June 15, 2025
Day B12: 60km Felt like 120km
After that brutal, mud-soaked journey into Bang Burd, I inhaled pad kapow and beers like they were communion. The restaurant buzzed with life, and for the first time all day, I felt human again chatting with the owners and the others eating late at night. I thought I’d sleep like the dead.
But I didn’t.
Instead, I lay awake in that dimly lit bungalow with thoughts spiraling. Maybe it was the silence. Maybe it was the weariness catching up. But I knew the real reason: exile. That quiet word again. Nearly four months of it now. And in that stillness, memories from early 2020 crept in—when I faced the same ache, the same question marks, the same crossroads.
Back then, I caved. I went back to China before the border closed. This time? No. Not again.
So what did I do at 2 a.m. in a remote Thai village, questioning my life and choices? You guessed it: I ran the whole existential loop with AI.
There wasn’t going to be an immediate fix. There never is when the problem is existential. But one truth rose to the surface: the door was closed. Not “maybe” closed. Not “perhaps-if-I-try-hard-enough” closed. Properly shut. Locked. Bolted. Done.
Going back to China wasn’t just a logistical mess; it was a game of Russian roulette with no real upside. I ran the mental math and compared it with other risk vs. reward decisions I’ve made recently, like scooter rides to Haad Yuan on dangerous roads or dancing into the Full Moon Party chaos. Those risks had asymmetrical upside to the rewards. They gave me something. Experience. Connection. A story.
But China? No story left. No win. Just a gamble with high stakes and no payout. The residence permit was probably invalidated anyway, and even if it wasn’t, what would I be walking back into?
No. That door stays shut. And this time, I don’t reach for the handle.
It didn’t help that another colleague, let's call him a fellow runner, had done his own version of a midnight exit. His was tamer, maybe even dignified on the surface, but the aftermath was anything but. He left nearly a million RMB in a Chinese bank account and then thought it wise to fly back and retrieve it. Well I guess he had no choice given he left the money there which was incredibly poor tactical planning on his part, but I couldn’t believe it. That was also playing Russian roulette with immigration.
To be fair, he got lucky. He managed to get the money out and I'm happy for him. But I still think it was dumb. He flew back on his old residence permit, insisting, “They can’t cancel it unless you sign the cancellation papers.” I didn’t believe him for a second. China plays a different game. The rules aren’t written down, they're opaque and they can change willy nilly.
Meanwhile, I had a new passport. A clean slate. But with that came the truth: all the old visas, work permits, residence documents? They were paper ghosts. Invalid the moment the passport changed. Yet Sophia, would keep saying “No problem, you can use those to re-enter. We’ll just switch you to a spousal visa.”
Right. And step into the spider’s web while you’re at it. No thanks. That may have worked in 2015. But it’s 2025 now. The rules are different. And this time, I’m not gambling.
More of that AI-assisted insomnia analysis went on through the early hours. No breakthroughs. No tidy conclusions. Just loops. Loops of memory, fear, and what-if. I must have finally blacked out around 4 a.m., because when I came to, I had clocked nearly ten hours, flatlined in that resort bed like I’d just come back from a warzone. Maybe I had.
When I finally wandered over to the restaurant, food was being served, people were smiling, the breeze off the sea smelled faintly of salt and fried garlic. Normalcy. But I wasn’t ready to drop the analysis just yet. I kept trying to work through it—this gnawing doubt that had followed me for months, if not years.
Then it hit me.
I wasn’t crazy. I wasn’t imagining things. The gaslighting I’d swallowed, tolerated, tried to rationalize, well it all broke apart. Things had changed. And they had change drastically. Under Xi Jinping, the shift was unmistakable. The writing wasn’t just on the wall, it had been etched into stone tablets and mailed to every province. Surveillance, control, nationalism, silence. The warning signs had been there for years. I just didn’t want to believe it.
What made it worse was the chorus of so-called “lifers”: expats who had either bought in, sold out, or simply tuned out. They kept telling me I was wrong, paranoid, overthinking. “China’s fine,” they said. “You’re just burned out. Things aren’t getting worse. You’re imagining it. Stay the course.”
But it all reminded me of that classic episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation. The one where Picard is captured by the Cardassians. They torture him, not just physically, but psychologically. The interrogator keeps pointing to four lights above his head and says, “There are five lights.” And the entire point is to force Picard to submit—not just physically, but intellectually. To believe the lie. And every time Picard insists: “There are four lights!”
That’s exactly how it felt. Like I had spent years being told to believe there were five lights. That everything was normal. That the tightening grip, the surveillance, the paranoia were all just quirks of the system. That it was all still “normal life.” But I could see clearly now. There were four lights. I wasn’t crazy. I had just refused to accept the lie.
Eventually, I had to shut it all down: the loops, the analysis, the late-night hypotheticals. It was turning into mental noise pollution. I was literally on a pristine Thai beach, hidden away in a forgotten corner of the Gulf, with the sea lapping just meters away, and I was poisoning it all by replaying China on an endless loop in my head.
