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The Practical Cyclists' Guide
(1992)
PO Box 3331 RUNDLE MALL SA 5000
The country:
The climate: in the dry season,
November through to January, temperatures were ideal for cycling, around 20
degrees. I experienced only one day's rain. The nights were pleasant in a sheet
sleeping bag, until the north when I needed a blanket as well.
The
attractions:
Maps:
were not easy to find, outside
The roads: were much better than one
might expect of a poor country. Highways, main roads and even lesser roads were
always well sealed, with dirt tracks of varying quality leading off to small
villages. Sealed roads were well sign posted in Latin characters, and I was pleasantly
surprised that
Bicycles: Sadly, there weren't many
push bikes in the provinces. The only cyclists seemed to be children, or the
very poor, though I did once see a team of monkey-handlers travelling by bike from
village to village for the coconut season.
On the other hand,
I was surprised to meet a dozen or so foreign cyclists, quite by accident. All
of them had come to
Every town has a
cycle shop, dealing in Chinese-style clunkers mostly. Ten speeds were not
uncommon though, and some shops sold basic MTB's. While
Food: was usually a pleasure. A
large, cyclist size meal could be as cheap as a dollar from a market take-away
stall, or around two dollars in a restaurant. I became partial especially to
"sticky rice", delicious with curries, or even on its own. Thai food
is very spicy, and served cold, but you get used to it. Most "sit down"
restaurants, however, seemed to be Chinese and the food there was less fiery.
In tourist areas, there were usually restaurants serving European style foods,
but at prices many times beyond the "local" cafes and stalls. There
were markets for fresh vegetables, and I could always find tomatoes, onions and
cucumbers. Fruit was an endless delight - Lady's Finger bananas, several
varieties of pineapples , jackfruit and many other delicious kinds. Local lager
beer is quite palatable, if relatively expensive, at about $3.00/lt. There is
also a wide range of interesting and often delicious sweets, and some very
exotic snacks - I once ate fried grasshoppers, tasting like corn chips !
Vegetarians would need to be careful , however - vendors had some difficulty
understanding the concept.
There was often a
regional food speciality of interest to the cyclist - dried sticks of buffalo
meat, peanut toffee, dried fish are fond memories. Supermarkets in most towns
carried non-perishable supplies, eg instant oats, instant coffee, milk powder,
canned sardines, honey, tea bags etc. I found the local breakfasts of fish ball
soup a bit much, and was happy to start the day with porridge. Lunch most days
was a picnic in one of the bus sheds along the highway ; this was a minor
economy, but also prevented becoming bored with cafe food, as well as giving a
sense of self-sufficiency: in a relatively poor country, the sight of too many
Westerners waited on for three meals a day was sometimes unedifying.
For some reason,
there were very few tea and coffee shops, and those that did exist usually
served only lukewarm and thin instant coffee at very inflated prices. I came to
value my immersion heater greatly, as all hotel rooms had power points. A small
thermos was also very useful for tea time on the road.
Water : nobody, local or
foreign, drinks from the tap. Plastic bottles of cold, "filtered"
water were available from provision stores everywhere along main roads, but the
resulting mess, as the non-returnable bottles were discarded, put me off buying
it. Fortunately, most houses had large containers for collecting rain water,
and were very happy to give me as much as I could want. Only once did I run out
of water -in the middle of nowhere, on the steep road skirting the Burmese
border, quite unpleasant but my own fault. Generally, negotiating for water
brought me into contact with the locals in a way the motorised tourist would
never experience, and I became very appreciative of the kindness I was
shown.
Accommodation: Basic, but reasonably
clean hotels in the provinces were around $ 5.00 for a room for two with your
own "bath", ie a dipper and large water container, and a squat
toilet. Hotels were not always well signposted, but were not hard to find even
so, especially with the increased mobility of the bike, which made scouting
about so much easier. When in doubt, a local cycle rickshaw will guide you, for
the usual fare, about 25 cents. There are also so-called "guest
houses", catering exclusively for the Western clientele of backpackers, with
micro-rooms, sometimes in palm leaf huts, for about the same price. I found
these had an uncomfortable, "golden ghetto" feel to them, with an
obvious, if unspoken, barrier between the locals and the hedonistic
"travellers". Contact with some of the latter seemed to have had an
unfortunate effect on the people operating these establishments: the guests
seemed to be over-serviced with expensive, pseudo Thai food, day tours,
souvenirs and so on. I found after some experience, sadly, that the more
English someone spoke, the more likely they were to be trying to sell me
something I didn't need.
