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Published: June 23rd 2006
premonition
Notice the sign? Vick did a slow speed version of this shortly after. Hello from Thailand! We've been in Thailand for about two weeks now and I have been sweating the entire time. Not that that is remarkable or that I expect it to stop, but for a guy who prefers the mercury below 25 degrees, a humidex consistantly over 45 degrees is an experience in and of itself. It's been a month since our last blog so lets leave the heat behind for now and return to cool NZ and the finish of our first epic bike tour.
We left off in Greymouth where we had decided to stay an extra day in order to go kayaking on the river behind the hostel and to enjoy the lounge/hottub one more time. Our punishment for our indulgence was a cold front carrying rain that would follow us along the road to Punakaiki. Punakaiki's claim to fame on the tourist circuit is the unique coastal limestone formations they call the Pancake rocks. There are blowhole also but we arrived after high tide so we missed out on them. Just down the hill we spent the night at a beach front hostel with million dollar views and went searching for NZ greenstone (jade) on
the beach. This search had been going on at all the beaches since Hokitika but without reward. We had another 50k day to Westport in the morning that passed by uneventfully until we discovered Vick had a flat tire in the back. That explained why she had been stuggling for the past half hour! We got her fixed up and into town where we made the mistake of taking a room in a hostel that the Kiwi Experience tour bus was stopping at that night. Needless to say our sleep was interrupted from 2am onward by the stupid white kids rapping and yapping after the bar. We got up tired, packed (leaving my $60 battery charger in the wall) and left on the winding road that took us up the Buller Gorge to Murchison 100k away. We crossed paths a couple times with friendly German dude that we first met in Hokitika, who was also cycle touring and ended up staying in the same hostel that night. The days were at the temp where you would sweat it up in the sun then absolutely freeze in the long shaded sections. When he asked us where we planned to go the
next day we told him we were shooting for Nelson (approx 135k). I can fairly say that he could hardly believe we were going to take on that trip after a 100k day. It put a smile on our face to think we're pretty tough nuts but an equal part of it was that with the end in site, we wanted to be done. After a long day we got into Nelson at dark and found our way into the city along the bike paths. As we reached the city center a couple of cyclists started chatting with us as we road along and it turned out that the one fellow was involved with a hostel in town so he offered to take us there. Even though we prefer to make our arrangements ourselves we decided take him up on his offer as we were tired and he seemed like a nice guy. Eventually we arrived at a homey little place with interesting people and got a discount to boot! We had a couple of nice days enjoying the city and the weather before we left to Havelock. We had become familiar with the laid back traffic on the West
Coast so it was a disappointment to be back on a major commercial artery. The day was going well until late in the day Vicki had her first big spill of the trip. She was following me on the narrow shoulder and I didn't know how close she was behind me so I failed to yell out a warning about the pothole. When I swerved around it she didn't have time to react and ran right into it, lost her balance and fell over. What a terrible experience to fall ( or hear someone fall) on the narrow shoulder of a busy road! Luckily there was a break in traffic and she fell mostly on the shoulder. She's a tough nut and falls well, with a large rasberry on her elbow and a sore shoulder being the worst of it. It would have been a cruel bit of fate had she broke something on the second last day! Enough what if's, all's well that ends well, we were shortly back on the bikes and into Havelock. We had a nice night in Havelock, with a stop at a pub whose happy hour special lets you roll dice against the bartender
for every round. We were up and of on the last day of our trip in the south and it was a great day following the ins and outs of the coastline to Picton. On the roll into Picton we had a real mixed bag of feelings. It ranged from pride to relief to sadness to excitement for the next step and especially a sense of gratitude for having the chance. Shortly after arriving in town we were on the ferry and on our way back to the North island with ~2800k more on the bikes. We were lucky in many regards on the trip, but the two that always come to mind were the great weather and the lack of equipment failure. We had a couple stretches of wind,rain and cold but less then expected and I never thought we would make the trip with only two flats, one broken chain and some minor shifting trouble. We had a nice calm ferry ride to Wellington where we spent a couple days relaxing and shopping of course. The NZ comedy festival happened to be in Wellington so we got the chance to see a variety show hosted by an Australian
named Charlie Pickering. Most of the acts were decent, if a little amature, but Charlie was the highlight even though he didn't do a full routine. From Wellington we took the red eye bus back to Auckland and ended up in a hostel that was not what we expected from the pictures on the internet. The next couple of days was a mass of confusion over what to do about Vick's soon to expire passport, Thai visa's, NZ visa's, flight date's, etc, but in the end it all worked out pretty simply. Funny what a little knowledge will do. So instead of being stuck in Auckland for two more weeks like we thought, we were on a plane to Bangkok in no time. The flight over was excellent, with a huge variety of movies, TV shows and music offered. We arrived in Bangkok at 12:30 am and walked of the plane into a wall of hot air. Soon after collecting our bags we walked into another wall of taxi drivers and touts all trying to get you into their vehicle and to their hotel/guesthouse. " Where you go? Where you go?" It's as close as I'll ever come to celebrity.
