Crossing Thailand: A coast-to-coast journey through a sea of palm oil plantations

March 6, 2015

For the next three days I cycled from the east coast of Thailand to the west coast, a feat I was strangely able to do by continuing almost directly south. This is because Thailand bends slightly.

On the first day I had an interesting encounter with three police officers. They were sitting at a cafe next to a bicycle shop, and when I peered out of curiosity into that bicycle shop, they invited me to join them. I didn't know that they were police officers because they were undercover and wearing regular clothes, and so I accepted the invitation gladly. That's when I noticed that the youngest of them had on a trendy t-shirt with the word P-O-L-I-C-E written vertically down it, and in front of him was a police radio. He wasn't a very good undercover policeman. "Your police aren't you?" I said, acting suspicious. "Yes" he said, "join us, I'll serve you." I wasn't sure what he was going to serve me, perhaps my rights, but I thought best not argue, and so I sat and had an ice coffee with the police, and did my best to not act too guilty about anything, and got through another interrogation. And then at the end I asked how much it was, and the young policeman again said "no, no, I served you," referring to the ice coffee. It was the waitress who served me, but whatever.

Although I was on smaller roads they were not that interesting, mostly traversing endless seas of palm oil plantations and being annoyingly busy. Certainly busy enough for me to continue wearing my helmet. The next morning after a brief stint of cycling I stopped to take a break and removed this protective headgear to discover that it was doing a sterling job of protecting my head. Upon the top of it I noticed was a large piece of wet bird poop, that would certainly have made a mess of my hair and/or cap, but washed right off the plastic surface of the helmet. What a heroic piece of headgear! And the helmet didn't just protect me from bird crap, oh no, it revealed a further use when I stopped to grab a drink from a roadside stall a little later. These simple structures have pretty low roofs to keep the sun off the vendors, and as a little old man with a tea-towel on his head mixed me a drink my head went BANG on one of the wooden struts. Didn't hurt at all. He leaned over to pass me my shake and as I moved in to take it BANG again. I gave him the money. BANG. He gave me my change. BANG. I laughed. I was practically banging my head on purpose now. "No problem" I said, tapping my trusty helmet.

The palm oil plantations made pretty good campgrounds though. I stayed in them four nights in a row.

Images of the king are everywhere in Thailand, and it is a crime to say anything bad about him. So I better state publicly that I really like his gold dressing-gown that he wears all the time. Good for him. If I was a king I wouldn't bother with getting dressed either

There had been an increase in both greetings and staring from the people when compared with the coast, presumably because no falang usually come this way. There was also an increase in the number of dogs barking at me and chasing me, almost every house had them here. Another thing of note was a sudden increase in the ambition to cram five people on a single motorcycle. I'd seen it once or twice on my travels, but here I saw it on five or six separate occasions in one day. I looked out for one with six people on it, but the record remained at five. I think you've got to go to India to see six.

This was the best bit, it didn't look like this very often

But nothing really happened on the third day. Having recently received word that Matt's cargo ship had delivered him safely to Brisbane, and Suzy and Dino had just set sail on a cruise from Singapore to Perth, here I was feeling left behind and keen simply to get my head down and cycle fast to Singapore and Indonesia in order to look for a boat of my own. In this respect, I fear things may have got a little dull with regards to my movie. It's difficult. In some ways perhaps inevitable. I think any movie that lasts two years is bound to drag a little. Sorry about that. But don't vacate the movie theatre just yet - still there remains the exciting final scenes. Will I find my boat to Australia? Will any of the love interests make a dramatic return? If so which one(s)? More than one, oh that would really be dramatic! And what of the hapless sidekicks? Will Robin make a surprise reappearance? And whatever happened to Cherno? Will Alan's rehab be a success? Will my shoes make it? All of these questions and more await answers, so grab some more popcorn, there's just a few more short months to wait to find out...

06/03/15 - 110km

07/03/15 - 96km

08/03/15 - 101km

Today's ride: 307 km (191 miles)
Total: 38,718 km (24,044 miles)

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