Sukorn Island is one of the favorite places we like to bike.  It’s only 60 km (36 miles) to the pier where we can chain-gang-load all our gear and bikes onto a long-tail boat and take a 30-minute passage to one to Thailand’s southernmost islands in the Andeman Sea.  It takes a couple of boats to get riders, bicycles and gear across and then we load the dunnage on a three-wheeled cart for the short trip to our destination on the island, while we tag along on our bikes.  In the past trips to Sukorn we’ve not had our traveling chef and provisioner, Go Cho, so we’ve supped on the local fare.  But Cho, who has one of our favorite restaurant in Trang, goes all out on these trips bringing the kitchen to the camp, not to mention all the things we might tote along on a raft trip, like pots and pans, utensils, condiments and wash up supplies.  Of course he can’t go anywhere without a 4-liter rice cooker, 3-liter electric kettle and a blender, a couple of 25-meter extension cords, fans and power strips for charging devices. He has at least 8 courses of foods and seafood is his passion, so this trip we had two sizes of shrimp (lunch and breakfast sized – 2″) and dinner sized (4-5″), plus a large crab for everyone, grouper, squid, octopus, sea bass and a number of other unidentifiable sea creatures.

Lunch, dinner and breakfast is the standard menu with snacks for the ride over and back, two 20-liter water bottles and a 100-liter cooler full of ice cubes for cold drinks, chilling the fresh foods and beer.  All that can be said is that no one goes hungry, left-overs are recycled for the next meal and I can’t believe how much Thai’s can put away.  I can do one and a half, maybe two full servings, and these men and women, go two and three times plus grazing on the tastiest items after they’ve put down their spoons.

Triptych of our lunch

GOPRO photo of island cement road

Sukorn Island doesn’t allow vehicles (only construction trucks and cement mixers) so cycling is ideal.  All supplies and materials are “carted” around on 3-wheeled scooters (basically a scooter with a one-wheel side car).  Since we last visited Sukorn they improved a number of crumbling roads with double-wide cement roads so it’s even better.  All minor pathways are meter-wide cement paths such that two scooters can pass traveling thru the fields and rubber tree plantations.  Besides fishing the main products coming from the island are rubber, rice, watermelons, and beef.

One other product is Batik cloth: we only know of one artist whose studio is a high road-side table on the less populated windward side of the island. Fortunately she’s there every time we visit and after purchasing a few items she happily gave us a demonstration of how she works the cloth.  I took several short videos which we hope to show back home.

A couple of things I haven’t photoed before:

A man cutting 40′ planks with a chainsaw.  Most likely to build or repair one of their long-tail inter-island boats.

And although watermelons are ubiquitous during the time we’re visiting Thailand, it’s very rare to ever see a watermelon patch.  My Belgian friend, Rik, spent several years looking for one on all his weekly scooter excursions.  We found several on Sukorn, and even sampled some of the fruit left in the field as unsuitable for sale. These melons are said to be extra sweet because they are so close to the ocean and the ground water used to water them is slightly different.  Our group only took 30 melons home with them on the boat.

We aren’t always cycling to sites hither and yon. Quite often we get to relax and keep up with the world, thru our online resources.  This year we’ve added a back porch table and chairs, plus they’ve shifted a lounge chair to my pond-side spot that only I and the neighbor’s cows take advantage of.

There are small fish in the several ponds behind Ban Wassana and the most interesting visitor besides the cows is a Monitor Lizard who we’ve never seen before this year. This guy is over 6′ long and moves very cautiously when he’s out of the water.  We’ve read that his diet is fish, small rodents and snakes, which is of particular interest to Stanna.

On Monday we cycled to the White Dragon Spine beach just south of Hat Yao, where the governor was promoting his plan to get tourists to visit this remote village and 5 other spots that have “spines.”  A dragon’s spine is a sand bar or shell bar that becomes exposed when the low tide (especially around full moon) drops the water level over 3+ feet.  According to local lore, it’s good luck to walk on the dragon’s spine and if you could conquer all 6 of the spines, the governor suggests you’ll be very fortunate.  Since this was a muslim village they had a performance of the local women dancing to an ensemble of drums and a fiddle.

About 200 people showed up for the ceremony which included a walk on the spine filmed by the newly requisite drone. This spine goes out over a kilometer into the sea and very nearly reaches Koh Libong across from the coast.

