Actually this was an O24O, as we left at 9:30 am and I returned around 4 pm the next day. Kip met up with his family at our destination (Pun Pun organic farm:http://www.punpunthailand.org/) and is staying a few more days.
Photos at http://www.flickr.com/photos/25150...@n08/4384444962/ Kip had done this trip once or twice (his sister in law co-manages the farm), but along major roads. Thailand is ideal in many ways for Riv- style biking, as it has a well developed road network with plenty of secondary and tertiary roads with little traffic, but with plenty of these roads going from paved to unpaved and back, making for interesting mixed terrain. Also, as Thais a serious about their food and small family-run businesses abound, great food can be had almost anywhere, even way off the beaten path. We wanted to maximize our time on small roads, and so I created a route using ridewithgps.com and uploaded it to my GPS (with Thailand map). Unfortunately I uploaded the track without saving it to the GPS memory. We started following the route, started deviating from it because the GPS was giving us some silly run-around directions (3 left hand turns instead of one right) and while it was recalculating when we were ignoring it, I hit the "cancel the recalculation" button, because I didn't really want it to give us turn by turn directions anyway, I just wanted to see the track on the display along with the map. Well, that "cancel" seemed to have erased the track from the GPS, so we had to rely on my memory of the track and a bit of making it up along the way. In any case, we managed to avoid all major roads, and hit only about 6-8 (thankfully short) dead ends that were supposed to go through, and only one locked gate (see photos). This all sounds like the GPS and the frequently incorrect Garmin map are less than useful, but actually I am very pleased with using the Garmin GPS (eTrex Legend HCx) and Thailand map. Though the details of the smallest roads are frequently wrong (real roads aren't on the map, and roads that are on the map don't always exist), but because there are so many minor roads in Thailand, many of which are dead-ends to someone's house or field, having a quick way to check if any given road goes through gives me enough confidence to be spontaneous about trying out new little roads, even if the hit rate is only 80-90%. For every awesome side road that connects to somewhere else, there seem to be about 3-4 dead ends, so without the GPS your statistical hit rate would be about 20-25%. And there simply aren't any paper maps that show any of the tertiary roads, and even if there were, without knowing exactly where you are, it would be very hard to know if you are at the intersection with the little dirt road that goes over the hills, or the next one 50m down that ends after 400m at someone's field. I grabbed a four-pack of cinnamon rolls from the little deli around the corner on our way out, and we had beef noodle soup at a great little noodle shop along the way, where we were treated to some crispy waffle cookies by one of the Thai customers who made fun of Kip for taking a photo of his food. I hadn't put my fenders on yet because of a crack in the rear one (see separate post), and figured that since we are in the middle of dry season (which is truly bone dry) there was no need. But enough people are watering gardens with run-off snaking across roads that I had quite a skunk stripe by the end of the day. Thus my desire to get the fender situation sorted (it arrived with 2 small cracks). Later I bought a bottle of water at a little raod-side shop, and as always told the woman that I wanted neither plastic bag nor straw, which is otherwise automatic. In a friendly way, she muttered "does't take the bag, does't take the car," and I said, "won't take the bottle either," filled up my water bottle of the immortals and handed her back the empty bottle. The next day Kip, his 6 year-old son, and 5 year-old nephew and I rode to a (not so) nearby waterfall. I turned south to head back home after 21 km and 4 km shy of the falls, but Kip tells me that the boys actually rode back on their BMX bikes all the way for a 50 km round trip, instead of the original plan of grabbing a pick-up taxi for the ride back. Pretty impressive. I returned along variations of the route to the farm, sometimes riding the same roads, sometimes trying a new parallel road. I stopped at another road-side noodle stand for pork noodles, and later at a farmers' market to buy two bags of tiny, apple-sized and utterly delicious, peeled and cut pineapples, and devoured them in the shade of a riverside tree. I tried a new, more direct route through the outskirts of the city which was almost a success: I just had to cross a 4 lane highway with a median barrier during rush hour traffic (Thais don't really follow traffic laws but fortunately are equally tolerant of others' creative behavior in traffic). I also tried to take a road that was marked as a main road on the GPS map but which turned out to be a little dirt path between bamboo fences with a closed bamboo gate, and a "no entry" sign. But I was rewarded with riding across the grounds of one of Chiang Mai's 300 temples that I hadn't seen before, as well as riding for a half km along the edge of the beautiful Chinese cemetery. Cheers, Gernot -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "RBW Owners Bunch" group. To post to this group, send email to rbw-owners-bu...@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to rbw-owners-bunch+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/rbw-owners-bunch?hl=en.
