Chaiya to Samut Songkhram: 400 miles

My birthday was drawing near as I headed north on the Gulf Coast and I was presented with an early gift: according to the signs, I was officially on the scenic route! I’d be following this through coconut plantations and quiet fishing villages for the next few hundred kilometres.

On a friend’s recommendation I’d booked to spend a night in a small boutique resort, set on a river on the outskirts of Chumphon. I was looking forward to using the kayaks and hanging out on the open terrace. Neither of which looked remotely possible as I arrived in the pouring rain!

The rain continued all night and was coming down heavy the next morning. The sound and smell of these downpours give you a kind of cosy feeling. And it was my birthday! The perfect time to stop and relax with a book.

Sadly though, the forecast spelled more of the same for the next five days.

I’d only managed a few pages in my new Kindle, but couldn’t really justify almost a week off the bike. I had to press on. The coconut plantations I rode through over the coming days, even in the rain though, were beautiful, the yellowy green palm fronds pretty in each kind of light.

Good thing, as they are also a total nightmare for navigation! With little access roads crisscrossing at all angles.

The resort in Chumphon was surrounded by these plantations and to get out I was handed a photocopy of a quaint hand drawn map. The rain destroyed this within a minute or so and with no way of using my phone in the wet I (embarrassingly) completed my first full circle of the trip, ending right back where I had started (albeit a bit wetter).

Take two was more successful but it was hard to get motivated. Dogs (usually chasing me) sheltered under cars and could not be stirred. Smoke struggled from coconut bonfires and the wistful sounds of Thai folk music crackled through weary speakers, adding to the lazy Sunday mood. Occasionally I passed someone tinkering with a boat engine under cover or checking on a pot of rice. Otherwise there was little activity to spur me on.

I stopped for lunch. Someone must have notified the chef of my ‘big day’ as they threw lots and lots of extra chilli into my papaya salad to mark the occasion. This challenge put the rain into perspective!

I plodded on through quiet roads but had to double take when I was overtaken by a pair of monkeys, casually reclining in a motorbike sidecar. They were monkeys on a mission, out harvesting coconuts, and I later caught up and stopped to watch them work. They were incredibly efficient, and guided by their handler, can apparently pick around 80 per day. These monkeys became a common, if surreal, sight, lounging in the backs of pick ups or even sitting in the driver’s lap, gripping the motorbike handlebars like a child.

The local “monkey schools” that train them say they are welcomed into the handler’s family as pets, but the off duty ones I saw were often chained to a tree alone. Sad for such a social animal.

With or without monkeys, the coconut business is tough going, and in this part of Thailand at least, totally unmechanised. It was really interesting to watch as the miles clicked by. The husk is removed from dry coconuts by slamming them onto a giant metal spike (this always seemed pretty perilous), whilst machetes are used to trim the fresh ones by hand. Sometimes these were shrink wrapped immediately for the supermarket.

If you weren’t involved in coconuts you were almost certainly involved in fishing. These guys were always putting in a big shift, out (disturbing my beach camps) as early as midnight onwards.

Tourism is of course present, but only (appears) to make up a small portion of the economy for most of this coast. This meant peace and quiet for me (good!), but also little choice in where to stay (allowing hotels to charge whatever they liked).

So it was that I ended up spending the evening of my birthday as the only guest in a tired and overpriced ‘resort’ run by some particularly grumpy staff. I was the only diner in the vast restaurant and was served by the security guard, a man of advanced years kitted out in full camo – including a beret. I had to laugh!

On the bright side, the five day forecast wasn’t as bad as predicted and the weather picked up eventually. Still, after pounding out hundreds of kilometres in the rain, I felt I needed to bring a bit of fun back to the ride.

I’d read on ‘Warm Showers’ (a cycling network) about a troop of spectacled dusky leaf monkeys that can be visited on the airbase in Prachuap Khiri Khan – a town I was due to stop in. This sounded like a suitably quirky detour to begin the following day with, so after stopping off at the local market to pick up a breakfast picnic, I showed up at “Wing 5” (as the base is called), handed over my passport, promised not to take photos of the runway and was allowed to proceed.

Wing 5 is surely the most relaxed air base in the world. You can pass through to the beach on the other side, eat in the cafes with the service personnel, or even hitch a lift through with some of the airmen (as I saw one person doing).

Unlike macaques, which can be aggressive and cranky, dusky leaf monkeys are incredibly gentle. Although nominally wild, these ones were very relaxed around people and not fussed about me approaching. A man with an automatic weapon watched from a distance as I took some photos. I suppose there aren’t that many monkeys that have their own armed guards!

