The Turnaround

March 5, 2015

When the wheels start to point toward home

Koh Chang Noi to Ranong (boat)

Ranong to Bangkok (bus)

Bus station to Banglamphu, Bangkok 10

Bangkok to Portland (plane)

Dear little friends,

Every paradise can start to cloy. Paradise itself was doing just fine, actually, but its inhabitants were starting to get on our nerves. The constant smoking and noisy partying by some of the other guests at Mama’s meant we found ourselves sitting at the “kid’s table” at dinnertime to avoid the smoke wafting through the dining area. This is an island of limited amusements, so after spending weeks there as some of these folks did, they were done with swimming and marine life and had settled down into what probably are their usual avocations back in France or Germany as barflies. If I am making presumptions, know that I can only judge people by what they seem to be very good at.

On our last day on the island we took a walk to a National Park area on the southern end, where a mostly deserted beach and some wonderful rocky areas had all sorts of tropical fish swimming about. I had seen some of these fish in the aquarium near Prachuap, but to see them in the wild, scurrying around my toes in the warm crystal water was a real highlight for me. My kingdom for a snorkel that weighs nothing and folds up into its own package and can double as a bowl or a pillow or some other useful travel gear. And binoculars. Inventors, please get on this.

On our last day on Koh Chang Noi we took a hike to another beach.

No, not this one, although it looks very tempting.

Nemo's cousin the Maroon Clownfish (Premnas biaculeatus) is down there someplace.

Hiking back in the blistering afternoon we stopped in a bamboo area to... you know. Cut bamboo. We needed two four or five inch pieces of hollow bamboo to use as fork spreaders when we packed our bikes up, how’s that for creative innovation? Our first fork spreaders were rolled up tubes of cardboard that are now languishing in Bagan, Myanmar. Perhaps they have long ago burned to ash in the clever wood-fired hot water heater at the May Ka Lar Guesthouse from where we took the first pedal strokes of this journey.

Okay, we need two 4-5 inch hollow pieces of bamboo, anybody know where we can find such a thing?

I had been waking up in the nights listening to the soft crashing of waves and thinking about toast. Toast, brown and buttered, with Killer Dave’s Good Seed bread from the Fred Meyer store on Hawthorne street. The cashier there knows us and will ask where we’ve been. On a wooden plate, on the kitchen table where I can see out into the garden, a cup of coffee, in the Obama cup that says “Made in America” on one side and has a photo of his birth certificate on the other. Toast. And a couple of eggs, over easy.

That’s how trips end, when you wake up thinking about breakfast, which leads to thinking about the comfy bed at home, and the cat, my son and daughter, my family, my street, the gardens, friends I miss, cooking my own food. Other clothes besides the ones I’ve been wearing for months. A pillow.

The Swiss army knife has a little saw on it which did the trick and we clutched our perfect lengths of bamboo as we scrambled down the bank to our little bungalow. The boat would arrive at 8:00 am to pick us up, we paid our bill and ate one last meal out at the kid’s table, and watched the sun set precisely over a tiny island far out in the Andaman sea, part of the chain of Burmese islands that we can’t visit yet. Maybe soon.

Surprisingly there was quite a turnout the next morning for the boat, several of the barflies/guests were leaving on visa runs or to some other islands to wait out the season, and there was a line of people waving us off from the beach. Climbing back onto the boat was more difficult than I had predicted and I think I may have broken a toe on that crazy ladder! The two hours back to Ranong felt like kids returning home from summer camp, I’m guessing a good many on the Golden Bee were hungover.

This is the point where we start heading home.

Back in Ranong. Prop the bike with the Click-Stand, set the brakes, load up, ride away. We love that.

