22/4/2011
Not such an enjoyable day. 7 hours, 140km and a whole lot of back tracking.
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| The 'Budda' Highway |
Sick of the highway it was time to head to the coast, easy enough. Great riding and knew I’d be riding a bit further than the highway but the quieter roads were bliss! Sunshine and lollipops, I discovered the ‘Budda’ rural highway which has its own dedicated red cycle lane then it happened… it stopped. A river mouth and no bridge. My GPS mapping on my phone showed a gap here but only about 2km so I assumed some random road would get me back on the roads shown on the other side. I asked around about getting a boat across and roads on the other side.“Yes you take boat to Prasae. 20 baht ($1). Where you go?”
“Chanthaburi”
“Ah, no road over there. You go back and around on highway.”
You are sh#tting me. I was sure it would continue on the other side. So back on the bike and loop around. 2 ½ hours later and about 45km later I had pretty much looped around, came to a turn off and there was the Budda highway again. Chanthaburi turn left, Prasae straight ahead. What! I did not physically confirm that I could have ridden from the river mouth as time was running out to find somewhere to stay and it would have made too angry. Google Earth has since confirmed I could –massive blowout.
Oh well there will be somewhere nice to stay along the coast here, I had seen a couple of resort signs. 3pm nothing, 4pm nothing, stop to refill water from spare bottle (always take spare!), 4:30pm call from Mum and Dad just for a chat and say happy Easter – I wasn’t in a happy place (sorry Mum and Dad), 5pm nothing, stop for a food break (feeling myself getting a little shaky from fatigue), 5:30 finally a big sign in Thai and that’s hopefully somewhere to stay, yay!
Well not to be outdone, Doug and I braved howling gales (well there was a head wind coming home) and monsoon rain (all right, a brief shower) on our bikes today. Apart from a) us knowing where we were going b)not getting lost c) being on an off-road track so no traffic to worry about d)only being out for 2 hours e)having a place to come back to with a hot bath included, I think it is pretty comparable to what you are doing - oh I forgot to say we had no pannier bags to annoy us. Quite similar though! We enjoyed it. Now going out for a curry dinner in Petone(possible Thai if its open). Cheers mate
ReplyDeleteWe were both on bikes. I suppose part of the trip is getting lost. It always seems to work out in the end somehow. There are lots of Thai restaurants over here...
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