The rest of the week was consumed by visa extensions and getting my road bike upgraded with new shifters (eBay purchase and brought over), plus a new chain and a set of upgraded (used) wheels.  And, not to forget, reading the latest Economists and New Yorkers on the iPad. We should mention that this week’s temps are 38 C, and a clue to conversion is that the human body is 37 C, so shade and a cool breeze are very important.

Mini Gold Bananas $1 – Aroi

… bananas, but still fully involved in things Trang.

Besides getting in the pre-dawn rides, which this week have been a little more brutal than normal, we’ve been strategizing how and where to get our visas renewed, plus working on a new project of recording backroad cycling tracks around Trang for prospective day tours.

A Ridley ringer showed up this week at the Fashung meeting point on his new Ridley Team carbon rocket ($3,000). Powered by a 150-lb 28-year-old, the group of old men (average age late 50’s) set Strava records trailing in his wake. Not satisfied with our normal ride after the first day, he shamed the group into challenging the pass the next morning for our 5 AM effort. All I can say is that Strava thinks I bettered my time to the summit by 2 minutes in 30-km head winds that almost stopped me cold rounding the first corner uphill.  His taillight wasn’t even visible after the half-way point.

Trang cyclists, besides their individual daily routines, have a number of opportunities to support various community events. This weekend there were two events where local cyclists offered support. Trang hosted it’s bi-annual Audax 200 Km where 250+ riders test their mettle on a course with a cut-off time of 13 hours.  I did this last year on the east coast of the peninsula and Durango actually hosted one recently. I didn’t enter but was part of the governor’s escort out of town. a number of reasons not to sign up this year; I’ve already done it, El Nino has brought very strong summer winds three months early, and mostly I didn’t know about it until after registration was closed.

Also this weekend, Stanna and I were asked to “ride in a parade” for Journalists Day, which ended up being an “anti-corruption” rally that we had not a clue about until we saw one of the many Thai banner’s printed in English. The Trang cycle club followed the 200+ walkers at a push and glide pace. Not something we’d normally do consciously, and will seriously avoid in the future.

I took my road bike in to a pro-mechanic (another unsecured outdoor shed-style workshop) to get the rear derailleur tuned (jumping up a gear while climbing with increased torque).  Tune up took less than five minutes, but subsequently he discovered the rear hub was bad and I had a broken spoke up front. So when he gets back from racing this weekend he’ll install a new set of “used” high-end wheels and a new chain.  Don’t think Mr. Ridley has to worry about competition, but this 30-year-old Trek should run a bit quicker.  I’m keeping the old wheel set for those Sunday rides where we go “everywhere” a two-wheeled bike can go.

Thai Omelette

In the TL;DR category: This year, because we only came to Thailand for 3 months, we didn’t obtain two sixty-day visas as is customary.  Last year we’d heard, from a inspecting Immigration Officer checking visas at our guesthouse, that we could easily get 30-day extensions at his office at the port town 20-km to the south.  However, since our return this year, reports have conflicted on this opportunity, saying that we could only get 15 days.  With the second 60-day visa they have to give you the longer extension, albeit that still requires you to check out and come back into the country at the border.  Foreigners without a visa, that would include us after our first 60-day visa obtained prior to coming to Thailand, can only get 15 days at a border or 30-days if they fly into the country.

Dory & Waffle Chips

Hence the dilemma, as you have to do the complete “visa dance” on the same day: either renew easily for 30 days, or find a way out of the country and method to return securing the last 30 days. We had two offers to drive us to any of the three border crossings in southern Thailand, we just didn’t know whether to take travel gear and how we might get back.

Update: Fortunately, just yesterday a Thai Trang friend offered to call her friend at the port town immigration office and confirm that we don’t have to leave Thailand, we can get an extension stamp without leaving the country.

Update 2: We were able to extend in Kantang, but it did required two extra trips for additional requirements: photocopy of passport and entry card, plus a color passport photo.  5 things in total.

We’ve met a British couple, Haydn and Sian, (and 5 year old daughter Hanna) who’ve come to Trang from China where they worked 8 years.  They settled in Trang about 8 months ago and Hadyn is planning to promote day cycling trips here thru all the internet avenues – social media and a web site.  He’s savvy on all the promotion and web based set-up, but lacking in suitable routes since all the Tourist info features direct routes on major highways.

Haydn would like to route his tours exclusively on backroads, which are virtually empty in southern Thailand. My maps of cycling routes around Trang (available beneath this site’s Header banner) use only major highways, so I’m helping him find and record backroad access to Trang’s favorite sites.  The added advantage of backroads travel, besides being slower and allowing cycling two abreast (not to mention safer), is that you can see how the people live, work and play.