However the
"guest houses" had the advantage that one could get a better night's
sleep than in a hotel, where the Thai and Chinese guests tended to be rather
noisy.
Some towns were
too small to support a hotel, and on those occasions I learned to approach the
local Buddhist temple or "wat", where I was always well
received, even if the monks were sometimes at a loss to know what to do with
such a strange apparition as a foreigner, on a bicycle of
all things. However, temples mostly had at least rudimentary guest facilities,
and staying with the monks was always a happy and calming experience. It proved
useful to ask the monks to autograph my diary, and to use this as an
introduction at the next wat.
A sheet sleeping
bag enabled me to sleep easily anywhere - even when the laundry standards were
not quite what Australians might be used to ! I didn't have a mosquito net, but
it would have been useful to have one, especially when staying away from the
hotels, which were usually screened in
Camping: I meet a number of
European cyclists who'd carried camping and cooking gear, sometimes for months,
without using it. Camping didn't seem worthwhile, given the number of
snakes we saw trying to cross the roads (including a live cobra about five feet
long one day in
Trains : there is a very good
railway system, with trains lines radiating out from
The People: While per capita income
is low, few people are hungry, though there are other unmistakable signs of
poverty. Most people were generally friendly and easy to deal with. There were
a very few crooks and cheats about, but these were greatly outnumbered by
helpful and generous people. Simple English was widely understood, and Thais
had a great appreciation for any attempt to speak their own language. In
between, pantomime filled the gaps, to everybody's good natured amusement!
While people were curious about foreigners ( who, among other things, are
incredibly rich compared to rural Thais) this curiosity did not extend to
staring or crowding. My lasting memories are of a great deal of kindness,
warmth and laughter.
One curious social
phenomenon was the "ran sur pa gow-gow" (second hand clothes shops)
of the South, where the locals bargained over used T shirts and cowboy clothes
imported in large quantities from the US, ~sometimes with their charity shop
price tags intact. Younger poorer Thais valued these greatly as status symbols
of a culture otherwise quite beyond them economically, and it was common to see
people wearing T shirts from long ago "Fun Runs" in, say, Montana or
Arizona. Ironically, we found a few with cycling motifs.
There were
negative aspects sometimes: the tendency for curious bystanders to fiddle with
the controls of my bike if I left it alone somewhere on the street; and, in the
South, the chorus of shouts of "Yu! ... Yu!" in each
village , from groups of macho layabouts on motor bike taxis who seemed to find
the sight of a hot and tired cyclist overwhelmingly hilarious - in fact they
were giving me a traditional, standard greeting, meaning "Where [ do you
go ] ? ". I managed to lose my temper on occasions with these jerks, and
perhaps I shouldn't have - I don't think they meant harm.
Thai men seemed to
drink quite a lot, whiskey mostly, and semi-drunk people were quite common at
stops in the villages. Fortunately, they were rarely more than simply
obnoxious, and I never felt seriously threatened.
There were
regional variations, too, gradually revealed to the cyclist - from the Muslim
South through to the increasingly Buddhist centre and North-East , and the
non-Thai minorities of the North. Stopping for a cuppa one day, I found myself
in conversation with a pleasant school teacher who told me how the last village
had been Cambodian-speaking, the next would be Lao, the one after perhaps even
Vietnamese: the populations were very mixed, but apparently without the racial
animosities of other countries in
Services: Banks and Post offices
were quite straightforward and reliable: I had no trouble using my Mastercard
to draw cash, and international telephone calls were simply arranged at
larger post offices. Pharmacies in small towns were well stocked, with helpful
staff, and I passed frequent hospitals along the highways. There were also
police boxes every 20 Km or so, and mostly the police were cooperative, if
sometimes officious and occasionally drunk.
Security : As a single male, I
never experienced anything resembling a security problem, in a journey of ten
weeks in
Guides : We used a
"traveller's" guide book most of the time but came to regret carrying
the extra weight, as the information about hotels was often out of date, and
much else irrelevant and even misleading. You'd get by much better spending a
night with an atlas, a coffee table book on
Grace
Newhaven , Adelaide 1992 - revised 1998 & 2008
Links
Brain DeSousa's
Mr Pumpy's
Grace's Vietnam : Hanoi to Saigon
1994