Kaeng Khoi to Chai Badan: grace in the linguistic desert


Statistics for today
Distance 95.00 kms 59.03 miles
Ride time (hours) 5.29 -
Avg speed 17.9 kph -
Statistics for trip to date
Distance 2,529.00 kms 1,571.45 miles
Ride time (hours) 132.76 -
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Friday, January 6th, 2017

There will be no English today, spoken or written, but food has to be procured and a place to sleep found. Somehow it always works out, the trick is to find some grace in the awkwardness of incomprehension.

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The day starts out on a bike path (also being used by scooters). It leads to a big factory, must be for the workers.

I have breakfast at a little roadside hut run by a woman who has to be pushing 100 years old. A pantomime routine leads us to agree on a soup. She is adorable in making my breakfast; but it does take some time as she slowly finds ingredients and puts my soup together. No rush.

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Scads of little bottles of orange drink left as offerings at this shrine in the middle of nowher beside the road.

I'm quickly into the hills today. It feels great to be away from urban areas, on back roads, climbing hills in the heat. Later I come down to a plain that is full of sugar cane fields. It is harvest time; the cut cane is being hauled out of the fields by long lines of tractors. It reminds me of riding through the Cauca Valley in Colombia. Strong headwinds in this area but I don't find them particularly frustrating. I'm just happy to be plugging along in the countryside.

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Sunflowers.
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Just looking for some company.
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I actually caught up to and passed this truck on a 5% grade. That doesn't happen every day.
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Hauling cut sugarcane out of the fields.

I come upon a lake that has a small road running along the shore. A really nice ride for 20 kilometers or so, then I cross over to the other side on a sort of causeway.

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Pasak Chonlasit (the name of the lake).
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Fishing.
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Bigger mountains in the distance.
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Getting a facelift, it would appear.

There doesn't seem to be much around in terms of accommodations, at least from what I can see on the internet, so I head back near a highway to find a sort of "resort" place; basically a small farm that has a row of rooms like a motel with sliding glass doors looking out on a small pond. Zero English again. A calculator serves as a negotiating tool, we settle on a price, I gather that the woman wants to pay for riding a rather sad looking horse but I decline, letting her know that my bicycle is my preferred steed. In this "conversation" the concept of horse is conveyed by holding one's index fingers up next to one's ears like horns.

Later on I ride to a restaurant down the street for dinner. I've found that pulling up pictures of standard Thai dishes is an effective way of ordering things. The food is quite good.