Back in Ranong we arranged for our bus to Bangkok, repacked our panniers, sweltered in yet another vintage room, and left early the next morning. Our bus was big and impersonal, they seem to no longer use the large tv screens on buses, where we used to always be tormented by karaoke videos or inane Thai variety shows. Only on lucky buses did we have Tom and Jerry or Mr. Bean. Now there is nothing, because everybody on the bus is plugged into their own devices, listening to their own thing. It was the quietest bus we’d ever been on. When an older Thai man nodded off and started snoring the khaki-clad European in front of him turned around and starchily told him off, in English, of course. We were astonished by that guy’s rudeness and condescension, if it had been silent before now it became an ugly awkward silence. Making a scene would only have made it even more embarrassing for the Thai guy so we just looked out the window instead.

"Hey, Bruce, there's a bird on the highway."

I remembered another bus ride in Laos, long ago. The bus was the classic chicken bus with much noisy chatter and babies crying and bags of rice in the aisles. The road was so rough that any time we descended into a valley they shoved the cassette tape back into the player and everybody got happy about the lack of violent bouncing and the cheerful music. It was raining like hell and a little boy sat on the dashboard with a roll of pink toilet paper, wiping off the condensation inside the windshield with great diligence, and a teenager stood behind him ready to steady him over the biggest bounces. The bus stopped for anybody that waved them down, which weren’t always passengers, one time it was for a guy selling dead squirrels, which were passed around the bus and inspected by sniffing for freshness. Recipes for squirrel were traded when the bus started up again. I missed that bus.

We were driving north on Highway 4, and although we had spent as little time on it as we possibly could while on our bicycles, we did watch for landmarks. There was the restaurant where we called in the couple on bikes with the little boy in the trailer. There were the headlands of Prachuap Khiri Khan, peeking above the trees.

A delicious cream cake snack on the bus. Well, actually, it tasted much as it looked.

Most of our last evening in Ranong I had been obsessing about our plan to ride our bikes from the southern bus station, which is on the west side of Bangkok, a significant distance from the downtown area. Pocket Earth had mapped out a cycle-friendly route, well, as cycle-friendly as a route can be in Bangkok. I took out my iPad and scanned the route, and tried to explain to Bruce why it was going to take us nearly two miles of riding just to get across the street from the bus station.

First, Bangkok is crisscrossed with very busy highways with restricted entries, not exactly freeways but nearly that strict. To get from one side of these to the other you ride like mad with the traffic, go up on a ramp that swerves above the traffic and does a gigantic U-turn, then ride like mad the opposite direction until you can ease out onto quieter streets. We had to take two of those U-turns right off the bat, and then it was fairly clear sailing for the rest of the way downtown, at least until the bridge.

It was dusk when we arrived at the bus station and we donned every light we had, gritted our teeth, and set out. First U-turn, good, second one, yep, terrifying but we can do this. Into the neighborhoods, whoops, wrong way, go back, we’re good, let’s go. Major right turn here, back into traffic.

With our adrenaline going gangbusters, we also were noticing how much room cars and buses and trucks were giving us. We saw dozens of bicyclists zipping around the city, something I can never remember seeing before. Maybe we hadn’t been paying attention. Besides the wrong turn, we were doing great, but we still had to cross a huge bridge before entering Banglamphu, so we stopped and scoped it out. A foreigner recommended another bridge, we rode down to it but some Thais stopped us and said, oh no no we couldn’t go on that one so we went back to the first.

It was dark. The sidewalks were full of people out eating, the traffic was busy but not horrible. We stood on the sidewalk, looking at the waves of vehicles disappearing over the crest of the bridge. It had been almost three weeks since we had cycled into Chumphon and our lazy legs were feeling some pain after ten miles of nervy cycling. We were both scared, and didn’t know what to do. Should we unload our bikes and carry everything up the long flight of stairs to the pedestrian sidewalk? At night in Bangkok? How the hell were we going to be able to do that safely?

