It’s a wonderful thing when you see your bikes at the other end of the line. In this case it was the Bangkok airport. This time we had to look at two different oversize baggage claim centers before we found them at the second one. We knew they were on the airplane because we had seen them loaded both in Durango and again in Denver. Just a matter of them making it on to the airplane in Seattle and since we had a delay due to two hours worth of weather delays in the East Coast. We were completely confident the bikes should make it from the Denver airplane in the Seattle airport.
Since we know our way around the Bangkok airport, we knew the first thing we wanted to do was to get our electronic devices hooked up to the local network. The Internet provider that we liked has a booth right outside the arrivals door of the airport so we just rolled our cart directly up to the counter and got unlimited Internet for one iPad and we got phone service for our iPhone. Cost for both was a whopping 1000 Thai Baht. I haven’t done the math yet but that’s about US$30.
This year we decided to assemble bicycles outside the air conditioned lobby of the Bangkok airport because it was just a little bit too chilly for us at 68° inside, it was 72 outside at 3AM. We had left the bicycles in their boxes while we rolled down to the food court where we had rice and chicken for a 4 AM breakfast. This was good, cheap and just what we needed in preparation for our dawn departure.
After a quick test ride of the bikes and a readjustment of Stanna’s panniers,we headed out the airport road and quickly were reminded of the peculiarities of the Thai drivers. Lots of people visit Thailand and often remark about the chaotic driving in Bangkok. But until you’re actually on the road yourself and trying to navigate the traffic, do you realize some of it is flowing in the opposite direction in your lane. Scooters are the most common violators of this basic traffic rule, that being driving in one direction on your side of the road. In Thailand they drive on the left and therefore all the vehicles should be proceeding on the left side of the road. However it is not uncommon and not legally enforced when scooters drive the opposite and wrong direction on the shoulder in order to take a shortcut to their destination. And to be perfectly clear, that means when you’re riding on the shoulder you have to navigate past obstacles, parked cars, and scooters coming right at you. All this of course is perfectly normal for the drivers in Thailand. Everyone expects it, everyone anticipates it, and is as soon as we, the foreigner, get used to it, everything flows along perfectly.
We start on the road at first light before the traffic was building to it’s urban rush-hour capacities. Our plan was to head directly from the airport south and west, trying to get away from the city of Bangkok as quickly as possible. The only real obstacle that we knew about is trying to get over the very large river that flows from Northern Thailand into the Gulf of Thailand. The Chao Phraya river is so large that ships with thousands of shipping containers can make it up the river to offload their containers in Bangkok. We are navigating on our iPad with the aerial maps provided by both Apple and Google. It wasn’t quite evident exactly how we could get over that extremely high double span bridge over the river. We decided to proceed directly to the river where the Google map showed a blue dotted line across the river itself. And lo and behold there was a car ferry, much to Stanna’s relief.
We were trying to avoid some of the highways on our way to exit the metropolis of Bangkok, through a couple of very very small back roads one of which was a dirt path through rice paddies and banana fields (Ariel Google maps allow you to see those dirt paths through banana fields) and as we passed a group of families living in stacks of shipping containers, we could see the huge IKEA sign and building looming just over the banana leaves. We couldn’t see inside the giant doors of the shipping containers covered with colored cloth like curtains but we were certain they couldn’t afford even the cheapest of the IKEA furniture.
We only managed to ride about 53 miles the first day, but we are very satisfied with that since we traveled 30 hours by air with only limited sleep, and had to navigate with numerous stops and checks of the iPad and Google maps just to get out of Bangkok itself. That 85 km took us eight hours and we were happy to find a small motel adjacent one of the major highways on the road south. For $15 we found a very comfortable and clean all tiled room with hot water, air-conditioning and TV plus wireless called the New Friend Motel.
