My favorite part of our first week of bicycle touring in Thailand was the food. We usually found restaurants fairly easily.
I also noted that it was unexpectedly cool right at the beginning of the trip, heading south from Bangkok in early February. We slept without air conditioning for the first two nights — in Cha-Am and Hua Hin.
The reason we started in Cha-Am and not further south (we had taken the train from Bangkok) was because I wanted to see Mrigadayavan Palace, a 100-year-old painted teak palace used by Thai royalty. The woman at the entrance tied us up with pha khao ma to cover our unseemly knees. I liked her sense of color.
The palace was built to take advantage of the breezes from the Gulf of Thailand. I bet the Thai kings have a/c now.
We ate durian two or three times in Thailand. It was good but never great like the ones we consistently found in Sulawesi.
In Hua Hin we enjoyed a great dinner at the night market on the long pier — grilled fish, grilled squid, squid eggs (?), fried caterpillars, pad thai, sausage, beer. It was almost cool enough to want a jacket.
In the morning we cycled about 25km to have breakfast in Pak Nam Pran at Brown Brew & Bistro, a recommendation of Thomas and Barbara, German cyclists we met in Hua Hin.
We had actually ridden on a wonderful off-the-road cycle path heading south from Hua Hin. That ended up being the only one we found in Thailand. After that, however, many roads had marked bicycle lanes, but that also decreased as we headed south.
We spent that night at San Roi Yot Beach, a recommendation of Greg, a fellow SoCal native living in Nan.
See the 6l water bottle in this photo? We tried to fill that up a couple times/day to avoid excessive plastic bottle trash. Sometimes we found coin-operated water machines, but here the woman filled my bottle (for free) from a 19l bottle. She also gave me unripe mangoes, great for salads, but Ferda’s happy eating these with salt and chili like the Thais (and Mexicans).
The next day we visited Khao San Roi Yot National Park.
We can see lots of photos on the internet of the sun shining down through the sinkhole on the temple in Phraya Nakhon Cave, but what’s the chance of actually being there at the right time? Well, by pure luck 10am in early February is perfect. Tour operators, of course, know this, and two tour buses showed up just as we were starting the walk to the cave.
Nearby is kind of kitschy Wat Hup Ta Khot.
Our next stop in Khao San Roi Yot National Park was the “canal” tour at Khao Daeng. It seemed more like a river than a canal.
We saw langurs,
but the wildlife highlight was the mudskippers.
Nearby were a couple short trails in the national park and a visitor center, but it was getting late, and we weren’t sure where we’d find a play to stay.
We needn’t have worried. At the nearby coastal village (~5km S of the visitors center) was a very nice rather new motel (common Thai style), and by luck we arrived for the twice weekly market.
We did a little shopping and brought everything back to the hotel. I was surprised that the markets in Thailand did not usually have tables and chairs for eating.
You may have noticed haze in the many of the photos so far. Finally the following day the air improved, and it was pretty decent for the rest of the trip, all the way to (spoiler) Singapore.
The riding was brilliant, (ever so slightly) up to Ban Ruam Thai through mangoes, sugar cane, jackfruit, coconut palms, and lots of colorful flowers. There are lots of homestays in the village as tourists come to visit Kui Buri National Park.
We started seeing rubber trees, something else that continued all the way to Singapore.
In the park from the back of a pickup we saw two groups of elephants (11 and 4 individuals), always pretty far away (fine by me). The most exciting wildlife was the hornbills, perhaps a dozen pairs, from this viewpoint.
Villagers collect elephant dung and dye clothes. Jack bought a shirt.
Even more than the clean air and rubber trees, we rode through endless palm oil plantations all the way to Singapore.
Here we have less common coconut palms with much less common pineapple.
Getting hungry we asked in Ban Yup Prik for a restaurant. There wasn’t one, they said, so we asked if they could cut up the jackfruit.
Tasty! When we went to pay, they refused the money. Only then did we realize it wasn’t for sale. We had asked for their personal jackfruit which they served us with smiles. Oops?!
15-20km later in Ban Khan Kradai we found a real restaurant.
Just 2km to the ESE is the beautiful teak temple building at Wat Ao Noi.
We rolled on and ended up taking a rest day in the provincial capital Prachuap Khiri Khan, an Oliver recommendation.