After saying bye to the monkeys I came across another cyclist, Will, from Holland. The second I’d met on this trip. It was around 10.30am and he said he was just finishing up his ride for the day. Will?? What do you mean!? (I still had around 100km to go!). He helped me join a super helpful 250 person strong What’s App group for cycle tourists in Asia and, as the sun came out for the first time in days, he indirectly persuaded me to take it a bit easier. No need to rush (he had done 43,000 km since he started cycling “full-time” as he put it, so fair enough!).

I decided to take his advice and stop off in Khao Sam Roi Yot (mountain of 300 peaks) – a national park on the coast that overlapped my route, rather than pressing on any further. This was a great decision! I climbed a viewpoint, camped on the beach and got up early to visit Phraya Nakhon Cave (home to a small but famous temple called the “Royal Pavilion”).

As I pulled in to stash my bike near the cave’s trailhead, I was met with the usual rush of semi-wild dogs that often come screaming out of temples (or often just out of nowhere) to show me who’s boss.

There isn’t really any avoiding them – Thailand loves dogs. Or at least some Thais do. The much beloved King Bhumibol was often photographed with his dogs and actually wrote a biography of his favourite dog (Tongdaeng) which was later made into a feature film!His son, the recently crowned King Vajiralongkorn, is also a big dog lover and controversially promoted his pet poodle (Fufu) to the rank of Air Chief Marshall in the Thai Royal Air Force!

Despite the royal treatment for some, an awful lot of the dogs in Thailand are in a real sorry state and survive by eating what they can from piles of old rice left out for them or by rooting around in scraps by the side of the road. Perhaps a quarter of the ones I saw had problems with their legs, but that still left 75% fit enough to give me a very good chase! And in my first couple of weeks, chase they did. At first I was worried about being bitten (‘Rabies kills 100% of the time’ – reads the poster below), but my manic escapes (at full speed, with little regard for anything other my assailants) were actually much more hazardous.

You can always get a shot of immunoglobulin, but there’s no going back if you pull out in front of a speeding bus. I needed a more diplomatic approach.

The cycle forums online recommend you get off your bike, keep it between you and the dogs, and stroll through the danger zone. When executed correctly this more or less says: get a grip guys, I am just a human!

I decided to try this out. (Well…. Not entirely, I’m not a madman!). Rather than get off the bike I decided I would first try slowing down and almost stopping. Bizarrely – every single time so far – the dogs stop as well. They don’t always stop barking and they might still surround the bike, but they do stop chasing and usually leave me alone soon enough.

By the time I arrived at the Phraya Nakhon Cave, my dog whispering was getting out of hand. Two of the dogs that initially came running for me happily waited whilst I stashed my bike with a local drinks vendor, then accompanied me on a 7km round trip along rough and steep trails up to the cave.

We were the only ones there as the morning light filtered through the sinkhole above the little temple. Though the dogs did their best to spoil the peace – chasing another adorable set of dusky leaf monkeys and sending them high up into the trees – it was certainly a special place to be. And better than soldiering on, as I’d planned to before meeting Will.

After leaving the national park the landscape shifted pretty wildly. Fishing villages and rice fields were interrupted by giant retirement complexes with Nordic flags and gated holiday communities with private security. The low point of all this was Hua Hin, a disaster area of a place full of massage venues and heavy drinking Europeans. Its only redeeming feature was a significant separate bike path on the route out.

It’s a shame that places like Hua Hin and Pattaya sometimes give the ‘Farangs’ a bad rep in Thailand. There are lots of lovely expats, many of whom speak good Thai and are involved in the local community. I met an English guy for instance on the bike path who had taken it upon himself to keep the route clean of litter. “I’ve been doing a few hours each day for the last three years”, he said, two bin bags slung over his handlebars. He then apologised for not having cleaned the section I’d just ridden!

From Hua-Hin:

*I followed a mammoth irrigation canal flanked by rice paddies (the occasional monitor lizard emerging with a splash to scare us both out of our skin).

 

*I stopped in Petchaburi specifically to track down the town’s signature dish khanom mor gaeng (an insanely rich coconut egg custard – well worth it). And checked out another stunning cave temple.

*Finally I rolled past the sun baked salt ponds of the Thai Gulf before finally hitting the coconut groves and orchards of Samut Songkhram, the last stop before Bangkok (my first proper milestone of the trip 🙂 )

This little ferry took me over the river and into town.