From Trailguru
Overview
| Trip Title: | Southern Thailand Bike Touring - Pattani to Songkhla |
| Date: | Feburary 21st, 2007 |
| Trip Members: | Tpark, Shannon Armstrong |
| Points of Interest: | Thailand, Pattani, Songkhla |
Map
Trip Report
We awoke at 6:45am this morning to the hazy sunrise and the sound of roosters crowing.
After a quick organization of our things, we went down to our included breakfast where the highlight was definitely the Thai style pancakes with what seemed to be a milk reduction as the topping. Yum.
We were off at 7:45am and headed out on the road towards Hat Yai and ultimately Songkhla. The main road out of town was a highway and was filled with cars on their morning commute and therefore hot, noisy, and basically not a lot of fun.
Fortunately, to keep it interesting, a military jeep pulled up alongside us and bunch of army guys waved and said hi. They held just ahead of us for about 5km and then they dropped back about 50 meters but stayed at our same pace (which was pretty high given the fast highway road and general dislike of riding on highway, but still, couldn't have been more than 30km/h). They would stay with us for a total of 40km just behind us. Perhaps they figured that if anything was going to happen on their patrol it would likely happen around the crazy foreigners on bikes. Finally, at what was probably the end of their patrol, they turned around and we were on our own.
About when the two of us were at the point of being absolutely disgusted with the diesel, of course, I had a mechanical -- the lock ring on my rear cassette came loose and when I stopped and took of my back wheel to have a look the whole cassette just slid right off. Nice. Not having the keyed tool you need to re-tighten the cassette, I used the pliers of a leatherman to get it as tight as possible. But I still had to tighten it about once a day for the rest of the trip.
We endured the diesel more (about 10km after we hoped, dreamed, and wished the turn off would of been) and made a right onto the road towards Songkhla. This was only marginally less trafficked -- we were not amused.
Fortnunately, we took a side road through Na Thap that really paid off. Headed towards the coast, we rode through rice fields before ending up in the outskirts of Na Thap where we had a great clear noodle soup.
But after Na Thap was where the real payoff was as we rode wall to wall sea views with little to no traffic all the way into Songkhla. We made a "victory lap" around Songkhla as it is an isthmus and has ocean views most of the way around it and eventually, after a few wrong turns, found our hotel and checked in.
We really enjoyed Songkhla. We took a tuk tuk (pickup truck taxi with covered benches in the back) over to Hat Samila and after giving an impromptu English lesson to a group of high school students, we walked and talked to another Thai man and gave him lessons as well. The Thais are either really curious in foreigner, really interested in learning English, or most likely -- both.
Regardless, the highlight of the evening was celebrating our escape from bandit country with a $13 crab dinner with 2 giant bottles of beer.
Statistics
Photos
Submitted by: Tpark |
Submitted by: Tpark |
Submitted by: Tpark |
Submitted by: Tpark |