58 km

We started the day with body surfing, then ate a big Thai lunch and got on the bikes. Early on we are faced with dogs that set our nerves on edge, so right away we decide we need sticks. YES! Beware, dogs, we shall defend ourselves, and you will run in fear before you even get close enough! We each find good sticks that are just the right size, about 3 feet long and an inch around, and secure them under the bungee cords that hold our camelbacks on the rear rack. They are ready to draw when needed. We set off with new confidence.

We get to practice our stick weilding several times throughout the day, and sometimes even ride side by side, with Dave on the left and me on the right, each using our dominant hands to whack our way through when there are several dogs at once. It sounds worse than it is, but it still gets our adrenaline up. However, we have found a new way to pacify some of the dogs that are on the fence about being vicious: we make fake motorcycle noise as we ride by, sounding like a space car on the Jetsons. That seems to make some of them assured that we are not alien life forms, just another couple on scooters. Honestly, I think it works for all but the meanest.

Having passed up a great beach camp spot yesterday, we planned to be prepared today. We decided the best possibility is just south of Hat Ban Krud on the same long beach. We passed a big port with a steel mill nearby and a village, then the huts and houses thinned out to nothing. We were again on a quiet road with little traffic and an empty beach to our right just on the other side of a line of feathery pines. We choose a spot with a big shady tree and take our bikes down the hill to the beach. We have just enough beach to camp on above the high tide line, right under that shady tree. It’s perfect! We set up camp and go swimming. No body surfing today, as the ocean was too calm. But it was a long, refreshing swim after a very hot day. We didn’t have much of a sea breeze so it was fairly warm, but our tent was comfy and the rhythm of the waves was soothing.

64 km

We started the day with dragon fruit. That makes all the difference!

We stayed close to the coast again today and enjoyed a breeze off the sea whenever we were near it. We followed quiet roads that wound up and around rocky headlands with gold-topped Buddhist wats, then opened to views of turquois water and clean white sandy beaches and limestone cliff islands.

We saw a quiet fishing village that probably rarely sees tourists and the province of Chumphon’s “Most Distinct Sand Dune”, which was, well, a nice sand dune anyway. The beach around the sand dune was so beautiful, clean, and completely deserted that we were sad we didn’t have enough water and food with us to camp. For those planning a trip through this area: please plan to camp here!

The smaller villages are so fun and interesting to ride through; we get to see people about the business of regular life, like spreading squid on screens to dry or collecting fat grass to make into thatched roof panels. People in smaller villages spread great smiles across their faces and shout hellos to us, taking their toddler’s arms and waving them at us. These are warm and welcoming people, always a nice change from larger, tourist-oriented places.

The one concession we make by enjoying smaller back roads is a great increase in the number of dogs we have jetting out to chase us. Some of them give a half-hearted attempt, but many others are a real menace. Dave has a handy pocket in his shirt where he started keeping rocks to throw at them. This works pretty well, but I still get nervous every time we see a dog.

We stop at Hat Bang Boet. It’s a very small, sort of scruffy looking beach town in a quiet little bay, so we are surprised that almost all rooms and bungalows are air condition only, starting at 800 baht. We are used to paying an average of 3-400 baht for a nice but basic room, often including the a/c. So. We hunt around a bit more, and as we pass a restaurant (Krua Khantong) a man calls out, asking if we are looking for a room. He tells us he has a couple of the only non-a/c rooms in town, for 400 baht. He shows us a clean, fairly new room behind the restaurant. We take it. We quickly change and head to the beach for a swim.

Then I did something I’ve never done before but instantly loved: body surfing! I hadn’t understood Dave’s giddy excitement at seeing the waves crashing out there. I thought it looked too rough for swimming. But after we got out there and Dave explained the technique, we waited for the waves, and, ta-da! It worked! Riding the waves like a surf board is hilariously fun, and we were laughing and anxiously waiting for the next wave and the next and the next. It’s awesome, and I completely tired myself out. After a late dinner, I headed straight back to bed while Dave worked on some engineering work on the computer.

41 km

We started off today with me feeling better after more rest. We’ve heard from friends at home that this virus is going around there as well, and it just takes some time. Patience is all I needed!

We decided to keep to the small roads hugging the coast today even though it meant slower going and no guarantees–our map doesn’t have great detail and often doesn’t show smaller roads. We made the right choice. It was a quiet and beautiful ride, sometimes swinging close to the coast, and other times through tree-lined country roads. Dave and I are able to ride alongside each other and chat, something we don’t usually get to do on the busier roads.