Enter a cyclist on a folding bike, nonchalantly buzzing by us in the auto lane and onto the bridge. “Follow him!” we both shouted to each other, and we bumped off of the sidewalk and tried to keep up with him. Of course we lost him but we certainly weren’t lost ourselves. Up, up, up over the bridge with legs pumping like we were outrunning the hounds of hell. Again, buses and trucks changed lanes and stayed as far away from us as they could. We were lit up like Christmas trees with blinking lights, maybe they thought we were alien space ships. But no, it wasn’t that. It was that Bangkok has become a cycling city and drivers know to watch out for us.

It was a damn steep uphill but then suddenly we topped out and then came coasting back down into the heart of the city. I had looked at the Google street view a hundred times from this point and barked turns out to Bruce.

“HERE!”

“Okay, now take that LEFT!”

And suddenly we were on one of those tiny back streets in the heart of the tourist area near Khao San Road. It was absolutely jammed with foreigners eating, drinking, getting foot massages and tattoos and buying tie-dye clothing, wandering around with their backpacks, some of them already reeling crazily at 7:00 in the evening with their dreadlocks askew.

We had made it. My knees were shaking.

The most dangerous ride of our trip was over, we were here to pack up, eat a lot of good food, and catch a taxi to the airport in a few days. But first we had to find a guesthouse, which took a good while but we did eventually, down a tiny alleyway in the Sam Sen neighborhood. Air-con, a ground floor room with plenty of room for packing our bikes, sold.

It's hard to believe we even braved this narrow alleyway at 9pm in Bangkok, on the off-chance there would be a guest house on it. But we did and there was.

Bangkok is a pretty cool place. Yes, it’s hot and the traffic is pretty loud and relentless and there are tons of tourists and too many 7-11s even for us. We ate at tiny coffee shops and tray food in our tiny street and went to some enormous malls. My broken/sprained toe made walking kind of a pain in Bangkok and of course it was hotter than hell. But we had a good time there.

On the scale of random sights in random places, Bangkok rates 9.999.

I still haven't figured out why people would go to Starbucks in Thailand.

We were in Thailand three separate legs of this trip and weren't seeing any of the politically charged "red shirts" or "yellow shirts". The new colored shirt group these days is the "purple shirts", supporters of the princess, eldest daughter of the king. This woman is head and shoulders above her degenerate older brother, the Crown Prince. Stay tuned.

City blocks in Bangkok are huge, and each one has little alleyways into the heart of them, sometimes there are parking lots, sometimes small houses and gardens, sometimes shops and high rises.

We were surprised to see that a cycling advocacy group in Bangkok had put up a large poster commemorating some long-distance bicycle tourists who had died in car accidents in Bangkok. We wrote our thoughts and so did many others.

Peter Root and Mary Thompson had cycled overland from the UK. One of their many memorable videos is below. They were both killed by a drunk driver in Thailand.

Chilean cyclist Juan Francisco Guillermo's quest to go 155,000 miles on his bike in five years was cut short after the accident, his wife and young son were riding nearby and also suffered injuries. We were gratified to see this tribute and to see that Thailand takes these deaths seriously.

We rode the water taxis when we could, down the klongs or out on the river. Yes, I almost fell into a klong. We had visited the Jim Thompson House and my head was still glazed from all the beauty I had seen and I made the mistake of jumping onto the klong boat by stepping on the wet rubber tire bumper which of course was incredibly slippery. I started to fall in! Instantly there were Thais all around me grabbing me up before I knew I was going down. Only one leg up to the knee went in, so it could have been much, much worse and once I was on the boat we all had a good laugh about it. If you have ever seen a Bangkok klong, you may have noticed that they are full of garbage and in some neighborhoods, like the one we were in, some very poor people have their little toilet shacks built right over the water. Fortunately we were headed back to our room where I could try to scald and soap the black filth from myself and my sandal. The next day we were back on the klong boat, no mishaps at all. Oh wait. Are those children we see swimming in the klong? They certainly were.

