Our route today took us around the busy royal city of Hua Hin, the residence of the respected king and family in Thailand. After a busy market street, we were treated to a beautiful dedicated bike path with light sprinkles of rain keeping us cool.
Shortly after, we found ourselves on the stunning Gulf of Thailand coast, one of my absolute favorite areas in the whole country. We cycled for miles on beautiful palm tree-lined roads by endless shops and restaurants, stopping at a British themed cafe for an iced coffee. The woman working there told us about a fellow she met a while ago who was walking (yes, just walking!) all the way from Australia back home to Europe. He stayed a few nights on this beach, and she invited him in. Bicycle touring seems so mainstream compared to walking across 3 continents… Respect!
A few kilometers later, cycling peacefully, watching the calm water, thinking about our beloved friends battling headwinds and miles and saving lives at AIDS/LifeCycle right now, and feeling a level of inner peace encompass me that I haven’t felt in a while, we prepared to turn …
CRACK!!!!
Oh shit, that can’t be good. I’d gone over a small speed bump. I sat on my seat and felt it sink under my weight and twist around. Oh shit, definitely not good. We pulled over under a palm tree on the beach and sure enough, the seat post clamp had cracked in half.
No problem, I’d packed extra clamps just for this occasion… Right? Well shit, we dug through the bottom of every bag, and nothing. In an effort to lighten our load a bit, we’d mailed a bunch of things we didn’t think we’d need for a while to Phuket. The clamps must have been in that package.
We packed up and I prepared to cycle the next 11 kilometers to our lunch stop without sitting. I had to use bungi cords to strap my back bag to my handlebars because my seat could no longer hold it up, and that made it so I couldn’t shift. So I was riding single speed with no seat and 5 pounds of stuff hanging unevenly from my handlebars, making steering really tricky. Fun!
We made slow progress but after 2 kilometers of not sitting while cycling, my feet were on fire. Luckily we happened on a small mom and pop auto repair shop and I showed the clamp to one of the guys. “Oh… Hmm… Aluminum” he said, shaking his head, along we some other Thai words. Aluminum is impossible to weld, so he couldn’t fix it.
But he then came up with one of those cheap screw clamps and successfully fastened it around my seatpost. I knew it wouldn’t last long but we only had 9 kilometers to go before we could find a hotel for the night and figure things out. I asked how much, and he just laughed at me and waved me off and went back to work.
We made it without further incident to our favorite restaurant along the Gulf coast, my seat only sinking a little, and ate again at this award-winning seafood restaurant with great prices, and then found the cheapest hotel we could nearby, getting a nice deal on a resort with a pool, thanks to off-season mid-week rates. I think we might be the only guests.
Unfortunately their taxi rates weren’t as good, and we used up a whole day’s budget to get back to Hua Hin to get to a nice bike shop, where I bought two clamps just in case! Plus picked up some new gloves, since the padding in my current ones is worn completely thin.
So we’re back in action now, but the next three days have a ton of rain in the forecast, so we may be staying still anyway. Our plan is to see how the rain looks in the morning and decide if we’re rolling out or beach bumming. I’m secretly hoping for sitting on the patio watching the rain fall for 3 days in a row, even though I would love to be out cycling as well.
We’ve got just over three weeks to cover 600km more to Phuket, which we could cover in 5 days if we had to, but more like 8 days comfortably. So even with the rain, we’re still on schedule. Time to relax.
