We took a rest day. Yes we’d only been three days on the road, but we finally got to the East Coast of the peninsula of Thailand and decided we needed to take a day at the beach. The town of Cha-am was a wonderful surprise for us as we weren’t expecting to find a reasonably quiet community right on the beach with lots of accommodations that were fairly reasonable. There was an entire beach full of tourists but it wasn’t over-the-top like some beaches we saw later down the line that had so many “farang” (Thai for tourists – like Gringo) that we felt like we needed to get out of town as quickly as possible.
The main road fronted the beach directly and there were about a hundred plus feet of sand from the curb to the water. At least half of that sand was filled with a virtual forest of umbrellas chockablock all the way down with beach chairs and table underneath every one. Because it was a weekday there were not very many tourists on the beach. We think that this beach community is mostly used by Thai’s from the big city of Bangkok which is only two and half hours away by their expressway. Nevertheless there were several hundred Europeans in the community all of whom were either riding bicycles or motorscooters to get around from the various attractions at the seaside resort. Our hotel had a pool and served a buffet breakfast in the morning which was great to get us going once we finally started back down the road south.
This stretch of coastline is favored by the royalty of Thailand in fact all the way back to the time of Siam. Halfway down our route for the day was a palace that was used from the 1800s to about 1925. We took a diversion off the highway into a military camp and checked in at the gate of the palace for Rama the sixth. This palace is on it’s second complete renovation, very beautiful on it’s quiet and peaceful grounds on a beautiful bay.
In our bicycle shorts we were inappropriately dressed to visit a royal palace, so we were provided with wraparound sarongs for our self-guided tour. Absolutely everything of the single floor palace was one story on pillars not unlike the Florida houses that are raised at the seaside 10 feet above the land to provide for better ventilation and in the event of high tides and flooding. The king and his family even had a several hundred yard elevated walkway all the way to the sand beach with a changing room at that elevation and stairs down onto the sand.
One thing we found very fascinating in the small museum at the front gate was the mandatory requirement for all servants to wear a particular color outfit for each day of the week. In glass cases they showed the color combinations for both the court and the servants
Because of our longer side trip on the coast at the palace we had a shorter day’s ride and found ourselves in the bustling seaside community of Hua Hin. For some reason unknown to us, this is a very popular resort area for farang tourists. It was so crowded and so chaotic that we felt like we couldn’t get out of there fast enough. Many of the guesthouses and budget hotels were packed and after looking at several we just took the first one that met our price range. It was a rambling old turn of the past century fisherman’s house and you had to stoop and step over a number of thresholds just to get from one section to another. The walls were paper thin, it wasn’t one of the most pleasant places we stayed. I’m sure we could’ve done better but we were too tired to keep looking.