If this was supposed to be the escape, then why was I dragging the whole damn prison with me? So I stopped. Just stopped.
No more bargaining, no more nostalgia gymnastics, no more running counterfactuals like an ex trying to write alternate endings to a breakup text. It was over. The door was shut. Not locked with anger or bitterness, but sealed by clarity. I’m not going back. Shanghai doesn’t own me. China was never meant to be forever. I had just tricked myself into thinking it was.
I finally accepted what my heart had known for months: you can exist outside of that world. You can live beyond its gravitational pull. You don’t need the skyline, the WeChat groups, the illusion of belonging propped up by QR codes and clearance levels.
It was time to move forward. To step into whatever came next—not with regret, but with a quiet kind of resolve.
The sea kept lapping. The air stayed warm. And for the first time in weeks, maybe months, I breathed.
But first things first, I had to move. If nothing else, just get back on the bike and go somewhere. I couldn't just lay around processing existential crises on a beachfront forever. Ban Krut was the next logical checkpoint—about 60km up the coast. Not too bad. Manageable, I figured.
The roads looked promising too. Straightforward. No more jungle death traps, no more Google spaghetti trails winding into mangrove oblivion. But with Thailand, you never really know. You just point the bike and pray.
So I packed up, tightened the straps on my soaked gear from the night before, and decided to go for it.
And that’s when the heavens opened.
I’m talking full-on tropical pissing rain. The kind that doesn't ask for permission, doesn’t build up slowly—it just erupts the moment you commit to something. Shoes waterlogged within minutes. Visibility gone.
It was almost too perfect. Like the weather itself was laughing: “Oh, you finally made a decision? Cute. Let’s test that resolve.”
So there I was, pedaling into a wall of water, back on the road again. Just me, a soggy Tern bike, and whatever storm this journey still had left for me.
The rain finally let up, giving me a small mercy to regroup and actually enjoy the ride again. I rolled about 20km north until I hit Bang Saphan Noi—a modest town but sizeable enough to mark some progress.
This was Wilaiwan’s old turf. Her Sananwan Beach House had once been a quiet gem on the coast. But like so many others, it didn’t survive covid. Another ghost left in the wake of the world shutting down. And standing there now, years later, I felt like I was seeing the remnants of a world that had just... given up.
It all culminated in a moment and said to myself: To hell with this. I’m taking the train.
But I wasn’t about to ride 10 kilometers inland just to find out I had missed it. I’ve learned that lesson too many times. So I did the smart thing. I asked AI.
Sure enough, the answer was as bleak as the empty coastline: the one and only train had already left—12:30 p.m. Gone. No more until well past 9 p.m.
Well that sucks.
So that was that. Once again, there was no escape. No rescue train. No shortcut. Just me and the road.
Back on the bike, then.
The next stretch was just over 40 kilometers. The weather, at least, began to reward my persistence. The skies cleared, the breeze turned friendly, and the coastal scenery suddenly bloomed into something unexpectedly beautiful. It felt like I'd crossed into a different province, or maybe just a different state of mind. Hard to say which. But it was a needed shift.
Then came the next trial.
The left pedal. Of all things. The damn left pedal.
It had gotten caked in mud during that earlier swamp slog, and now the bearings were seizing up. Every downward stroke turned into a wrestling match. It wasn’t pedaling anymore—it was coercing. Like forcing a rusted machine back to life one grinding shriek at a time. And oh, the sound. That hideous mechanical wail, like a dying banshee inside the crank arm. It screamed at me with every half-turn:
"You will not beat me. I will beat you down."
But I kept going. Because that’s what this whole trip had become. It had becme man vs. machine, man vs. himself, man vs. the absence of options. There was no other choice but to press on, one cursed pedal stroke at a time, all the way to Ban Krut.
Every kilometer felt like a fistfight.
Not just with the road, or the pedal, or the trucks roaring by—but with my own body. My own mind. My own story. I just didn’t have the energy to hack this ride anymore. And that was the hardest pill to swallow. Because there was a time—not long ago—when I could chew through 120, even 150 kilometers in a day and barely flinch. I was that rider once.
But not now. Not with the 20 extra kilograms I’ve been carrying—weight packed on from stress, upheaval, and half a year of survival mode. Not with the load strapped to the bike. And not with the clutter in my mind, the ghosts of Shanghai still whispering that I should’ve stayed, that I’ve lost something. That I’m lost.
The weight wasn’t just in my panniers—it was in my soul.
And still... I kept going.
Because slog or not, there was no turning back. There was only one pedal after another. One truck-blasted shoulder, one slippery crank, one internal pep talk at a time.
Then came the last five kilometers.
Ban Krut revealed itself not with fanfare, but with grace. Like a hidden beach unveiling itself just for me. The rain had cleared, the air smelled of salt and soil, and the road finally let up. Palm trees lined the way, and the sky opened wide like a curtain call after a long, brutal act.
I had made it.
Today's ride: 60 km (37 miles)
Total: 1,104 km (686 miles)
| Rate this entry's writing | Heart | 3 |
| Comment on this entry | Comment | 0 |