19. Man overboard…
We’d been told that the national park south of us wasn’t even a hill by some fellow tandemers, who shall remain nameless, so after a lovely couple of days relaxing for my Birthday, we merrily tried to cycle up an 18% “not-a-hill” and did what a Corporation would call, “an involuntary dismount” or as a football crowd would much more honestly chant “He fell over!” We were fine going down the not-a-hill before the up bit, but that was too steep, too soon and I failed to get the right gear quickly enough and we went over sideways and missed the...
Read More18. Hot hot hot
We’ve been quite lucky with the weather so far, almost no rain, just the one 10 minute deluge and we’ve generally managed to finish cycling before it got hot hot. Hot is fine but hot hot is not! But the last few days it been getting up to the mid 30’s and with the humidity that’s hot hot. We’ve also arrived at a part of the coast where there are few hotels and no tourists. The beaches are full of washed up debris of palm leaves and plastic and not very nice and the whole area is nice to cycle through but very undeveloped and poor. Beach debris The...
Read More17. A Pelleton of tourers
We’ve not seen many tourers this trip which has been a great surprise as we thought the place would be heaving with them, so perhaps like London buses they clump together and we duly bumped into a Spanish lady heading to Hong Kong from Bali and whilst we were chatting to her another British couple on a Tandem turned up – immaculatly clean, much to our Tilly’s disgust – and whilst talking to them ( discovery we had mutual tandem friends in England!) a couple of Canadians turned up too. The Canadians had numerous Canadian flags flying and we wondered, given we’ve...
Read More16. Turning south
We left our cabin in the paddy fields at dawn and had a lovely cycle though small lanes, with ever changing scenery from Sugar Cane to strange crops we had no idea about but they looked about as worn out as we were by noon when it got really hot. We were within about 10km of our visit for the day and had found it really easy going, but all of a sudden it just became like cycling through treacle and it was so much effort, all because the temperature had risen to the high 30’s. It takes almost twice a much energy to cycle at 35C as it does at 20C, all of the extra energy is just to...
Read More15. Bridge over the River Kwai
Kanchanburi, is the home of the bridge made famous by the David Lean film Bridge over the River Kwai. The film is about the wooden 2nd bridge, but today the main railway bridge, made with stolen steel spans from Java, is a huge tourist attraction and was heaving with people when we rolled into town. It’s now got a ‘Concentration Camp Market’ on the far shore located on the site of one of the POW camps and the other end is surrounded by stalls selling everything from food to Cheap Chinese crap. The modern day view of River Kwai The town has numerous museums, the best of...
Read More14. 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...
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