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Published: November 4th 2009
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Day Two: Samut Sakhon to Samut Songkhram
Somehow, we managed to get up and continue on the next day, although we sure didn’t leave early. At about eleven, after a lovely meal of grilled chicken, sticky rice and crab papaya salad in a breezy roadside shack set on bamboo over a marsh, we began biking. We did not get lost on this day, biking successfully south for hours, stopping often, once to buy a sim card (to make our phone work in Thailand), for orange Fanta, fresh sugarcane, green cake-bread. Ecstatic, we got our first glimpse of the sea, biking alongside it on a quiet road for hours. We biked through quaint fishing villages, breathing a sigh of relief that our decision to bike Southern Thailand had been a good one. We passed salt farms, big wet fields, and farmers by the roadside, selling big bags of the salt they had just harvested. We rode by shrimp marshes, and all day people waved and beeped.
We biked through the most glorious seafood mecca. Consider your love of candy as a child; you may have dreamed of a land with candy everywhere, all varieties and at a negligible cost. Well,
this is what Don Hoi Lot was like, albeit with seafood. We took a side road towards this dream town, arriving as a pouring rain began, not an issue for our biking as the hot weather makes biking in the rain a refreshing change. We first passed twenty huge parking lots, attendants by the road, trying to wave cars in to eat at their restaurants, perched three-hundred feet back at the ocean’s edge, atop stilts. Then on our left we passed the most massive seafood market I have ever seen; it seemed to continue forever and was packed with merchants selling fresh fish, crabs, squid, clams and oysters, as well as all kinds of seafood I couldn't even recognize. Simultaneously on our right, hundreds of vendors had set up tiny platforms along the sea, barely three-feet above the now tumultuous waters that often washed on to their stands, handily keeping their seafood alive. This was fresh seafood at its best; all this food had likely been caught sometime during this very day. And the place was nearly empty of buyers; a few cars, a very few walkers shopping around. It must be a popular place to go for a day
trip out of Bankok, but with the weather today, no one was there. We were dying to eat our way from one end to the other, but first we thought we’d find a hotel and put our stuff down, maybe wait for the rain to stop before eating. Close by, we rode up to a gorgeous modern hotel, built recently on the ocean’s edge and priced at the equivalent of $40 US a night. I tried my hardest to negotiate but this place would not budge! They knew they could get that much from rich Thai and foreign tourists. So we biked on. And on. And on. Not splurging on that new hotel turned out to be a huge mistake!!
As the miles between us and Don Hoi Lot grew greater, we knew our chances of gorging on seafood were growing slimmer. But J said we could not pay $40 for one night, a very expensive price for a room in Thailand, and no other hotels came our way. We stopped for directions to a hotel; the first woman we asked didn’t know, but gave us some delicious purple sticky rice she was selling, grilled between two pieces of
bamboo. We asked another man, who called over two more men, and then two men stopped on a motorbike to help, and soon all five men had conferred and drawn us a map to the closest hotel. Alas, the hotel was farther away from Don Hoi Lot.
We said goodbye to the seafood fiesta we were attending in our heads and ended up back on the main road, void of the choices espoused to us by our hand-drawn map. We asked workers leaving a Toyota dealership for directions and they insisted we follow them, five miles, all the way to the parking lot of the nearest hotel. The place was nice, but we ended up eating at KFC, all the while thinking about what we had missed… although, I did eat fried sushi there, which you really can’t get everywhere! On this day, we biked 38.7 miles over the course of four hours, a pretty incredible feat considering the previous day we’d biked 24 miles and thought that an unbelievable accomplishment! Day 2 was a great success.
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