We’re well down the Thailand Peninsula at this point, about 150 miles from Bangkok. We couldn’t avoid all the highways leaving the metropolis, but we finally got onto some back roads along the eastern coast of the peninsula. It was good to get away from all the traffic like these scooters coming down the interstate shoulder against traffic. Just before we finally left one of the major interstates, I passed by the turn that would take us down the peninsula closer to shore and not on the major north-south highway. I missed the turn by about 3 1/2 miles but once again by looking at Google maps on the iPad we determined that we could go cross country and catch up with that coastal road. Ariel satellite maps led us through a bunch of dirt roads in and around rice paddies and shrimp ponds. It was on one of these dirt road so we saw our first exotic animal, a crocodile crossing from one pond to another. He was probably 50 yards off but it was easy to tell that the crocodile’s tail and nose almost reached both sides of the dirt road, so was probably 6 1/2 to 7 feet long to tip to tail.
I’m not sure exactly where we had our first sighting, but at this point we have probably seen three or four groups, I should say troops, of monkeys in various towns and communities we’ve passed through. Last night’s troop was particularly large, we guess it was at least 50 in the downtown streets in Petchaburi. Petchaburi backs up to a karst mountain (large sun limestone domes that poke up out of a Delta) and I’m sure the monkeys come down out of those hills to search through the trash cans for garbage. They were quite a sight seeing them swing on all the telephone lines, going up and down the various business awnings, and running across signs and up and down the streets and shop tables that were abandoned after hours.
The Gulf of Thailand not unlike the Gulf of Mexico has lots of fishing, we saw plenty of fleets in the ports and river openings. One port must have had 20 shrimp boats, all wooden, three decks high, on the hard at a marine railroad, in for painting and refurbishing. Must’ve been off-season for the shrimpers. It wasn’t long after that we took a side road to a town we saw on the map that was along the river, and we had lunch at an apparently popular waterside restaurant. From the high-priced cars we saw in the parking lot we figured that a lot of people came down from Bangkok just eat in this restaurant. We were able to FaceTime with my sister Donna right from the restaurant, with the iPad, showing her the environs as we ate. With unlimited data and good solid five bar 3G connections we’ve been able to face time and message just about anywhere along the road as we been cycling along.
One of the things of this eastern coast of the Thailand peninsula is famous for is harvesting salt. We are fascinated to see salt beds up close and even look into some of their salt drying sheds built entirely with bamboo.
Of course being a seacoast most of the local people are fishermen and we saw lots of varieties of fish drying on racks along the roadside. What surprises me the most was to see so many racks of squid, four inches long, stacked evenly a couple hundred to a tray.
One other animal item worth noting is that this coast is famous for harvesting guano from birds. They build these very large apartment- house-sized buildings with no windows only small little pigeonhole openings in the building, said to be for the sole purpose of collecting the guano from the birds who nest inside.
We managed to cycle about 60 miles, 100 km, the second day and were even more tired than the first. For our third day, were going to take about half that distance and end up at a beach resort town called Cha Am.
We didn’t we have room for any more on our bikes or we might have been tempted by one of these colorful kites which we saw along the road approaching the beaches.
This is from Stanna: Dead-snake-on-the-highway-shoulder count: Day one: 0; Day two: 3; Day 3: 10 This is still many fewer than we saw in Dec 2012 when we biked thru Central Thailand right after the major flooding of the Chao Phraya River. One other contrast to 2012: that year I managed to crash twice on the first day. This year I waited until the 2nd day to lay my bike down 🙂 No injuries, just skinned the same left knee.
