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Published: November 6th 2009
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Day 5: Cha-Am Beach to Hua Hin
We arose at 8, shocked it was so late as we’d planned to leave very early, but in our windowless room, with cloud pillows and puffy comforter, we thought it was still the middle of the night. Biking along the beach, we passed a cute lady who greeted us, “Morning!” and it was such a sweet salutation I decided it would be my greeting from then on too. The road winded away from the ocean, forcing us on to a main road, but we continued to take side roads cutting towards the ocean, hoping to find one that ran back along it. Somehow, I managed to lose J’s hat from my head without even noticing, and we backtracked to look for it, unsuccessfully, for close to an hour. It was a really cool retro Red Sox baseball cap and I felt really bad. As it was nowhere on the road we’d just ridden, I assumed some very happy Thai man or woman was now rocking a great new Red Sox cap, one they‘d picked up moments before its owners came looking for it.
We were biking down a road that all of
House on stilts, right next to our hotel on stilts
Can't get any closer to the ocean than this - we are actually in the ocean half the day. Very nice. a sudden, with no warning, ended at an air-force base, and a female soldier waved us to continue biking through. OK... Thirty minutes later, we were barely able to talk our way out of the other end of the base without getting strip-searched. The soldier asked us a lot of questions about what we were doing there and searched our bags. After he realized it was an honest mistake, he was friendly.
As we got closer to our destination for the day, Hua Hin, we began passing dozens of brand-new fancy and massive resorts set off from the highway, backing the beach. At one point, J was joking around, riding very close to me and he wiped out, right in to the road. One second he was next to me, and the next second he was way behind me, in a slump. I raced back; luckily he was not hit as no cars had passed, but he was very shook up and had bad road burn on his hand, shin and wrists. Poor guy. Those took months to heal and scarred too!
If Cha-Am was Coney Island, Hua Hin was the Hamptons. The King of Thailand, though supposedly
residing at his palace in Bangkok, actually resides at his lovely beach house in Hua Hin. In a matter of ten years, Hua Hin has turned from a small village to an international tourist destination, with millions of dollars pumped in to the local economies. New and modern hotels, restaurants and shops have sprung up, turning Hua Hin in to a town that wouldn’t be out of place in the Hamptons. After miles and miles of hotels, including every American brand you’ve ever heard of, we arrived in town.
A nice bike shop, affiliated with Pro-Bike, enabled us to purchase all the supplies we hadn’t thought we’d need back in Bangkok. Additional tubes, more patches, extra glue, a new kickstand for me, a bell so I could alert J when I was stopping, a rear-view mirror for me so I didn’t have to constantly turn around to see if cars were approaching, and gloves for J’s hands, sore from gripping his handlebars. A few more turns, and we reached these cute little winding streets by the beach. Surprisingly, after all the expensive resorts on the way in, we quickly and easily found a fabulous row of hotel rooms, seconds
from the beach, for $10 a night. We soon realized that our room was not close to the ocean, it was actually above the ocean, on stilts, and when the tide rolled in, it rolled underneath our room, creating the loudest, most beautiful in-room ocean lullaby I’ve ever heard.
We headed right to the beach, immediately ecstatic about the wide-open sandy, untouristed stretches, unlike on Cha-Am. The ocean was warm and green, the sky massive blue and dotted with puffy clouds, and lithe palm trees swayed in the breeze. And this beach was set quietly, far back from the road, also unlike Cha-Am. Walking along the beach, we came upon an area crowded with tourists, sitting in lounge chairs set up on the beach under umbrellas. These chairs could only be rented by ordering food from the accompanying tiny restaurant. Looking at a menu, we saw that normal food prices had been inflated about 500%, the pumped-up prices so arbitrary that a bowl of rice was priced the same as a shrimp and squid curry. Twenty restaurants operated like this, right in a line, each with nearly identical menus. Out of principle, we could not eat here.
We
continued walking and came upon a small family-run, grilled corn and papaya salad restaurant, operated from a blanket under a palm tree. If we ordered the normally priced food here, we could lay upon bamboo mats. So we ate grilled corn, papaya salad, sticky rice and fruit, lay back, enjoyed the gorgeous day and watched the soap opera style interactions of the family running the blanket. One grown-up daughter was jubilantly happy, another morose and sassy, clad in a sheer mesh black tank-top, exposing her white lace training bra beneath. The two sisters sparred. Mama clipped her toenails while smoking, seated in the exact same spot where she had prepared our food, seemingly unaware that this sort of thing could be considered bad hygiene. The family chatted to us, asking loads of questions and giving us oodles of free fruit. The weather was perfect, in the seventies, breezy, and we stayed for a gorgeous pink and orange sunset.
Later on, we explored town, packed with foreign and domestic tourists, dining and drinking. The thin, windy, fun-filled streets were reminiscent of Provincetown. I was surprised to see Sara Jane’s, a restaurant chain owned in Bangkok by a friend; I didn’t know she opened a place here in Hua Hin. All of a sudden I spotted Janie herself, sitting right there on the front balcony of her restaurant, at a table with her husband and friends. She didn’t know I was in Thailand, and was equally shocked to see me. I had met her my first day in Bangkok, three years back, and remembered so well sitting in her presence and being amazed that she could live in such a foreign place and in awe of everything she taught us. Well now I had some experience under my belt to share with her, and we had a great time catching up. Later, J had a crazy night out in town, making the most of our short time in a place with actual nightlife, meeting all kinds of eclectic people, while I nerdily yet happily went to bed early.
We stayed in this dreamy beach town the next day, napping, relaxing and swimming. The best parts were the late-night hamburger cart in town, owned by an American guy we befriended, who confessed that he retired too early and was depending on the success of this cart for his retirement, and the sounds of the waves crashing right underneath us as we slept.
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