59 km

Yesterday’s Ride Pays Off This Morning

Yesterday we had a long day in the interest of getting to a town listed in LP and with the guarantee of a guest house. We’re going through so many small towns that don’t seem to offer accommodation (that we can tell) so we just wanted that guarantee.

We also knew that this particular town offered something we’ve been missing for the last month: real filter coffee. COFFEE!!! We’ve been drinking either Nescafe or Malaysian coffee, which is mostly instant coffee with stimulating herbs added and always sweetened and usually with condensed milk too. So, this morning we found one of the coffee shops recommended in LP that also offered breakfast. Yay! LP sent us in the right direction this morning. We each had two cups of filter coffee. It could have been stronger, but who’s complaining. Not us.

Afterward, we found bread in the grocery across the road. We are already finding out that bread is going to be scarce here in Thailand, and we’ll have to stock up when we get to a city big enough to have a large grocery. We have looked in countless small stores since entering Thailand and this was the first bread we’ve seen. When you do find a loaf, as our friend Charlie wrote to us, there are about 10 pieces of bread in the wee loaf, so we have to buy two just to get us through a couple of days.

An Attempt at an Easy Day

I had thought we should take it really easy today, make it short, since we went long yesterday. I want to help my knees get stronger by challenging them and then giving them plenty of rest. So I picked out a couple of towns ahead that looked big enough to be promising for accommodation. But we didn’t see any guest houses until
Ban Khuan Kun, 59 kilometers into the day. It turned out to be fine for my knees though, because it was mostly flat and we had a tailwind, so it felt like a shorter day than it was.

Where Are We, Anyway?

I can’t tell you what guest house we are in right now, because the sign is written in Thai and the owner here doesn’t speak a word of English. Trying to get the name of this place would just not work. But it’s about 500 meters before the junction with the larger highway, where the main part of town appears to be. It’s new and really nice and clean. We paid 350 baht after asking for a cheaper room than the 400 baht that she asked for. She simply nodded 350 would be ok after she talked with her husband.

All We Want is Vegetarian Thai Food

We used our phrase book and written Thai for “no msg” and other things and tried ordering food at a restaurant. Um, we did get food. But. It was rather plain vegetables over white rice. No curry or pad Thai noodles or anything like that. I guess when we present them with the phrases, “no meat, no chicken, no msg” they freak out and wonder what the heck they CAN make for us. This has happened a couple of times now. Also, the plates of food were not enough for our monster appetites, and when we tried to order more, we just couldn’t. They didn’t get it, at all. The woman (and her friends who were trying to be helpful – basically repeating everything she said) just kept repeating the price of our meals, “50 baht, 50 baht.” So we finally just had to pay and leave. We stopped at a market on the way back to our guest house and got an ice cream bar. So, the grand food adventures that everyone is hoping to hear about are not starting yet, but soon! Soon, we MUST be able to order real Thai food!!

Welcome to Thailand, where you see pictures of the king just about every kilometer. This one is a state line marking.