The next suggested destination from a cyclist on the net was about 92 KM from Bang Saphan and Stanna was up for another 60-mile day.  The route map showed that we would be going along the coast once again. So we headed down the highway and quickly switched over to the coast road where we found an official bikepath. Most of the shoulders are pretty wide but this shoulder was painted red and had bike signs every half-kilometer. As you can see from the photos the roads were virtually empty and we could ride almost anywhere we wanted. In this case I was riding down the center of the road taking photos with my iPhone.
It wasn’t as glorious as it was the day before because we started encountering rollers or hills in a different kind of vernacular. But fortunately they were short, not like what we find around Durango. We soon got to the coastline and we could see that the predicted 17 mile an hour winds out of the north were really chopping up the seas. The very high wind Marine effect brings in a lot of mist so the photos of the sea and the sky are not very clear as you can see in the photo with the karst popping up in the background.

We’ve been fascinated with all the shrimp farming going on along this coastline. And I actually looked up online certain facts about shrimp farming: it appears that Thailand exports 80% of the world’s shrimp. The photograph below shows one of the more professional shrimp ponds lined with plastic and has all of its aeration equipment down on the bottom because the pool is empty at this point. Not all the shrimp farming is this professional, it varies from just small or large unkempt pools to more open and less well-appointed ones, to this very large and upscale example below.

We had never really seen them harvesting the shrimp. We understand that they drain the pool so they bring in a lot of local people to grab the shrimp up off the bottom but other than that we have never seen the actual operation until today. We saw this heavily laden truck with 50 gallon barrels overflowing with netted shrimp. If you count them there are about 15 to 16 50-gallon barrels of shrimp in the back of that truck.
And just on the other side of that truck they were dumping the 50-gallon barrels into the large green tubs and then taking a small laundry basket of shrimp over to the sorting tables. These weren’t small shrimp, these were really good-size shrimp. Think from your thumb all the way to your index finger. In the foreground below you can see the large blocks of ice that they’ll pack with the shrimp in the non-refrigerated trucks just behind the shed.
We could see this Buddha from a long way down the road. One thing that we since  learned is that the Wats (temples) are always at the top of a hill. This Buddha was way larger than any that we normally see and in fact it was still under construction with scaffolding all the way up to the top knot. Only when you count levels of scaffolding can you put it into scale, I’m thinking 12 to 15 sets of taller than our height scaffolding. That would make it somewhere around 50 meters high. We really could not understand why they put such a large Buddha in this location until we actually turned to see what the Buddha was looking at. You will just have to imagine a beautiful large bay probably a couple of kilometers across, in the lee of a number of towering karst hills with lots of fishing boats sheltered in the bay. Unfortunately the winds and the atmospherics made the whole photograph unusable.
Our rule of thumb is that there’s always food along the Thai roads, but on this lonely stretch of highway (actually a back road) we really challenged that understanding. So we had to jump in the first time we saw a small little eatery off the side of the road.
Yesterday we mentioned the Australian charity ride of 50 riders coming down the same Coast roads this week, but here’s picture of a few of the stragglers with the sweep van following.  Much to Stanna’s credit we kept up with this group for two days, leap-frogging back and forth, and they had no baggage and were at least 20 years younger.
This photo should fit in my Thai peculiarities gallery page included on the Blog. The contrast here is a rural simple rubber farmer with his 2-day’s worth of rubber mats drying in the sun in front of the shacks that they live in and of course out front is the dish TV.
And finally because I’m fascinated at how things are done in other countries: this is a photo of a crew installing a cell tower. I watched them bring up that next segment with the gin pole and a four-horse Honda Motor attached to a tug-sized capstan on the ground.

This was a welcome sight after 9 hours and 72 miles on the road.  Rest day is planned for Sunday in Chumpon.