December 12, 2016
to Tak: bowling down the highway
For anyone staying in Thoen after us: go to the Nakron hotel next door, the 150 baht you are saving are not worth fighting the mattress springs all night. We do hear some awful karaoke which might have originated at the hotel next door so pick your poison.
We load our bikes in the lobby, push out and we are off down Highway 1, a straight shot to Tak. There is a more scenic route following the Ping River downstream, but it adds quite a bit to the distance to where we probably need an extra day to get to Tak.
Our sights are set at Burma, so we bowl down the interstate-like highway, Rachel in the lead for most of the day since Patrick is still recovering from his cold. Traffic is not bad and very considerate of cyclists, Thailand has the most courteous drivers we have seen anywhere on this trip. The highway is a bit isolated though, no foo-foo-coffee stalls or even basic shops with refrigerated drinks. We ride over 50km to the first 7-11 where we have a litre of chocolate milk and a litre of green iced tea. That helps us all the way to Tak.
We have picked a hotel based on a photo on googlemaps and it proves to be a good choice (see the map at the end of the SE Asia section for more details), 400baht, about US$12 for a nice clean room with AC, good wifi and warm shower. All rooms in Thailand have TV's, but we have not tried any to see if there are English channels. Still too depressed to see any news programs on the train wreck after the elections happening at home.
Across the street is a Big-C supermarket where we have lunch at KFC, next door to it is a Tesco-Lotus that has its own KFC and Dairy Queen. We have dinner at a night market in the parking lot: great Pad Thai and live music. A friendly Thai lady who lives in LA comes over to talk with us.
We are leaving a bag with heavier items behind at our hotel since we will be back this way in about 4 weeks. In its stead, we have stocked-up on some items we are not sure whether we can find in Burma, mostly breakfast cereals, muesli, cookies and crackers. We still have plenty of peanut butter and nutella.
Our plan is to take a short bus ride to Mae Sot tomorrow, cross into Burma and take a long shared-taxi ride to Yangon on Wednesday.
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Today's ride: 95 km (59 miles)
Total: 26,103 km (16,210 miles)
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