14. The car is King

We left our hotel about 50km south of Bangkok to salutes from all the staff and managed to weave our way through the paddy fields and countryside to the outskirts of the capital where the tranquility of the rest of the country ends and is replaced by the New God of Thailand.. The Car.

Everything revolves around it here despite only 28% of people owning one.  There are new roads going in everywhere and Bangkok ns everything surrounding it, is a temple to the car.

The city is cross crossed by 4 and 6 lane highways which are difficult to cross if you are a pedestrian as the central barrier is concrete.  These divide the streets up like the Berlin Wall and there are occasional pedestrian bridges and every kilometre or so there’s a u turn lane.  But this involves getting across these busy roads and then back onto the other side, one of our least favourite things here, despite most drivers being very courteous.

Coming back into Bangkok the motorway was raised above two dual carriageway below, so at times 16 lanes of traffic – soooo noisy.

The city crawls along at rush hours – we walked 700m from our hotel for dinner faster than the cars drove it, and the construction of new roads won’t help. Build roads, encourage traffic, they really need bus lanes, and mass transit systems, but all hail the car –  until ownership just makes the place grind to a halt.

Anyway, we stopped in at a bike shop to have Tilly’s brakes adjusted and then did the obligatory u turn on the main road and reached our hotel for the night before heading off to an Indian restaurant for dinner  but as it was Muslim Indian it didn’t serve beer. Sacre Bleu! …after a day on these roads we definitely needed one…But the staff said the owner (who clearly wasn’t Muslim) owned the adjacent Italian so we could have our Indian served in there with a beer. Good plan and a fabulous Indian it was too.  The Indians we have had here have been some of the best we’ve had anywhere.. I wonder if Thai food is better in India…

We headed out of the environs of Bangkok to some mixed driving standards. Most of the drivers are still really courteous and will give way to you to help you get across lanes, but some of the new expensive large SUV cars are  ‘Get out of my way’ drivers. They simply have to be in front of you -and this happens all over the world – if there’s a row of stationary traffic ahead they will desperately overtake, even if they immediately have to stop, just to be in front. Why…

But once we had cycled about 25km directly into the wind, naturally, on an ancient dead straight Roman road, we managed to leave the bad drivers, noise and mayhem behind. Although we still had to navigate the occasional Berlin Wall dividing road through a small town.

At one of these there was bedlam as the police were stopping all the traffic in the 3 lane carriageway to check documents. We needed to get across all the lanes and then use the one open lane to go past the dozens of stopped lorries to get to our U Turn. The policeman simply stuck a cone in the lane to stop all the traffic on the road and waved us through to our u turn point..Brilliant…the vehicles did not look amused !

From then on our cycle was much nicer again, though we still feel we are missing something about Thailand.  So many people go on about it being their favourite country but so far, we think we much preferred Cambodia and Laos.

Thailand is almost like a Western country in many places but there are a huge number of new gated housing estates being built everywhere – which are almost always one long straight road crammed full of houses on either side behind an imposing wall and entrance gate with security guards – they have no character whatsoever and almost seem a bit prison blocky.. the old wooden stilt homes which are so beautiful seem to be being demolished or abandon and as much as we totally understand the need to improve people’s living conditions the new builds have nothing Thai about them at all  Many are very nice but they could be anywhere in the world.

They are however creating jobs for thousands of security guards who managed these gates with red flags and a whistle. Everywhere has them..training centres, colleges, businesses, hotels …we see loads of them.  We wonder if there is  a training school for whistle blowing and flag waving as we dont really understand all the whistles. They just seem to blow and blow.. a lot… and again, they are always very helpful to us if we are near them, stopping traffic to let us out and waving and giving us the whistle goodbye…and sometimes even a salute..We rather enjoy it all!

As we headed north and these estates disappeared there are numerous ostentatious huge Dallas houses springing up.  Again, they are very impressive and look great, but again they have nothing Thai about them.  We just wished they added some of the wonderful flourishes the roofs have in the wooden homes to make them look and feel more local. It’s almost as if the country around here is losing part of its soul. Many of the old houses often have some curving roof art, or lovely wooden carvings on the sides. These unique and artistic touches make them so enjoyable to look at as we cruise past, unlike their replacements.

Anyway, we are headed north as the two french tandemers Mat & Lou who we met earlier in Cambodia told us we should visit Ayuttayah, the ancient capital of Thailand (or Siam as it was then) ..                                        By the way they may be calling their new tandem ‘JoLi’ after much nagging from us about having to christen her …

So we rolled up into town for a 3 night stop to take in the temples. Ayuttayah is a UNESCO site with 289 hectares of ruins. The city was one of, if not the most cosmopolitan and wealthiest city in the world in its heyday. The vast temple complex is testament to this but the city was sacked by the Burmese in 1767 and never recovered.

The style is similar to Ankor Wat in Cambodia, which was sacked by the people from Ayuttayah, so what goes around comes around I suppose. It’s a fantastic place to visit and there are hundreds of ruins to see and wander around and they seemingly stretch for miles. In fact, the best way to see them all apparently is by bike, so we walked!

In Thailand there is a supermarket chain called TOPS. It’s an Aldi size shop that sells loads of imported goods, mainly from Australia and USA but carries a lot of Waitrose stuff and usually has a bakery selling lovely bread! They are only in big towns and Ayuttayah had one so we grabbed a Grab, the local Uber, and went out for some Cheddar! Even on this drive we past more remains and ruins all over the place. This city must have been amazing and we longed for the TARDIS again.

But whilst at TOPS we encountered the future of shopping.  We found ourselves harassed by a flipping robot in the shop.  It had a screen and carried products on trays in its body and (presumably) was trying to get us to buy something as it was following us around chatting away in Thai.  Great to see once, but I hope they never catch on!