I’m feeling better today, but still tired, so we make it a short day. We get back to the coast and stop at the first bungalows we see: Coffee Beach. They are very nice and new and cost 450 baht with a/c. The two women who show us around don’t speak a single word of English, but they have constant smiles and are patient with us as we try to communicate. It looks like we’re the only customers here, and we confirm that they are serving dinner at the open-air restaurant where we pay for the room. Yes! So, we head to the bungalows and immediately change to go swim. The water is ours, the beach is empty except the dogs who reside here at the bungalows, and they happily splash in after us. Dave and I enjoy cooling down in the water, and feel instantly refreshed. It’s just amazing how that works.

We shower and change back at the bungalow, and as we are ready to head out, the power goes out. No backup generator kicks in, as we have seen happen in other places, so we head to the restaurant with our headlamps to order dinner. There are candles lit, both at the restaurant counter and next door where the family lives. We get a couple of candles for our table and we anxiously await dinner.

We are so happy that Chris Wee sent us the link for Chanchao’s Thai Menu Helper, which has helped us so much when ordering in places with no menu or when we need to make sure we get vegetarian versions of what’s in the kitchen. It works well for us tonight, and we enjoy green curry with vegetables and tofu, and pad thai. As we are finishing up dinner the power comes back on, so we get to make use of our air conditioner to sleep by. We had been worried we’d have to open the windows (with no screens) and then figure out how to put up our mosquito net without a hook overhead. That was the reason we didn’t take the fan room in the first place, because there were no screens or bed net. We each got about fifteen mosquito bites at dinner and are glad we won’t have to get any more.

After two good days of riding, I woke up this morning feeling SICKER AGAIN. Since I got sick at least a couple of days after Dave, he’s not surprised I’m still messing around with it. I’ve got the sore throat and swollen glands that he started out with. So, here we are, resting in one spot again.

We had already decided yesterday that we would hold off on diving on Koh Tao until the end of our trip here in SE Asia. Neither of us felt 100% healthy, and we didn’t want to get out to Koh Tao and not be able to dive as much as we planned. So, we can end our biking back in Bangkok (probably take the train or fly down from somewhere in Laos or northern Thailand) and leave our bikes in storage. Then come down to Koh Tao for the last week and dive.

For now, I’ve got some resting to do.

66 km

Today’s ride was full of gently rolling hills, with nothing too steep. In the mid-afternoon it started to lightly sprinkle on us, and then it turned to an all-out rain.

We are seeing more and more dogs the farther north we head. In Malaysia, we hardly saw any dogs, and there were cats everywhere. Now it’s the opposite. But as we keep going, the dogs are less shy and more interested in raising our heart rates. We’re being at least half-heartedly chased a couple of times a day now, and once today I really thought the dog meant business. It might be my imagination, but they do seem to give pause to my “psht” sound, learned from my hero Cesar Milan, the Dog Whisperer. If you haven’t seen that show, you gotta. You just gotta. Anyway, Dave said that we can keep rocks handy in our handlebar bags and they will respond to that. He had plenty of practice while riding across China and Tibet.

We cycled in the rain for the rest of the day, finally rolling into Chumphon to a lighter sprinkle. The last 8-10 kilometers were grey and depressing, not because of the dark skies and rain, but because it is one long, straight stretch of highway filled with tired old shops and car dealorships, growing to a 4-lane ruckus closer to town. But still, it was plenty safe and smooth riding.

If it had been nicer and earlier in the day we would probably have continued north about 12 kilometers to the beach and found a rustic bungalow. But instead, we find the Suriwong Chumphon hotel listed in our guidebook because we know it will be clean and easy. They let us park our bikes in the front lobby out of the way, and we do get shown a clean and tidy room with a fan. Usually in cities, where it can be noisy and hotter, we opt for air-con rooms, leaving fans for the country bungalows where we also have a breeze at night. But the evening remained cool and it continued to rain or sprinkle, making the cheaper fan room quite bearable.

64 km

We rode over gentle rolling hills all day today, with just a couple of short, steeper climbs. At around 15 km we stopped at a lookout, and ended up chatting with a guy from Malaysia who drove up in his Lotus. He had a huge bunch of small, local bananas that he shared with us and a guy who was traveling on a scooter with his small boy. After we talked for a while, he left the rest of the bananas with us, “You guys need them more than I do!” and then vroomed off in his little car. Less than a kilometer down the hill we came to a waterfall that would probably be spectacular in the rainy season, but which was pretty and sounded cool and refreshing (though we didn’t take a dip).

