Cycle Touring Thailand: Phuket

January 28th Mai Khao

Early this morning we were woken by something climbing on the roof. It sounded like a lizard to me. The noise stopped and we fell back to sleep. A while later Maria got up to go to the toilet and found it full of bees! I guess they have been living in the roof and what ever got up there disturbed them and they moved into our bathroom!

Luckily by the time we had been for a run and had breakfast the maintenance man had sorted it and we were bee free again.

Now in theory it should be easy to get your bike on the bus or a train but trying to get somebody to confirm that is hard. If you hung around the bus station long enough somebody would take your money and throw them on but this is not so good if you are 30+km away from the station. As for trains not all will take bikes so you need to check if the train has a baggage car and what the connections are like. The other thing to remember is the train line stops in Surat Thani.

So we had a bit of a mission today. Yesterday I found it was not only easier but cheaper to fly to Chaing Mai from Phuket, with the added bonus of taking 2 hours not 2 days. Trouble is we didn't have bike boxes or a bag to but our stuff in for the flight. So we hired the scooter again and headed for the airport, nowhere sold boxes. So the next stop was a bike shop in Thalang where we got 2 boxes and after a bit of folding and balancing we got them on the scooter and back to the bungalow.

Next we needed a bag and we were directed to a market back towards the airport. Now they sold lots of random stuff but mainly very dodgy looking meat including peeled frogs! No bags big enough though but the market stalls were all using huge stripey carrier bags with zips which would have been perfect but nobody was parting with one. So back on the scooter and we ended up back in Thalang, with a bit of searching and 150baht later we had our own stripey bag.

We got back at sunset, booked a hotel in Chiang Mai and are now all sorted for the next leg. Tomorrow like yesterday should be nice and relaxing, just the bikes to pack up AGAIN and we should be set.

Chilling yesterday

Scooter park at Tescos!

Almost like the locals, they wouldn't have folded the boxes, probably had the bikes in them, been drinking a thick shake and chatting on the phone with 2 more passengers.