17. 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 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...
Read More13. Costa del Thailand
From Chanthaburi we headed back to he coast on a cycle lane! There’s been quite a lot of these recently, though very very few cycles and they’re usually used by the mopeds and motorbikes to pootle along in. A proper protected cycle lane Once we reached the coast though the cycle path was a segregated cycle only lane, with a separate footpath and a moped lane. It had signs every few meters saying bikes only no parking and as cars the world over do, it was totally ignored unless it was physically impossible to get on to it to park due to a big curb. I have no idea if this is true,...
Read More12. Road? What road?
We reluctantly left our Christmas oasis of luxury in Phnom Penh after a lovely seven nights rest. Our journey from here takes us back westward to the coast. Once we reach the coast we only have one road option and that’s the main road and it goes up and down a lot. You know what we think of ups and downs, but far worse than this is that the road is being ‘resurfaced’. What the Cambodians mean by this is its actually being laid. The old road is what an estate agent would describe as ‘Laid to pot holes’, though this is stretching the term pot...
Read More11. Phonm Penh
The ferry into PP is an experience on its own. There are about 15 ferry’s, 2 of which are roro and the others are drive on reverse off ferries. No probs for a tandem or the millions of mopeds but there’s a single concrete ramp leading down into the water at each port and the ferries push and shove to dock right next to each other anywhere they can on this ramp. Cars and moped then fight to get past the other cars and mopeds trying to board outgoing ferries and men wave batons and blow whistles to try to control it all. It’s great fun to watch and we walked Tilly off...
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