Into Thailand, and another police escort....

Firstly, apologies for not getting in touch with the kind people who have been adding comments. At some point the 'e-mail me when a comment is added' button must have been switched off, and we've only just seen comments from the last four months.

Anyway, on with the saga.

Every day on Penang we could see the storm clouds rolling around on the mainland during the morning, ready for the afternoon downpour.

Time to head north away from the monsoons, but there's a long way to go.

We headed an hour up the road to Sungai Petani to stay with Ann and Lucas - 2 Australian bikers who have been house sitting here in Malaysia. We had a great time swappng stories and set off in the morning ready to hit Thailand.

Petrol stations are always fun because the people are so friendly, and our last stop to get cheap petrol before Thailand's outrageous prices (65p/litre!!) was lovely. Ery was very chatty and introduced us to his mum. I confused the hell out of the girl on the till by giving her all the Malay Ringit that we had left (about 90p).


The Thai border was fairly straightforward, but I wished that I'd not given away our last change - a fellow biker in the queue gave us the required 4 Ringit though (about 90p.....). The guy in the pic above asked us where we were going, and when we just shrugged, said, 'come and have lunch with me'. Ok.

We ended up spending the evening with him and his girlfriend Bui who had taken the bus from Bangkok to this horrible border town.

The town seemed to be there mainly for Malays coming into Thailand for the 15 year old Laos girls working there. We had a quick drink in a bar purely for research.


Something told us that we weren't in an Islamic country anymore. No more early 4.30am calls to prayer.



Cheap taxis are just pickups that may or may not have been converted. Great fun to ride in, and only 10 Baht (20p) for a short ride.





I'm not sure how much they charge for a bull.


The terrain became full of strangely eroded limestone hills.

And as we got to Krabi ('Grabeee'), we had a great view of Thailand's highest mountain.


We were also lucky that when we got to Krabi, it was Loi Krathong weekend, and the streets were full of great food stalls.


Including some not so great, like stir-fried maggots.

And grasshoppers.


And the strangest looking crabs that I've seen.


The veg stalls are fantastic even though we couldn't identify half of it.



This tortoise was for sale as a pet by the way, not to eat (but they had some eggs to eat).

But these live frogs were definitely on the menu.


But it was obviously hard graft selling food


Loi Krathong, if we understand it right, is a festival where people float out boats made of banana tree slices dressed with banana leaves and flowers, candles, incense sticks, and some of your hair and nail clippings. It was all very touching, if slightly farcical, as the river kept sending the boats back to shore, and the ones that did float out into the river had to run the gauntlet of the little fishing boats taking people out for trips.

Then it rained. It really threw it down and messed everything up so much that the local authorities let the stalls stay for another 2 nights.


The best part about Krabi was the elephant park nearby. It was only a small place, but had kep elephants on an old pubber plantation for 12 years, and the ele's were well looked after.

It was an unforgettable experience, spending an hour riding around on these two through wild terrain. They're wonderful creatures and very gentle.


Yes, I know that you're thinkng 'why the soppy puppy picture?' We'd stopped at a stall for a drink during the day, and were talking to a dog. The owner took us to see the dog's pups, and it all got a bit confused at that point.

We tried to ask how old the dogs were, and as their eyes were still closed were gesturing 2? 3? meaning weeks. The lady smiled sweetly, nodded yes, and got her daughter to put 2 or 3 of them in a cardboard box for us to take away. At this point we made a pretty hasty retreat.

We'd made it to an area called 'The Isthmus of Kra'. What a great name. It's where the land at the south of Burmah/Thailand gets very narrow, and the 2 countries are separated by a river. Burmah is a no-go unfortunately, and we'll eventually have to fly over it.

This temple ('Wat'), like many, was a work in progress, and the guy in the picture below was single-handedly painting out the inside with simple but beautiful murals.




In Pracuap KhiriKhan we found some hungry monkeys.

Then a whole load more found me.



And one tried to eat Anita's helmet.


These boats were in Hua Hin bay.


Hua Hin is better known though for its girls. They're sweet girls, and very friendly despite what we can only imagine that they have to put up with. They didn't take much peruading to have their photo taken.

In Kanchanaburi we were lucky enough to meet up with Pat and Shenoagh. They're two english round-the-world bikers who are on two bikes, headed in roughly the same direction as us. We felt that we knew them already, having seen them on the HU videos (http://www.horizonsunlimited.com/).

We had a wonderful evening chatting with them, and almost felt like proper adventure travellers. We left them with loose plans to meet up again in the north of Thailand.



The next evening was just as exciting. We'd got chatting with Cecil Hale and his wife Noon. Cecil was a motorcycle racer in the UK, and once raced at the Isle of Man TT. It so happened that it was the same year that my parents were there on honeymoon. Strange days indeed. They're a very sweet couple with a gentle sense of humour.

Kanchanaburi is the site of the bridge over the river Kwai where the film was made, and a visit was compulsory.



We also took a 100 mile detour to go to the 'Hellfire Pass' museum where a section of the Burmah-Thailand railway has been cleared. It was a sobering and humbling experience walking a 3 Km stretch of the track, and hearing how 100,000 local conscripts and POW's died at the hands of the Japanese while building it almost with bare hands.

And this is where we are today. The hotel corridor looks just like a prison with the steel doors that are padlocked on the outside.


We've got used to seeing odd businesses in high streets, but we couldn't quite believe this. Riding through the town, we spotted an open-fronted engine reconditioning workshop next to clothes and food shops. Lathes, milling machines and borers where buzzing away as people walked by doing their shopping.

Heading up towards Tak, we rode into (almost literally) a big Chinese street festival. You might be able to make out the poor guy who was sitting on the bamboo pole. It was his job to 'kill' the dragon and a dozen or so blokes were at the bottom of the pole pushing it up to bring him right up to the dragon's head. He's a brave man.


We did it again. Riding along, and we spotted flashing lights behind us. Ok, it's police so slow down, move over, let them by... and it was just a bunch of bikers again. It would have been rude to have not followed, so we tagged onto the back and followed them - at one point doing 125kmh.



They stopped for fuel, and invited us to join them for lunch. They're great blokes, and according to Pierre, the guy to my right, quite a few of them are famous. I'd have put up one of the pictures that Anita took during the ride, but most of them look like this.

Not easy to take pics at that speed.

We're hoping that we'll catch up with the guys at the Chiang Mai bike week this weekend.


It dawned on us the other day that it's not really rained since we came into Thailand. It seems that we've finally come out of the monsoon area. It's still humid but not like a sauna. Halleleujah!

We're now in Tak close to the Burmese border and close to some unbelievable biking roads through the mountains around Chiang Mai, so should have some nice pics for the next blog.

See ya.