Next project is to learn how to place those gpx files on the blog so that they can be downloadable. I’m using the GAIA GPS app on my iPhone to collect the tracks.  We’ve been using GAIA GPS for several years to track almost all of our hikes because the free, easily downloadable, topo maps give use USGS quality contours.  Open Hiking Maps, a subgroup of Open Source Maps (OSM), has world wide too maps for free download.  We used this source on our Switzerland hikes, downloading the gpx tracks before we left home.

While endeavoring to insure my iPhone didn’t get wet when wading in the waterfall cascades this weekend, I dropped the phone into an 18″ pool of clear fresh water. I could still see the home screen lit up underwater.  It took about 10-12 seconds to rescue the phone, but about 45 seconds to get it turned off.  (My Gaia GPS was still tracking and I didn’t want it operating when it was wet.)

I vigorously shook the iPhone trying to sling out any water from the bottom phone orifices and inadvertantely turned it on again. Since I was an hour away from any rice options, I let it sit in the direct sun for an hour, and then once I managed to buy raw rice from a restaurant I packaged it up in a spare ziplock bag.

There won’t be any photos from this weekend’s ride at this point. It was a leisurely 85-km ride checking out the backroad routes to Trang’s favorite sights. I’ll be happy to use it again as a camera if the intensive-care bag trick works. It’s been 24 hours at this point and I’m patiently waiting another 24 with the bag in the sun.

Update: iPhone is working just fine after 48 hours in the rice bag and cooking in the direct sunlight.

Real happy to say the least.  Read that I should have taken the SIM card out as well but I’d be worried that rice would have gotten inside that slot.

All’s well again.

Jumbo Shrimp Tempora

We haven’t featured much “food porn” this year, but that doesn’t mean we aren’t still taking photos of most of our meals.

Glass Noodle Salad

Noodle Salad

We often tell the story of when we were trying to decide where to travel after Paradox and our stent of house-sitting. We generally asked folks who’d been traveling just where they liked, and would recommend we visit next. Thailand always came up on everyone’s list. And the only thing they could quickly bring to mind was “You’ll love the food”, or “the food… the food.”

A few of the more than 100 crabs served to 20 people at one of our island bicycle overnights

Now on our fifth trip we are still raving about “The Food”. And, not just the cost or value of Thai food, but the quality and tastes. Just a couple days ago we finally remembered we hadn’t even had Pad Thai this year: a basic staple that costs 20-25 Baht (80 cents) and is available everywhere. “A-roi”: the Thai word for Excellent. I ordered Pad Thai in Durango several years ago and paid $8.95 at a simple Thai restaurant.

We learned an expression when we first arrived in the Rio Dulce, Guatemala on Paracas.  One of the cruisers announced the minute she tied up at Mario’s Marina, “The Galley is closed.”  While in Thailand we are doing what that Texas lady in the Rio did and incidentally what we believe most Thai families do: bring food home or eat out.

Chicken Red Curry

Duck & Rice

We do have a small concession to eating “every meal” out, in that we’d discovered German Muesli in 1-kilo bags that we eat for breakfast most mornings with yogurt.

Cashew Chicken

Sweet & Sour Chicken

We are very partial to one restaurant that serves “the best” Panang Curry and even though it’s way on the far side of town, 12 km from our home, we scooter over there at least once a week.  Stanna even had a lesson in that restaurant kitchen last year, but just can’t quite duplicate the cook’s heavenly taste when she tries it at home.

Our three favorites at Mai Mueang

We have at least four restaurants we like to hit each week, each has a different menu and we’ve actually rated them by quality, quantity, and value.  Depending on our lunch schedule we’ll choose one over the other.  Most of our evening meals are take-home foods we gather on the way home from shopping or we just zip over to the University food stalls or the large outdoor market minutes from our home.

Yam Mu Ya with seafood

Occasionally we’re treated to a meal or dish prepared by one of the Thai tenants in our complex or given a meal by one of our friends in town.  Never knowing what we’ve been given is always exciting, so we ask our owner-host at Ban Wassana how to serve it and what we’re enjoying, oftentimes sharing the large meal with her family.

