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.