I set up camp four kilometres from the Thailand border.