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Published: November 18th 2009
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The P & P Bagery
Don't expect anything baked though. Day 18: Nakhon Si Thamarat to Hua Sai
We slept in and took a leisurely walk over to P & P Bagery, a place we’d spotted the previous day. We were enchanted by the possibility of a real bakery and by the funny spelling mistake in the name.
Unfortunately, this bagery had only store bought, pre-packaged, crust-less white bread, in terms of baked goods. (Perhaps a bagery is something altogether different than a bakery.) We were in shock, but nonetheless, stayed for some delightful coffee as well as rice and eggs with chili sauce. When the bill arrived, it was quite a bit higher than the sum of the listed prices. When we inquired, we were told the listed price was for one egg, but we had each had three eggs. We found this a bit strange; if we ordered the egg listed on the menu, why would the waitress have tripled our order to three eggs without asking us? Did she assume she was being kind as we were big foreigners and would obviously need more food? Hmmm…
Coming back to our room after breakfast, we found the maids had already been in to clean. It would seem
to be more efficient to clean a room after the guests depart, but this experience introduced us to a new phenomenon. Often, in the course of the next month, we would have maids knocking down our door, trying to get in to clean, sometimes before we even woke up. Apparently, these maids were commissioned to clean the hotel rooms. Period. As soon as the rooms were clean, they could go, perhaps on to other work. So they would try to clean the rooms as early as possible, regardless of whether guests had yet departed. I’m not sure how this worked for arriving guests…did they arrive to find their rooms somewhat clean but not necessarily clean? Depending on the cleanliness of the last guests?
As we were checking out of our room, we met an awkward elderly white man, possibly American, staying at the hotel. When we told him we were on our way to Indonesia, he gave us his Indonesian phrasebook, as he had just come from there. What fate! Because we’d been looking everywhere for a Malaysian phrasebook before we reached Malaysia, but hadn’t uncovered one anywhere. (Malay and Baha Indo are very similar languages.) We’d assumed we’d
be forced to wait until we reached Malaysia. What a blessing! We rifled through our bag to give him our Thai phrasebook, which he was thrilled by! He was actually so giddy he screeched in excitement.
J’s knee felt good this morning, so we were eager to get out on the road biking again. We felt lazy, having biked only twelve miles the previous day. The heat was getting more intense each day, as we got closer to the equator. I remember that morning, eager as I was initially, after six miles, I was hot and tired. I felt like quitting. But I didn’t. And I ended up biking 52 miles.
Keep pedaling...that is the secret to long distance biking. You want to stop. Don’t stop. Just keep pedaling. If it’s hot, or if it hurts…regardless. Keep going. Put your head down, and pedal. That’s perseverance, a great skill to learn, and one that can be applied to almost anything.
We were biking through a very rural area, we passed an abnormally small amount of shops and restaurants but many salt farms, cows, chickens, friendly people. It felt like we were doing a PR tour for white
people- waving, smiling at everyone, always being gracious. All the people we passed just gawking, staring, then smiling at the white aliens strangely come in to their midst. We stopped for a quick but delicious lunch of noodles and discovered the oddly repetitive bob hairstyle all the young girls were rocking was school mandated. We started to see many Muslim women and men, all the women and girls as young as seven, wearing the headscarf, still so disarming to see in Thailand. The men wore long skirts and vests, flowing shirts, tight fitting boat-shaped white hats.
Biking along the ocean, we saw that development had not yet hit this area. Just shacks, small houses, fishing boats, a high concrete sea wall, big rock piles in the ocean. I guess because the area is totally flat it is very susceptible to flooding. Little kids sat under an umbrella, selling sweet sticky rice smoked in bamboo tubes. Few trucks and cars passed by, very little thru traffic, we couldn’t have hitched a ride today if we'd wanted to! The heat was extreme, and the quick but powerful ten-minute rainstorm that swept through was just what we would have ordered had we spoken to God himself.
Truck beds were packed full of jackfruit, a giant football sized green spiky fruit that evokes my gag reflex just remembering it. Intrigued, we passed three mosques, each dome shaped with a star and moon symbol atop the dome. We saw giant nets suspended on four stakes in little inlets; I think when the tide comes in, fish get stuck in the nets and when the tide goes out, fishermen simply retrieve those fish. Our odometer hit 600 miles - 1000 kilometers. We were delighted and decided we should celebrate that night. But we were already too tired to want to.
We finally hit the small town of Hua Sai, the only town on the map before the big town of Songkhla, a long way off. Locals directed us to the town’s hotel, delightfully right in town, minutes away, although we biked right by twice, as it didn’t initially resemble a hotel. The place was right on the ocean, but we were in such a rural area, you would never have expected a hotel there. The room was very simple, just a hard bed, a table, and a bathroom with manual toilet and cold shower hose. The sink looked like a refrigerator. But it was 300 baht and it was just what we needed. A place to rest and refresh. A local woman and her son grazed cows and goats in the grassy parking lot.
We biked about half a mile looking for a place that was open to eat. We found a little noodle shop and ordered two fried rice, in Thai. We got one fried rice, one rice with shrimp and vegetables and one sautéed greens with fried pork. Everything was tasty but for the first time ever in Thailand, the rice tasted old. The bill came to 160 baht, about 80 baht more than any meal we’d ever had at a roadside stand. We tried to dispute the charge, but as there was no menu, and we’d just ordered, assuming the prices would be normal, we had little basis to argue from. We paid and biked to a little shop to buy dessert. Toasted, sugared bread, oval tine (like chocolate milk, but supposedly healthier) and crackers sandwiched with chocolate, all pre-packaged, made a delectable and original dessert.
On our way back through town, we passed a mosque full of men, dressed in special outfits, chanting their evening prayers. No women were present. This town also boasted plenty of non-Muslim men and women. So far, Thai Muslims, like Thai Buddhists, had been nothing but lovely and welcoming.
We fell asleep that night dreaming of the surprises Malaysia would bring when we reached it in just a few days.
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