Kayaking (actually, cycling) in Thailand : 2

The Ping, at Hot.

OK, so the kayaking thing is a bust, but I am not just going to sit around at home - not least I have booked a whole bunch of hotels and indeed a train back from Nakorn Sawan, so I need to get there somewhere, and obviously the best alternative I have is to cycle.  First though, I have one room booked that is a pretty long way from Chiang Mai, and also the other side of some very large mountains from the next hotel, booked for four days later.  So, having returned to Chiang Mai via an expensive taxi ride and dumped the boat back at home, I decide to do some extremely lazy travelling, by car.  One day I will do road trips, oh yes... but I am not old enough yet.

Always nice to come here.

Anyway - obviously my destination, Hot (actually pronounced more like 'hort') is of course on the river, more or less, but it is also on the main road from Chiang Mai, which as it turns out takes a very scenic and exciting mountain route.  Hot turns out to be a nice little place, and I find a good restaurant too.  Taking a look at the Ping, I notice it is flowing quite quickly, just as it was away from the resort yesterday (yes, there was a massive weir there too, but I'd have had to get out of the water anyway...).  I wonder if this stage of the kayaking would have worked?  Although, my accommodation, though very pleasant, is three kilometers uphill from the river, not sure I'd have enjoyed that much.  Anyway... it was worth driving here, not least as on the way back I'm able to visit Doi Inthanon, Thailand's highest mountain of course.  Yes, I have done all the things here before, but even so, this is the nicest day I've ever visited the twin Pagodas, and they've laid out a new garden next to the King's too, very nice.  I had not noticed the neutron monitoring station by the summit either...

The bat cave!

Back to Chiang Mai for one night, then I am off on my bike, yet again.  It is a familiar route, over the mountains to Lampang, then down highway 1 to Thoen and on to Tak.  These places remain not terribly exciting... I do at least find a bar in Lampang, but beyond that it is back to, restaurant and then retire to the hotel  / resort.  I am staying at some quite nice places this time, I basically tried to book as near the river as possible, whatever the cost.  So a couple of times I find a wedding ceremony happening, Thai weddings are quite strange - it seems to be a thing to have some kind of comedian keeping up a more or less constant patter, including making very strange, loud noises.  All makes sense to them I am sure.  This trip is I guess slightly different to the first time I took this route, in that I am going the other way - well, it is downhill I suppose!  Also it means I spot things to look at that I didn't notice from the other side of the road - for instance, there is an interesting cave temple a little south of Thoen, not only containing many life size statues of monks, but also a large colony of bats.  With only my phone torch to guide me I get really quite close to them, most cool.

Photos to go with this post can be found here.

Kayaking in Thailand : 1

More travelling!  It has been about time...

My first practice paddle.

Well, I am still in Thailand - given the Covid situation it is hard for me to get to any other country.  I could fly back to the UK, but as it is currently under lockdown and experiencing a second wave of the disease I'm not sure I fancy it much.  And indeed I have responsibilities (wow that sounds weird) - my three hundred plus students are not going to teach themselves next semester.  So, I put my foot down and insisted on a full two week break (I'm not going to miss any classes, but the typically insane school management wanted me to come back after just eleven days to push paper around...).  This means I have time for a little trip, and I want to try something a bit different, namely kayaking.  I have purchased a rather nice inflatable boat, the plan is to travel for five hundred kilometres or so down the river Ping, from Lamphun where my school is to Nakorn Sawan, from which I can get a train back.  What can possibly go wrong?

See, this was the problem.

Well... I haven't been going long when it becomes clear this isn't really going well.  I'd been wanting to do something like this since my little taste of kayaking in New Zealand, as I recall there I moved pretty quickly, and thought that covering as much as eighty kilometres in a day was entirely possible.  So here I have been 'conservative' and planned forty-fifty kilometre days, easy enough, no?  No.  I have taken the boat out for a couple of test runs, the first of which I averaged 5km/h, not helped by having to repeatedly carry the kayak past weirs, the second time I did better, 7km/h or so.  But today I am going even more slowly... I think it is simply that the river has no current to speak of here, there are indeed many weirs, each of them blocking the natural flow of the water so that the river is more like a flat, calm canal.  At five o'clock I am facing yet another weir, the fourth of the day, and I've only managed twenty-eight kilometres, not great.  But, OK, Thailand has a ubiquitous, cheap, online taxi service - I can just get them to take me to the resort I have booked for this evening.  But no, 'all our drivers are busy' they say - or in other words, nobody wants to come and get me from the middle of nowhere.

I phone the resort, and manage to persuade them to send a taxi - they don't believe me when I say where I am, and insist on talking to a Thai person to confirm.  But I get there in the end and there is food and beer, yay.  It is very nice in fact.  But, I don't think I can risk carrying on in the Kayak, sadly.  Four days of my plan involve fifty kilometres each, through a trackless wilderness - all sounds very exciting, but if I only manage thirty kilometers per day I will be in big trouble.  So, change of plan - back to Chiang Mai after lazing around at the resort for another day, and then instead of kayaking, yet more cycling.  Well, at least I know I can do that!

The resort was nice anyway...

Photos to go with this post can be found here.