Advertisement
Published: November 11th 2009
Edit Blog Post
Day 10: Bankrud to Ban Saphan Noi
We began the day biking on quiet back roads running right alongside the beach. We passed seafood factories and watched workers arriving for their shifts, or breaking at small restaurants across the street, clad in white hair-nets and full white plastic suits. A town full of young men, hanging out, playing pool, drinking beers we presumed to be fishermen, already finished their workday, perhaps a 3-11 AM shift. It was a very poor area, the houses just little shacks, but there were people everywhere, mostly working, shocked and delighted at our passing. It didn’t seem like an area that saw many tourists. Attempting to remain alongside the beach, we took a lot of wrong turns, ending up at dead-ends half a dozen times. The most memorable dead-end happened in the woods, on a dirt trail, where a bunch of teenagers were hanging out. Chumpon? we said. They pointed back the way we'd come. Chumpon? we said pointing the way we were going. They shook their heads, pointing the other way, again. Damn. Our desire to never go backwards meant we had actually imagined this dirt path would take us onwards south, to our
destination.
An orange Fanta in my water bottle after the first twenty-three miles of the day revived me and kept me going. And boy, did I need it. We were facing big, big hills, and were back on the boring highway. But with truckloads of people cheering us on, we got in to the zone, and biked hard. We set a new high speed record, hitting 23 mph gliding down a lengthy hill. We passed coconut farmers, surrounded by piles of coconut shells, hacking away at hundreds of coconuts, harvesting them for their parts.
We didn’t even stop for lunch until 2:30, five hours after we’d begun biking, so concentrated were we. We were aiming for a big town called Chumpon, but as the day wore on, Chumpon only got farther and farther away. At the start of the day, the signs said 80 km, after we’d gone 40 km, the signs said 120 km. 40 more km of biking, and the signs said 100 km. By this point, we were exhausted. We’d gone over fifty miles. We’d hit a new high calorie burn of 1010 calories. We took a road we thought would take us along the
beach, where we might find somewhere to stay. When the road ended in the woods, at a dead end by the beach, we almost cried. I think I did cry. Yet it was nearing sunset, and the beach was just stunning. Deserted too. I tried to convince J we could just sleep on the beach but he wasn’t having it.
We turned around, got back to the main road, and contemplated what to do. Should we turn back and look for someplace to stay in the last town, or should we bike on, and hope the next town was not too far? Luckily, we ran in to some English girls on a motorbike, who mentioned that the next town was twenty km on. We turned back. The last town was only about five km away. It was a cute little town yet when we began asking around, we discovered it did not possess a hotel or a guesthouse. Luck was with us again though, as the fifteenth person we asked, “hawng non, yousie?”, meaning “hotel, where?”, (I know, my language skills are pretty pathetic, but they got the job done), guided us to Don.
Don is a retired
Thai man in his seventies who lives smack in the middle of town, right on Main St., and speaks perfect English. He worked for PEA, an American company, for sixteen years, as a technician in Vietnam and Saudi Arabia. Being in possession of an extra house, next to the house in which he resides, he rents a room out as a “home-stay” to visitors in need of a place to sleep. (A home-stay is typically a room rented out in one’s own home for people in need of a short-term place to stay.) I can’t tell you how excited we were to hear this, having begun to wonder where the hell we were going to sleep that night.
The ground floor of Don's spare house was rented out as a barbershop. The rear of the floor boasted a kitchen, in the most casual sense, and a bathroom. Climbing up a ladder, to a loft, was the bedroom, endowed with two big windows facing the street, and a dreamy soft mattress set in the middle of the floor. I was so tired at this point I could have slept anywhere. This simple, but clean room was truly heaven. Don asked
250 baht ($8.50) for the room, with breakfast included. Yes, yes, yes!!
We ate a bowl of noodles packed with a bonafide meat fiesta at a place Don recommended down the street, and then drank Don’s homemade bourbon with him, on the porch in front of his homes. Don was a neat guy who now supported himself by raising pigs, chickens, cows and growing vegetables. Townspeople stared at us in shock, perhaps they didn’t see too many tourists, but were friendly and smiled. The entire town closed down around 7 PM and we went to bed soon after, sleeping like babies.
The next morning, we woke up early, around 6. We ‘showered’ in the bathroom, by scooping buckets of water over ourselves from a big trash barrel full of water from a tap. Don made us scrumptious coffee and egg sandwiches, and we ate the fried dough that everyone was crazy about, from the man across the street for dessert. Then we set off, hoping to reach the elusive Chumpon on our second attempt.
(If you're wondering why the blogs went from July 23rd to July 25th, you are not alone. We were also wondering, when after
a few weeks on our trip, we realized we'd had the wrong day for weeks. When I tried to retrace my notes, to get the dates right, I was always missing a day, no matter what I did. So I have no idea what happened, to where that extra day went.)
Advertisement
Tot: 0.2s; Tpl: 0.011s; cc: 7; qc: 56; dbt: 0.0741s; 1; m:domysql w:travelblog (10.17.0.13); sld: 1;
; mem: 1.2mb