About a kilometer before Kraburi on the right side of the road we saw a couple of places to check out, one signed as “Bungalows” and another resort, though I can’t remember the name. We checked out the resort first, and saw very cute bungalows with fans for 350 baht. They were built and decorated in all kinds of materials like broken tiles of different colors, bottles, rocks. These were really cute. But, as is our habit, we had to check out at least the other place we’d seen, just about 50 meters back. This place also had nice little bungalows, though not as cute and not quite as new, but for only 250 baht. For us, they were really the same functionally, and because we’re trying to travel at least another year without going back to work full time, we take the cheaper one.

We rode into town, just over a kilometer, and found a great dinner of pad thai and some yummy desserts on a corner with several food stalls. Cheap and yummy!

OK, this slimy dessert was maybe not so yummy. It was sweet and very salty, and reminded me too much of something one generally expels rather than ingests.

We got back to the bungalow ready to shower and relax for the evening. I was getting in the shower when we heard girls outside, giggling, saying, “Hello, excuse me!” We didn’t know who they were talking to, but they sounded like they were outside our door. Finally, they knocked. Dave answered, wearing only his bike shorts as he was soon headed to the shower himself, and they asked him if we were going to have breakfast. He said, “Well, what do you have?” and they giggled and ran off. Dave decided he better put a shirt on. A minute later a woman comes up to the door and asked him if he remembered her. He knew he recognized her, but couldn’t place her right away. She said, “You don’t remember me. I remember you but you don’t remember me. I saw you in Ranong a few days ago on your bikes.” And then he remembered.

Just as we were heading into Ranong we took a wrong turn and were stopped at a light trying to figure out which way to go. This woman pulls up and starts talking excitedly to us from a pickup truck, saying something about wanting to tell us all about her resort somewhere else and some other things, but we couldn’t really understand or hear her well, with all the trucks and everything, and we really just wanted to get oriented so we could find our way downtown. So finally we asked her where a certain bank was which was on our little guidebook map, and she pointed straight ahead and then the light turned green and the driver went on. That turned out to be completely wrong. We did get ourselves oriented without too much trouble, but that didn’t help any.

So here this woman is, speaking to Dave in a deep, agitated voice, and she asks Dave why we didn’t stay at the other bungalow. Dave said, “Well, it was 350 baht and this was 250 so we chose this one,” and the woman says something about how “No, you didn’t understand. She said it was discounted to 250. Ours are nicer and newer than these.” But Dave and I both know the woman who showed us the other bungalows clearly said 350 for fan, 500 for air-con.

The woman at the door then wants to know if we want breakfast in the morning. Dave said, “Where? Here or over there?” and she said she’d deliver. Then he asked what she had, and she said coffee, toast and fried egg for 90 baht each. Western style breakfasts are typically overpriced and too small for our cycling appetites. But it’s not just that, this woman is weirding us out and we have no desire to spend any more time with her. Dave pokes his head in and asks if we want breakfast delivered, and I said, (just loud enough for her to overhear through the window) “No, we have plenty of food right here, we don’t need breakfast.” And Dave let her know we were not interested. She left in a huff.

We decided the visa run was enough for one day. Dave has been doing some contract engineering work while we’ve been here, and he’s happy to work on the technical writing a bit more before we leave.

We took a longtail boat ride to burma, got our passport stamped and a new visa for Thailand, then came back. An easy, three hour process from door to door.

We first took a songtaew (pickup taxi with benches along each side and a canopy covering) to Thai immigration for our exit stamp. Then a motor scooter ride to the boat dock that was included in the price of the longtail boat (400 baht r/t). We walked back to Thai immigration from the dock (15 minutes) and got our passports stamped. Then a songtaew ride back to the guesthouse. We took a truck labeled with route “4” to get there, and the “3” to get back. The driver will let you know when you’re near.

Ditto yesterday.

(We’re feeling better.)

Tomorrow we will probably do a quick visa run to the Burma (Myanmar) border, then head on to the next town to make our way to the East coast.

Sleep, eat, internet. Repeat.

62 km

Today neither of us felt good. I think we must both have a virus, since we share the same symptoms after a full week, and Dave took a course of antibiotics in that time. We must have picked it up on the dive boat, which we shared with about 40 other people for two full days. That, combined with the stress on the sinuses and ears of pressurizing so many times over the 4-day dive course must have cinched it.

There’s not much to say about today, as I was in a mental fog the entire day, tired and grumpy. Bike touring is no fun feeling this way. We are going to take a day or two more off here in Ranong and hopefully kick this.

The owner of the Wassana Guest House in Hat Bang Ben recommended the Suta House in Ranong, and we are glad for the tip. It’s a nice, clean place with a variety of inexpensive air-con rooms.