We ran the gauntlet and got to a hotel reservation booth and they hooked us up with a relatively expensive place ( $60 cdn/night ) in what turned out to be the perfect part of town for us. After they arranged a taxi for us we were off for some rest. As it turned out the overpriced cab fare didn't include the expressway or toll roads and our driver soon informed us that if we didn't want this to be a long ride we would have to pay extra. And so it begins. We turned him down and he took the expressway anyways and got us there in one piece, even though at times he got up over 150k/hr. We spent that weekend by the pool, walking around town and shopping some more! Shopping is the national pastime of Thailand. Everywhere you go there is someone ready to sell you something, 24/7. A friendly passerby directed us to the Thai Tourist Authority for the best deals on transport and lodging in Thailand, which turned out brilliantly. We had planned on taking the overnight train to Chiang Mai but instead we got a return flight and five nights lodging in Chiang
Mai for $150/person. Also on a positive note we got to the Canadian embassy and got Vicki's application for a new passport submitted with almost no trouble at all. With that out of the way we went to the night markets and also to Lumphini Stadium to watch some Thai boxing. The fights were very entertaining, if a little different than we had thought. There is a lot of emphasis on lower body work which doesn't thrill a westerner quite as much as the relentless head hunting of western style boxing. As an intermission they had a demonstration fight between two men in traditional Muay Thai outfits. It was choreographed like a wrestling match, with the fighters performing a series of crazy flying monkey style moves. That was about all the tourist type activity we attempted in Bangkok and we never even scratched the surface of all the cultural history in the area. NZ was all about seeing the sights and after awhile you stop looking at things with a fresh eye, so we're leaving those things for now and trying to settle into more of a routine lifestyle to recharge our curiousity. Sadly two of the things that made
the strongest impression on me was the traffic and the pollution. Some of the locals wear masks and when your eyes start to sting walking down the street you can understand why. The city is just so chaotic compared to what we're used to. We of course found an Irish pub in the neighborhood and stopped in there one night for some live music. As it turned out, we happened to have an ex-pat from Nova Scotia sitting at the table next to us. We sang some songs and drank some beer and generally had a gay old time. It was especially interesting to get a chance to interact with some Thai people ( who spoke good english ) in a relaxed, social setting. In vino veritas!
After a day spent recovering we were on the plane and off to Chiang Mai. It's just a one hour flight to Chiang Mai In the north of Thailand where it is cooler than Bangkok for most of the year, just not this part. We spent our first five nights in Chiang Mai at a guesthouse called BMP Resident. Decent room, pool, open air restaurant/bar and Jimmy our self appointed host all came
together to make for a great stay. That is except for the last night when an intestinal bug took hold inside me and deprived me of my sleep that night and also my sense of freedom for the next few days. Just my luck we started massage lessons at ITM ( Vick Level 4, me Level 1) the next day. It's no fun massaging strangers when you have diorrhea! Kidding aside I had a great time learning a little Thai massage and also had the opportunity to meet alot of the people who would become our neighbors at our new guesthouse. Vick's having fun being back at the school and has some good classmates to work with so ITM has been a big hit. Our new guesthouse, Walai, has been central to the good experience. It's close to school so it's full of students and it has a beautiful little lounge/reception area where people hang out, meet up and take meals. It's also close to a mall and a couple of our favored restaurants, one of which is a great italian place, where, I'm not embarrassed to say, I eat a lot. Brett can not live on Thai food alone.
Pit stop.
Just like Sask. there was a couple of farmers in the bar in the afternoon shooting the breeze and having a beer. They had a friendly, your crazy, laugh at our expense and scared us silly with the horn on the big hill just outside of town We even rented a little motorscooter to get around town which was a blast. So you can say that things have been going really well. Almost too good. After my first week of Thai massage I wanted to go to a Muay Thai ( thai boxing ) school to stay in shape while Vick finishes her training. I ended up at the Ancient Muay Thai Sangka school on Wensday. The school is taught by Kruu Villalobos who has had a succesfull international career in Muay Thai and mixed martial arts. These guys are all about endurance, aerobic and anaerobic. The day consists of 2.5hrs of technique oriented calisthenic work in the morning and then 3.5hrs of bag work, grappling and sparring in th afternoon. This all takes place in a covered outdoor training area, on rough concrete, in bare feet. Some of the guys are even running morning and evening! If I hadn't been cycling for the last three months, I wouldn't have made it through the first day. You could always tell where I had been working because there would be a puddle on the ground, no kidding. At the end of the second day I was so gassed
and sore that I decided I had better just cut back to the morning classes for awhile. On the way home I met Vick at the Italian place we got some take out and went home. When we got to the guest house my glucose-deprived brain decided that I didn't have to lock my scoot right now, I could come back and do it later. Of course I didn't come back untill the next morning and guess what? That's right, no bike. It turns out that they hadn't had a bike stolen from the guesthouse, locked or unlocked, in the last five years untill now. Whoopee! So now I'm on the hook for $900 to the rental place, unless the cops find the bike. There are two bright points to the story though. The morning I found it stolen I had to get a truck-cab, to and from class and on the way home it was just a Thai lady and I riding in the back and she must have seen a funny look on my face because out of the blue she told me she was going to pay for my ride! She explained saying, that some people take
Almost done!
We're hiding our beer guts in this one, we really took the Bus! advantage of tourists, that there are good and bad people everywhere and how Buddists are required to " make merit" through deeds of kindness. It was such a timely, poignant jesture that I couldn't stop smiling like a fool. The other bright point has been our guesthouse operators, especially Yo, who's taken me to the police station twice now and basically done all the talking with the police and the rental shop. It's great having someone you can trust who can speak the language. It would have been so much hassel without the help.There that wasn't very long was it? Ha! I have to go find out if there is some way I can catch the Stanley Cup final, till later.
Brett and Vicki
P.S. I forgot to mention the week long celebrations for the 60th anniversary of H.R.H King Bhumibol's ascension to the throne. It's foreign to our minds but they are seriously in love with their King.
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Linny
non-member comment
Brett you missed your calling!
Although I guess it's not too late! You have a way with words brother. I have gone from genuine tears of pride and pain to laughter all in one Blog entry. I could practically feel my little sis biting the concrete on that fall but I am so glad you are there to support each other. Enjoy the change of pace and scenery in Thailand and bring some self defence moves back and we'll set up a back yard brawl between you and Andre! P.S. Sorry, haven't seen the bike! I'll keep a look out.