Penang Sea Bass

BBQ’d Baby Squid – So much better than Calamari

Here’s the Mai Mueang Menu with English translations, in case you’re curious.  This is regarded by our Thai friends as “pricey,” however you should note that 100 baht is $2.80

When the average meal is 40 Baht or $1.15, this restaurant is a splurge, but we’re managing,

Omelete

Snack

Shrimp Fried Rice

Camping food

Magnum

Coconut Snack

Spicey Seafood Salad

Chicken Fried Rice

Known as “baby wind” [mills], the LukLom competition adjacent to Trang, was full blown when we visited this last week.  Located along the rice field roads just before the wind funnels down into a Venturi created by two towering karsts, the Lukloms color and fill the skies with their palm tails, ribbons, dangling cones and spinning cups. Since last year’s competition they’ve constructed an elephant-flanked head-gate to the Khao Chang Hai Cave (a place we’ve visited numerous times with it’s legend of the lost elephant) which is part of the northern-most limestone karst rising out of the rice fields. I asked a couple I’d met if they could give me a reference and their answers should be quoted verbatim, so I’ve included it below.

These baby wind mills are a relic of ancient times when these colorful and noisy contraptions were placed in the middle of the rice fields to ward off birds who fancy eating the newly planted rice shoots. Perhaps there aren’t as many avian marauders or the current technology of putting those errant flapping plastic grocery bags on posts in the newly planted paddies works just as effectively at half/no cost or labor. Now you only see the authentic crop saviors at the end of the harvesting seasons during the height of the Spring winds high along the roadside to be judged for their individual sounds, motion and frightfulness.

There is a never-ending opportunity to pose  in front of one of the local attractions.  The Andaman Gateway is an elaborate rest stop half-way between the two coasts along the narrow peninsula between Trang and Phattalung. The pass over the mountains is only 750′ with a easterly ascent of about 5 kilometers, but it offers a challenge to cyclists and over-loaded trucks, who jockey for positions all the way to the summit. (In case you’ve not figured it out from the photo: Thais used elephants pulling giant stone rollers to compact those original roads – we saw a live demonstration of an elephant pulling a massive stone roller at an agricultural exposition last year.)

This attraction has been under construction for several years and recently opened in our absence over the North American summer.  We watched them last year erecting wire mesh elephant forms  and then in following weeks painstakingly placing cement to give the forms a solid shape as we cycled past.

They’ve done a remarkable job on this 10-acre hollow along the highway and we look forward to coming back and reading the history of how and when the original road was built.  (It was raining when we stopped.)  However, according to our host, the ancient King ordered the road built for trade between the coasts since the two rice growing seasons are opposite each other.  The 10 3’x 6′ bronze shields should give us the full story since they’ve taken the trouble to cast the history in English as well as Thai.

Our outing this week was accompanying TigerSong’s son to his embarkation station in Songkla, where he is picked up by an oil rig helicopter and transported to one of the rigs in the northern Gulf of Thailand.  He is a new materials engineer supervising cement blow-out caps for the daily underwater drilling operations.

The contrasting cultural experience was visiting Hat Yai’s Central Shopping Mall, a dizzying 6-floor mega-mall with a central interior courtyard, escalators, international brand-name shops (we seldom see – even in the States) along with it’s indoor ice rink, I-Max theater and convention center.  Hat Yai is 3 hours over the central mountain range from Trang, on the East coast with 800,000 Thais in it’s metro area.  Quite a revelation for us as we’ve been in southern Thailand for 5 years now and never knew such a large city loomed over the mountain and south toward Malaysia.  We like our side with it’s urban population of 56,000 and hardly any tourists.

Fortunately on the way home, TigerSong took us up the coast an hour where we visited a newly constructed market at Thale Noi, where they channelled off a lagoon of the famous water lilly lake and built a perimeter of rambling elevated walkways of traditional Thai merchants selling traditional foods and handicrafts.  The stormy day didn’t offer many wonderful photographic opportunities.

Almost forgot to include a photo of the swimming herd of water buffalo we saw crossing the channel between their wetland habitat and the Thale Noi lake.  I’m eager to show anyone the video of them swimming and then rising up on a submerged bank.

Long day, but we’ve now seen new territory and some more of Thailand’s changing times.

Luk loms from Jum and Ken’s knowledge: A better translation may be “child of the wind” or “son of the wind”. Originally they were a type of “pest control” to keep birds and insects out of the rice fields around harvest time. Over time people began to try to out do each other and build the best luk lom and it became kind of a competition. Although no longer used for pest control, they tradition has remained and become what it is today, a local festival. According to Jum, this was once  widely done throughout the south, but had slowly died out, along with knowledge of its origins. But, again thanks to Jum and her curiosity for such cultural things, I can tell you what I learned when we first moved here.