The klongs are an extensive network of canals of Bangkok. The boats zip around town with a great deal of splash and noise, and their roofs get lowered when they go under certain bridges so standing passengers need to stay alert. Handy tip I learned the hard way: don't use those tires to step onto the boat.

A water feature at the Jim Thompson House.

Jim Thompson was a collector of beautiful Asian furniture, art, and textiles. His house is a gorgeous old wooden building set amongst trees and flowers, a real respite from the bustle of Bangkok.

We eventually had to get to the business of finding boxes and packing. One box was begged from a begrudging neighborhood warehouse, the other was a bike box from Velo Thai that we cut down to the size we needed. In the end we had two serviceable boxes that were probably 30% packing tape, each packed to around 46 pounds, that had to be lugged down our alley to a spot where a taxi could pick them up, and us, and our new stripey bags, and one carry-on pannier apiece. Sweat trickled down my back even in the air-conditioned taxi on the long, long ride to the airport. We stopped at yet another traffic light and I shifted the 46 pound box on my lap and glanced out the window to see a Thai teenager slumped against a wall, huffing from a brown paper bag.

Packing materials being made ready. Our boxes needed to be 12x20x30, a very specific size that wasn't easy to find so one of them had to be made from scratch. 62 lineal inches is the magic number to not be considered oversized baggage. They also had to be under 50 pounds, so there was much hefting and wondering and nervous repacking.

All this packing calls for a mango break.

Bruce has one last street food meal. Oh, wait, I think there was one more after this.

It was time to go home. It can be hard to go home and it can be easy, too. The long waits at the Bangkok airport, ridiculous waits, really, were just part of what it was going to take to get back to everything and everybody I had been missing. That airport has a lot of futuristic design but it’s pretty hostile, in my opinion, very sterile and chilly feeling. Entering immigration was surreal, with huge crowds, slow lines, and crazy and confusing routing. After that ordeal we could change into some travel clothes, but finding a restroom was incredibly difficult. It’s an AIRPORT! The ones we found were stuck behind some back walls looking for all the world like where the janitorial staff kept their supplies or went to have a cigarette. It did have a handicapped stall large enough for me to change and do a little wipe-down navy shower after the sweaty taxi drive. Bruce said that in the men’s there was a guy puking into a urinal.

Waiting for the Asiana desk to open. After this there will be two or three more long queues to stand in, so we might as well take a load off for now.

Suvarnabhumi Airport, Bangkok. Warm and fuzzy it ain't.

After the red-eye to Korea there was a very long layover in Seoul, but guess what? There are free showers in the transit area! We both took one and felt much better. There were napping areas, there was a little coffee bar. The electric outlets there are pretty wonky though so make sure you are already powered up beforehand. People with more stamina than us can take free bus tours of Seoul during long layovers but the glum, chilly weather and our exhaustion kind of nixed that.

San Francisco was a piece of cake, the immigration guy heard we had biked through Asia and kindly gave us a get-through clearance through customs. And then soon we were landing in Portland on a beautiful sunny 70 degree day, with Mt. Hood glowing over our city and a group hug with my kids in the airport. At home we said goodbye to the house sitter, hello to the cat, and walked a block over for pizza, finally, some really good oven-fired pizza.

But first I had to dash through the house looking for pants. Where were my pants? So much had been stashed away before we left, phones and computers and purses and I had cleared out my closet and dresser for the house sitter to use. Where oh where were my pants, not in the basement dresser, not in the other closet, I could not go out without changing into some pants that didn’t have chain grease on them. Finally I looked in that closet I had supposedly cleared out and there they were, shoved to the side behind the winter coats I didn’t wear this year.

We walked over to Division street, Portland people everywhere, sitting out in the rare early spring sunshine with their pasty winter skin and feisty hairstyles and their bikes locked to poles. We had hurried and scurried to get to our favorite pizza joint by five o’clock because, well, maybe you already know why. It was happy hour.

Today's ride: 10 miles (16 km)
Total: 1,646 miles (2,649 km)

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