103 km

We’re seeing more women without full head coverings, fewer mosques, and more Buddhist temples. We are definitely seeing changes as we work our way North of the Malaysia/Thailand border. We even saw a couple of Christian churches today, one in session with the doors wide open. There is definitely more diversity here. Other drastic changes include seeing dogs. In Malaysia the only animals we saw around houses or restaurants were cats and chickens. Now there are very few cats and plenty of dogs. We had our first dog chase us today, though it didn’t put in all that much effort and never caught up to us, but if it were a cattle dog like the ones we saw in New Mexico on the Great Divide trail we would have been toast.

Passing through one of the towns, we stop at a Buddhist temple to
take a look. This friendly monk wanted to be in the picture.

Another site we saw many times throughout the day as we passed through towns in the palm & rubber plantation countryside was people on motorcycles and scooters holding cages with birds in them. Nice, big, ornate cages, sometimes covered and sometimes not. We could not figure out why so many people were transporting birds around. They were not all on the move, there were many houses and shops with one to several cages of birds hanging out in the yard or from the open front overhang. Birds were chirping left and right on the road through these towns.

Later in the afternoon we overtook a couple of cyclists coming back on the road from a noodle stand. Wow! Cyclists! Day after day in Malaysia we were the only alien beings on the road, and so far in Thailand we’ve seen three pairs of cyclists: an older couple getting on to the ferry we had just taken to get to Satun, they were going the other direction; another couple passed us going towards the ferry several kilometers into the ride from Satun; and now these two men ahead of us. We rode along with them and chatted for a while. They’re both Thai, touring for 10 days from Satun up the West Coast. After talking with them for a while, Dave asked them if they knew anything about the birds everyone was carrying around. Evidently they hadn’t noticed. Hadn’t noticed?

Just a little while later, Dave and I were having a cold soda at a roadside stand and saw THREE MORE CYCLISTS! They were from New Zealand, heading the opposite direction as us. One was traveling for a year, his sister had recently joined him for a month, and another friend had just joined them for ten days of riding. They stopped to chat, and we talked with them for about twenty minutes. We got all kinds of great information about the roads ahead, from Thailand to Cambodia, Vietnam and Laos. We’ll definitely be taking that information into consideration as we plan the weeks ahead.

We got to Trang late in the afternoon and tried to find the Yamawa Hotel, which was listed in our Lonely Planet guide and sounded pretty nice. But Trang was just too big to randomly look for a particular hotel, nobody recognized the name and we didn’t understand directions to the street it was on. The Thai people so far speak little to no English in general and we don’t speak any Thai, and using the phrase book so far is not working well because we’re not saying the Thai words well enough for people to recognize them. We’re probably not getting the tones right or something. Anyway. Dave finally saw a sign for tourist info, and he went in there and got a copy of a simple street map with a few places marked on it, including our hotel.

The Yamawa is barely like the description in LP, more expensive, and ended up having some kind of bed bugs, so we can’t recommend it. However, the girl who worked there spoke just enough English that, with our phrase book, she was able to write down and help us pronounce a few key words with which to find food. It’s not easy being vegetarian in SE Asia, but Dave is also very allergic to MSG, which is in everything here in Thailand in great quantities. His stomach is already in great distress. So I will give the Yamawa good marks for helpfulness, but I’d still say to just look around for a reasonably priced guest house.