 Like many other things in SE Asian Buddhist cultures it traces its roots back to the Hindu Brahman traditions and the Vedas. It is based on a legend where Vayu, the Hindi god of the wind, was busy with preparing for harvesting his rice crops and taking care of his other “divine” duties. Vayu had to leave for some reason (I cannot recall why, some sort of “divine mission”) and told his son to watch the rice crops and keep the birds from stealing it until he could return to harvest the rice. His son, who did not want to kill the birds (after all they were only trying to eat), realized he could not protect all of the fields at once and that if he used his power to control the wind to blow the birds from the fields that he would also destroy the crops. Being rather inventive, he designed the bamboo windmill which in Thai is known as “luk lom” to make noises and movements that would scare the birds (and insects / locusts) away from the fields. He could then place the windmills around the rice fields and use the ability to control the wind (he was the son of the wind god, after all) to blow the windmills, which would spin and make the “singing noise” from the hollow bamboo flutes on the ends of the blades, and the motion and noise would keep the rice field safe.

When Vayu returned he was very impressed and showed his son’s handy work to the other Vedas (? guardians?)  who were also impressed and told him to share this with the humans so that they could also protect their crops from the birds. And thus the origin of the tradition. 

Apparently, the origin myth associated with the luk lom is no longer as well known as it once was, just like building them. Another casualty of modernization and loss of cultural heritage due to the loss of knowledge and traditions no longer being transferred from generation to generation as people now keep their heads stuck in their smartphones rather than engaging in such personal interactions.

Just like when we were cruising, folks ask what we do all day just anchored in one cove/town, one place, and in this case one room. ADL’s was the answer we gave so frequently when we were on the boat. Activities of Daily Living: those same goals they require in nursing homes for the institutionalized so they don’t develop lividity.

Time goes so quickly you have to remember to do “one chore a day for the boat,” and for us in Thailand, besides our ablutions and feeding (which is no less than sumptuous even when we eat at our room), that amounts to cleaning our digs, washing clothes (major room cleaning and linens provided weekly), catching up on local home news, national and international happenings (digitally, of course with websites [Durango Herald, Huff Post, CNN, Aljazeera, FiveThirtyEight], subscriptions [Economist, New Yorker and Atlantic], and podcasts [New York Times, Science Friday, Wait Wait… and Planet Money].

Then, tg’s studying Thai (vocabulary flash cards, audio alphabet and phrases, plus translations of menus and signs photographed with later interpretation using Google Translate) Stanna working occasionally with Chalong on her ESL professional papers and presentations, to challenges us. Oh, and keeping up with friends with Chats, Messages (text) and FaceTime, not to mention a blog.

And additionally on the home front, we get to read books (Kindle app for Stanna on the iPhone and iPad – Audible on the iPhone for tg), watch videos of recent movies, provided by the local residents (most of the 2015 new releases) on USB flash drives, and now we can use our Netflix subscription (albeit with limited content availability) to stream movies and TV serials like Narco, Jessica Jones and Making a Murderer. Entertaining podcasts such as Serial, Undisclosed, Hidden Brain, This American Life, and Wait, Wait Don’t Tell Me fill in when you feel like veggin’ out, or the latest word is “chillin’”.

We have a number of venues to relax, read and chat in. Lounging by the ponds, out at our back yard table and chairs, the front porch, our Belgian friends’ porch and we can use the social eating and gathering sala if we choose. Much like Paradox we’ve got a “big yard” and plenty of room to hang out.

This belabored dialog is simply to encourage those of you retired folks in cold, inclement and closed-in climes to consider all the advantages of coming to Thailand where the weather is warm, the people are friendly and the conveniences are plenty.

Is it worth reminding you that this arrangement costs us $150 a month for our apartment (Stanna reminds me another $ 9-10 for electricity), $45 a month for a scooter with $1.40 for gas each week. Our most expensive and best dinner-sized meal costs us $6.25 for two, if Stanna doesn’t have a beer, and normally lunch costs about $1.20 each.

Our regular blogs should explain what we do when we leave our residence, which we have to do almost every day to forage for Thai food, whether we eat out (at least once a day), or bring it home as a take-home delight from the carts, markets and carry-out restaurants all over Trang. Or when visiting with our Thai friends and cycle touring.

We would never say this is better than cruising on Paradox, but it’s a very similar and far less expensive alternative. And there is no guilt for not shoveling your neighbor’s walk.