January 11, 2015
Khong Chiam: Home of the river of one colour
I'd found a pretty good camping place again, something that was always easy to do in Thailand, and so I took my time about getting myself packed up and ready to go in the morning. First I fried a couple of eggs and made myself an egg sandwich for breakfast. I was eating like a king these days. Alan was very pleased too, and said that eggs were nutritious and delicious, and when I cooked them myself were an economic source of protein. I thought maybe Alan did fancy himself as a bit of a nutritionist on the side. After I'd finished eating, to put off cycling even longer, I gave myself a haircut. You may be surprised to know, given how well maintained I always appear, that I genuinely do cut my own hair. I haven't been near a barber in five years. Well, maybe I have, in the queue at the bank or something. But I haven't let a barber cut my hair for five years, I do it myself. Usually in this way too, using a pair of broken scissors and my bicycle mirror. Needless to say Alan was very much in approval about this money-saving strategy.
Finally I could put off cycling no longer, and so I cycled. Something odd happened though, because I went much faster than normal, and arrived in the town of Khong Chiam before I knew it. This pretty reasonably-sized town sits at the confluence of two rivers and the point where they meet is known as the 'river of two colours' because, as the more intelligent readers will have already worked out, each river is a different colour and so when they meet they become a single river with two separate colours. This apparently-interesting phenomenon would be much more genuinely-interesting, however, were the two colours not almost identical.
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The other claim-to-fame for the town of Khong Chiam is that it is the furthest point east in Thailand. A big board by the, naturally very nice, riverfront promenade states that this is the first place in Thailand to see the sunrise. It's a nice little additional fact about Khong Chiam that I'm sure makes one or two people very happy when they wake up here and look at the sun rising over the 'river of two slightly-different-shades-of-the-same-colour.' It is, however, a fact that would be much nicer were it not complete and utter b*llocks. A quick look at the map reveals Khong Chiam to be not the most eastern point in Thailand at all. In reality I had been further east in Thailand when I'd woken up at my camp earlier that morning. So I'm sorry if you were in Khong Chiam on this day and looked at the sunrise and thought you were the first person in Thailand to see it. Actually at the exact moment that you were smugly watching that sunrise there was a maniac cutting his own hair in the woods who had already seen the sunrise ages ago, over a fried egg sandwich.
Disappointed with Khong Chiam's continual lies and deceit I gave up on being a tourist, and instead spent most of the afternoon out of the sun in a restaurant using the free wifi to update this cycling blog that I've been working on recently. Then finally I thought I had better do some more cycling, because a cycling blog does need a bit of that in there somewhere. Actually it's kind of fundamental to the whole story really. So I cycled a bit. Pushed down on my right leg, then my left leg, then my right again, you know how cycling works. But I actually couldn't do too much, because before I knew it I was almost in the border town of Chong Mek already, and I wanted to camp one more night in Thailand before crossing back into Laos. It was a most odd day - I felt like I'd done almost no cycling at all, and yet I'd arrived easily at the place I wanted to get to. In other words, where I wanted to get to had proved easier to get to, and took much less time, than I had expected. This was a most peculiar phenomenon, not something that had ever happened to me before, nor that I had ever heard of occurring to any other cycle tourist in the history of cycle touring.
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With even more good fortune in my favour there was a massive lake nearby and after a bit of searching I found a road down to it. It was another excellent place to camp. But it wasn't quite time to camp yet, and so I sat and watched some fishermen boating out on the lake under a sky of extraordinary clouds. Then I watched the sunset, and it was a beautiful sunset, and I thought about how I was one of the first people in Thailand to see that sunset. They don't put that on any information boards though do they? But more than that I thought about how wonderful Thailand had been to me, what an excellent place for cycle touring it truly was, and how pleased I was that its elongated geographical position dominating the land mass between me and Australia meant that I was going to have the opportunity to come back.
11/01/15 - 55km
12/01/15 - 48km (8km in Thailand)
Today's ride: 63 km (39 miles)
Total: 35,715 km (22,179 miles)
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