Samut Songkhram to Bangkok: 68 miles

A day on the bike has different stages.

It can be hard to get going for the first hour, then the rest of the day might fly by as if it never happened. The nicest part is usually the last 20-30km. Having banked the bulk of the miles, the pressure is off, the worst of the heat gone and the light at its best.

This is the time put on ‘Jump’ by Van Halen, rest your hand on the window, turn up the volume and cruise. Or in my case (with no CD player or window) – just cruise!

With the big miles behind me (since Singapore) and a manageable day ahead, this last little ride into Bangkok felt like a whole day for cruising. Though given my eventual late arrival, negotiating heavy traffic in the dark and rain, it’s possible I took it a little too easy.

I started early enough at least – up ready to see off the 6.20am train as it pulled out of Samut Songkhram.

When the train line was built, it cut right through the local market. Rather than relocate though, the market stayed put and the trains simply roll right through. It’s an amazingly casual affair; a gentle announcement sounds and vendors nonchalantly pack up their stalls whilst shoppers shuffle aside and breathe in for a few seconds to let it pass.

Unsurprisingly the spectacle has become a big fixture on day-trip itineraries out of Bangkok. I was expecting the usual charade of fridge magnets and tourist tat, but went along all the same.

I couldn’t have been more wrong! This was the real deal with stalls overflowing with seafood straight from the coast and heaving with fresh produce from the local orchards. There were no day trippers at 6.20am and I doubt the deep fried toads are for their benefit anyway.

It’s often tricky for me to stop at markets with the bike so it was great to take my time wandering around. They are used to tourists here too so nobody paid me any notice. I almost convinced myself I was ‘blending in’ with the barefoot monks and keen local shoppers as I clicked away in the soft morning light. The atmosphere must have gone to my head!

The first half of my route from Samut Songkhram was crisscrossed by an immense network of canals which go right through to Bangkok, irrigating coconut plantations and orchid farms along the way. The plantations here are used for palm sugar as well as coconuts, the sap boiled up on site in giant wood-fired vats, giving a smoky sweetness to the air.

I’d visited Ta Ka, a small floating market in this area, a couple of years ago and thought it would be fun to call in again as it was right on my route. Officially Ta Ka is ‘closed’ on weekdays but I thought I’d see what was going on. I was surprised to find two big coaches parked up outside. These were not tourists, it turned out, but a group of very excited school kids out on a trip to visit the few vendors that do show up when the market is ‘shut’ to sell to the local neighbourhood.

The students had all been given a few Baht by mum and dad and the noodle lady was doing a roaring trade!

My arrival soon drew a crowd and everyone queued up to take turns asking life’s big questions:

Where are you from? What is your name? How old are you?

I had enough Thai to tell them I was a history teacher cycling to Bangkok. BAI KRUNG THEP?! CHAKRYAN? (Bangkok?! By BIKE? – in chorus). They thought I was mad. Their teacher asked for a photo and we then took one with my phone too – a young photographer stepping forward to arrange everyone.

I knew the roads would begin to get busy as I inched nearer the city, so enjoyed some calm here (once the kids had left!), buying sticky rice treats and noodles (to top up my first breakfast), strategically ignoring the fact that the noodle lady had just washed the bowl I was about to eat from directly in the canal water.

The route into town was surprisingly ok until I hit my first major intersection, a giant web of lanes with roads spiralling skyward in several directions. Luckily there was a footbridge allowing me to continue onto smaller roads on the other side. I haven’t weighed my bike and luggage, but it is pretty hard to lift from the road to the kerb. So carrying it across four or five major expressways (like this one) pretty much killed me. Of course I gave a deranged smile to passers by all the same (‘all ok here!’), hoofing the thing around like a witless villain shifting a corpse in a Hollywood comedy.

To make things easier, a big storm rolled in, and I ended up making up the last few km’s in the dark. Still, it was great to arrive. I’d cycled to Bangkok!

I sent a message to the cycling What’s App group (from the previous post) to see who was in town and ended up meeting up for a drink with two really great guys. I even went along with one of them, Brian, to the Channel 7 boxing arena where you can watch Muay Thai (for free) as part of the TV audience.

Proper Muay Thai is a shockingly brutal affair to be honest and not really my thing, but I was glad to have experienced it once. The atmosphere was wild, with almost everyone in the crowd there to bet on the matches. As betting is officially prohibited in Thailand, all the bets worked on a complex kind of peer-to-peer system, arranged by an indecipherable code of hand signals and gestures made enthusiastically throughout each bout. At one point a fight broke out in the crowd (presumably an unpaid bet) and a middle aged man came tumbling down the stands with a bloody nose.

Heavy stuff for a Sunday afternoon.

Aside from the boxing, I did a lot of overdue ‘admin’ (laundry, haircut, blog, attempting to post stuff home, eating lots of obscenely sweet Thai deserts – someone’s got to eat them!, bike maintenance and deep clean, getting some camera gear fixed and so on).

I also took a ride around the city, which was really simple once you get into the flow of how things move.

Here are some pictures from my ‘rest’ days:

Bangkok is a really great city, but a little strange for me as I’d last been here visiting a now ex-girlfriend and kept stumbling across old memories:

• This is the place we had breakfast that time!
• This is near that old record store!
• …and so on

The city is as it was:

• The oversized signage and neon lights of Chinatown
• the whistling riverboat men of the Chao Phraya Express
• pink taxis
• that first blast of cold air on the BTS
• and bizarre specialist streets (my neighbourhood alone boasted a TV repair alley, street full of trophy and medal vendors and a whole cluster of roads dedicated to selling hats for the uniformed services).

I’d rested long enough though – it was time to get moving! But where to? Up to now my focus had been on reaching Bangkok. And my route? Easy – follow the coast! I now needed to reset and home in on a new target.

I was pretty tired though, so ended up going to bed on my last night without a plan.

Perhaps I should have spent less time taking photos!

Here’s some more from a walk around Chinatown: