Bicycle touring Thailand: Chumphon to Krabi

Another week of rolling through rubber tree and palm oil plantations. During this third week of our trip, I realized that we hardly traveled through any non-agriculture land in Thailand and that makes the riding, well, kind of boring. Our original plan for this tour had been to ride in the north where there are hills and even mountains, but we had to nix that plan when we learned about the pollution due to burning the fields at the beginning of each year.

On the positive side Thai people are friendly, and of course the food is good.

20250213_183142 by bryandkeith on flickr
Sawi

Back in Cabana Beach this family helped us order dinner one evening. We stopped at their shop to buy dried durian chips and durian paste on our way out of Chumphon.

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Bicycle touring Thailand: Prachuap Khiri Khan to Chumphon

My favorite part of our second week of bicycle touring in Thailand was the food. It felt like it was one good meal after another. We spent two nights in Prachuap Khiri Khan. On our full day there we rode over to Ao Manao Beach.

20250207_112950 by bryandkeith on flickr

Here’s the coconut milk soup and seaweed soup lunch that they served us at our small table on the beach under the shade of pine trees.

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Bicycle touring Thailand: Cha-Am (Phetchaburi) to Prachuap Khiri Khan

My favorite part of our first week of bicycle touring in Thailand was the food. We usually found restaurants fairly easily.

20250202_111517 by bryandkeith on flickr
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Four days in Bangkok

The start of another bicycle trip. We had tickets from İstanbul (IST) to Bangkok via New Delhi on indigo. This turned out to be my fourth winter in row in the tropics (after Sri Lanka, Raja Ampat, and the Philippines). At some point I’ll have to get used to cold weather again… I guess, maybe (?).

IMG_20250126_204514 by bryandkeith on flickr

But first, how to get to IST? The bus from Antalya (via Esenler) was, of course, an option, but airfares were reasonable to SAW (Sahiba Gökçen) so we flew to SAW and took the bus from there. All this meant that we had time in IST to visit the airport archaeology museum. It also meant that it ended up being a 31-hour trip from our house in Antalya to a hotel in Bangkok.

Our guide in Luxor had talked about the world’s first peace treaty between the Hittites and the (Egyptian) New Kingdom after the battle of Kadesh. The İstanbul airport archaeology museum is not big, but here’s the Kadesh Treaty:

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Perge, Termessos, Gökkaya Tepesi: Philip visits Antalya

We took advantage of my cousin’s son’s short stay to get out for some nice day trips near Antalya. Philip visited for about a week in January before a stint of studying in Barcelona. I was excited to show him Perge — I had heard a year (or two or three) ago that the theater was now open for tourists. Doh! I should have gone as soon as I read the announcement. It’s closed again and sounds like it won’t be open for years. They need to do some stabilization work.

As before this is about the best view of the theater.

IMG_20250108_132838 by bryandkeith on flickr

In more positive news they’ve moved the parking lot and entrance out of the center of the site. Now the stadium feels more like it’s actually within the archaeological area.

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