well. hey. finally got on the bikes again today after a few days off, rode 65 km this morning, not such a bad effort, we are in a town called sukothai or something close to that, much smaller than all the rest of them so far, but still a really cool place. there are these utes with loudhailers on them that drive round the place. last saw them at ayutthaya where we spent 3 days looking at old temples and generally suffering in the heat, they make me think im living in cold war russia or something, they blare out some guy yelling in thai, interspersed with really bad dance music (i assume that makes people think that the person doing the yelling is 'cool' or maybe he has advanced a few levels and become 'groovy') i dont know what their point is, i guess they are selling something but it sounds like a facist rally. anyway, this is getting a little disjointed. so. just decided that this will be a journal entry not an email, so lets start a little earlier on.
after leaving bangkok by train we arrived in a town called kanchanaburi. people might know it from the bridge over the river kwai, which is a book and a film and is also a historical event. theres this railway and bridge that the japs "built" during the war. by japs built i mean everyone that was captured by the japs built for them (most of them dieing in the process), they reckon that it cost one life for every rail sleeper (the wooden bits that go under the tracks). we rode the train, and it took a long time. thats a lot of sleepers. theres lotd of old war shit here, we had a beer in a bar that had an aircraft droptank just hangin out by the tables. and we fed their ostrichemu thing, i dont know the difference between the two, maybe one is australian?
we went on a tour around the sights of the town, and hiked up this awesome series of waterfalls that have clear cold pools that are sweet to swim in and abound with these little nibbling fish that try to eat your toes. kinda alarming when youre not expecting them. also went elephant trekking, a bit of a disappointment because its quite obviously set up for the package tourists who come in on their aircon busses, ride an elephant for 1/2 hour then leave again. they are also not nice to their elephants, in fact thais seem to have absolutely no regard for either their environment or their animals. i hope they learn to swim real soon. this entire country has been covered by a haze for the last 2 weeks almost comparable to the aussie bushfire smoke from the buring of their rice fields, something which is supposedly illegal but is blatently obvious (the train cruises right past burning fields so close that standing in the doorway you have to turn away from the heat) so i guess the government either doesnt care or gets paid off. the cool thing about the trains is that the doors are open, so i spent most of my time on them sitting on the doorstep checking out the countryside while lissa got harassed by small children.
so we lounged in kanchanaburi for longer than we should have because our hostel, the jolly frog, was so nice then because of our lack of time and general unpreparedness we caught a local bus to suphanburi (a really crappy town that i was glad to leave) which cost like 40 baht including bikes. thats about 1.60 AUD each for a pretty long trip. got off the bus when it started getting hot (cause thats the best time to go for a ride), assembled our bikes in front of the infodesk woman cause she kept trying to sell us a bus ticket. i said "which way Ayutthaya?" and she pointed at the bus. "no, we have bicycles (make cycling motion), which direction (point this way and that), she says "no, yellow bus". so we took the machines out of their bags, built them and then asked "which way Ayutthaya?" she points down the road. no problem... so we biked 60 kmish to Ayutthaya, (i still dont know how to spell it but thats pretty close if not pefect) even though our map said it was 40. this was the first real ride, and the bikes peformed pretty damn well, thanks ross :) cept for a bent derailleur hanger from the flight which makes me unable to use a few middle gears and will be changed as soon as it causes me to get hit by a tuktuk crossing an intersection, or as soon as i can be bothered. we saw some pretty random things on the road, a rice paddy worker talking on a cellphone (thats just plain wrong) and a 2 metre long roadkill lizzard. we saw the dismembered foot of one a while before, looked like a dragons foot or something, really put the hook in me. then a whole one... fuckin massive. Lisa saw a living one in A town but it was too speedy to get a photo so next time we will make a photograph and publish his ass on the internet. saw some amazing temples in Atown but it was too hot to appreciate them properly. also while we were there Lissa discovered that our entry visa for vietnam expires a month too early, so our trip as we knew it was fucked, and had to make a new plan (the TAT or tourist information of thailand is a useless useless useless organization that recieves too much government funding and should be either disbanded, shot in the head, or exposed to a semilethal dose of competion to make it function at least barely adequately) which now sees us traveling north towards laos instead of east to cambodia. this is good and bad, im looking forward to laos after the madness of thailand itll be good to ride some deserted dusty potholed rural road and see some hills, but it means that the insanity of cambodia will have to wait. there is a gun rental place by the airport (good place for it) in Phnom Penh that rents out AK47s for 10 bucks and you can fire grenade launchers for 30. fully checkin that one out.
we caught a 6 hour (read 8.5 hour) train to pitsanulok, stayed there the night at a hostel that felt like the combination of a hospital and an office block, but which was at least cold, then got up with the crows and biked out to Sukothai, where i now sit. was an excellent ride. not too hot or dusty and we didnt get lost despite a frenzy of roadbuilding that would put settlers of katan to shame. we tagged along for a while on a new and somewhat deserted road with a guy and his daughter on a morotbike/icecream freezer thing, was fully tempted to buy one as we rode but couldnt be bothered explaining my intentions in sign language while riding with loaded panniers, could get dangerous. these people can build anything out of old motorbikes, im sure if you gave a thai mecanic 20 dead chinese motorbikes and an arc welder he could build you a tank. and a tank that was cheap to run on 2stroke fuel but not too ecologically sound, still you dont usually worry too much about the environment when you get down to building tanks.
so we found this town, checked into a cool looking hostel with a bungalo in the garden for about $12 a night and had a magnificent lunch at poo cafe. yep. i think thats a guys name. no excuse though. they have the cheapest beer too, so might have to smash a few changs tonight and see where we end up. hopefully not in the river, cause they havent had much rain here recently (maybe because of the 2stroke tanks) and shes lookin a little stagnant and tepid. yep glad i got to use that word before i forget it. hang out here for a few days i reckon then cruise northish either to chang mai or somewhere close to there. would like to see the golden triangle before we head over the border and i want to do some hiking, apparently there is plenty of that in chang mai.
Aux.
