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Otres beach near Sihanoukville, on the southern coast of Cambodia is pretty close to an idyllic desert island resort – bamboo beach huts, quirky beach bars, white sand, sun and so on, but for the closest thing I’ve seen to the location and vibe of the film The Beach, you can’t get much better than Koh Ta Kiev. It’s a mostly uninhabited island where there are a couple of hippy communes running beach bars with accommodation huts although there’s no electricity or running water and the cost of a drink is twice that on the mainland, but then you’re paying for the location. The place is staffed by people who are mostly more interested in cannabis than customer service, but hey, what do you expect to find on a desert island? It’s either going to be hippies listening to Bob Marley or the latest James Bond villain! Possibly the most frustrating part of the excursion was being on a long tail boat with a few other tourists (no that’s not the annoying bit), we stopped to do some snorkelling and line fishing over the side of the boat. Everyone else managed to catch a fish except me, my fish were far too clever and managed to eat the bait off my hook without getting hooked … very frustrating, but I consoled myself with the fact that I’m not depleting the local fish stocks unnecessarily! Back on the mainland I met up with Critical Dave again who is mooching around Cambodia trying to work out how to get into Vietnam without an entry permit for his bike. Dave had hooked up with two more motorbike overlanders; Norm and Maggie with Northern Irish accents but living in Hertfordshire! Well, I say they’re living in Hertfordshire but they’ve been on the road for ages with no immediate plans to return and they’re still heading away from the UK. I’m quite jealous, travelling together as a couple on two bikes gives you more impetus to just keep going and see where you get to. Maybe, one day …
My front tyre is serious cause for concern now, it’s got almost no sign that there was ever any tread on it, and it’s starting to wear down the main body of the tyre, not long ‘til the steel belt starts showing, it’s a good thing I’m less than 700km from Bangkok, it’s a bad thing that the KTM service centre doesn’t have my tyre size in stock, and probably another three weeks until they get one. With stress level rising again I ask them about other tyre dealers in the city. There must be someone who’s got a 90/90-21 tyre, surely? I could hug the helpful service manager at the KTM service centre in Bangkok, he sensed my stress and phoned round all the tyre dealers in Bangkok until he found a great little shop called ShowPow who had a whole selection from full-on knobbly off-roaders to street tyres. I remind myself of the advice I gave a bunch of young KTM riders who I bumped into six months ago in the hills of Tamil Nadu in India … “always make sure you’ve got decent tyres; they’re the only thing holding you to the road”. Time to adhere to my own advice and get some fresh rubber to keep me shiny side up. You cannot imagine the feeling of relief when you take a totally shot tyre off and put a nice new grippy hoop on your front wheel. The bike instantly felt more confident and better balanced, the handlebars stopped wobbling in corners and I no longer felt that I was going to slide into the ditch if I took a bend with a puddle.
The further through Thailand I travel the more secure I feel. The stress of tyre failure has gone, as has the stress of bad / non-existent roads or flooded roads or roads without bridges or petrol stations or meeting death-wishing truck drivers. After Bangkok I took a recommendation from Kasia to go to the Khao Sok national park on the way South through Thailand. Great recommendation; riding up to the Khao Sok national park with lush green vegetation and near-perfect road surfaces is like being back in Western Europe, whether the UK are part of it or not. Don’t get me started on that ridiculous debate, I’ll be here for hours! In Khao Sok I left the bike at a friendly guesthouse and booked an overnight stay on a floating bungalow on the Cheow Lan lake. The Cheow Lan lake is a manmade dammed reservoir stretching 165 square kilometres through the national park, filled with amazingly warm but ridiculously deep fresh water. It looks for all the world like a Scottish loch, especially on the day I arrived which had black storm clouds brewing overhead, but Scottish lochs tend to be quite cold, whilst this lake is at bathwater temperature, even during the sudden Monsoon storm where the rain was so hard and heavy it bounced off the surface of the lake. Over dinner on the floating restaurant, just down the gangplank from my floating bungalow I am struck by the irony that my crazy home nation has just voted to remove itself from Europe whilst I sit here with a selection of Dutch, German, French, Spanish and Belgian travellers whose only common Lingua Franca is English, and who all think that the British have gone mad. I’m inclined to agree, I like being part of this little European community on a lake in Thailand.
Three hours south of Khao Sok the famous part of the Thai Southern peninsular starts; Phuket, Krabi, Phi Phi Islands and the like. It really feels like I’m on holiday now, my only stress is figuring out how to book the bike on an air-freight out of Kuala Lumpur and whether I can get it in and out of Singapore in a few weeks’ time. Whilst in Krabi I take another fantastic recommendation from Kasia, who’s stuck back in London, that is to do a SCUBA diving course. The first and only time I’ve been diving in the past was not a good experience, I ran out of air in the Irish sea and was not fully briefed on the procedure! So with some trepidation I signed up to do the Open Water PADI course having spent not an inconsiderable amount of time researching a decent dive school in Krabi. The Kon-Tiki dive school, run by some British and Swedish guys is, thankfully, a super-professional, super-helpful and totally confidence-inspiring outfit. All my previously found fears and misconceptions have been alleviated and I am now a fully-fledged convert to deep sea diving, and a certified Open Water Diver; how cool! And how come I always manage to pick some of the most expensive and inaccessible of pursuits … skiing, diving, motorbike travelling … crazy fool! Over the last couple of days I’ve seen the underwater world for real: Blue Sea Star and Crown of Thorns Starfish; Black Diamema Sea Urchins; various Sea Cucumbers; a Peacock Mantis Shrimp (which has the fastest, most powerful claw punch in the world), schools of Damsel fish and Yellowback Fusiliers; some Bannerfish; Trumpetfish; Tigertail Seahorses and an aggressively territorial little Tomato Clownfish!
Now I’m sitting in another idyllic beachside hostel bar looking at the Andaman sea on the island of Ko Lanta off the West coast of Thailand, it being low season I have the bar and most of the beach to myself and I’ve just met a crazy Thai guy who is supposed to be running this bar but has nothing to do due to the lack of tourists so he’s offered to take me on a guided bike tour of the island tomorrow. He’s got an off-road scramble bike so this is going to be interesting … looks like I’m going to get at least one more crazy adventure on the bike before heading to the relative civilisation of Malaysia.
My front tyre is serious cause for concern now, it’s got almost no sign that there was ever any tread on it, and it’s starting to wear down the main body of the tyre, not long ‘til the steel belt starts showing, it’s a good thing I’m less than 700km from Bangkok, it’s a bad thing that the KTM service centre doesn’t have my tyre size in stock, and probably another three weeks until they get one. With stress level rising again I ask them about other tyre dealers in the city. There must be someone who’s got a 90/90-21 tyre, surely? I could hug the helpful service manager at the KTM service centre in Bangkok, he sensed my stress and phoned round all the tyre dealers in Bangkok until he found a great little shop called ShowPow who had a whole selection from full-on knobbly off-roaders to street tyres. I remind myself of the advice I gave a bunch of young KTM riders who I bumped into six months ago in the hills of Tamil Nadu in India … “always make sure you’ve got decent tyres; they’re the only thing holding you to the road”. Time to adhere to my own advice and get some fresh rubber to keep me shiny side up. You cannot imagine the feeling of relief when you take a totally shot tyre off and put a nice new grippy hoop on your front wheel. The bike instantly felt more confident and better balanced, the handlebars stopped wobbling in corners and I no longer felt that I was going to slide into the ditch if I took a bend with a puddle.
The further through Thailand I travel the more secure I feel. The stress of tyre failure has gone, as has the stress of bad / non-existent roads or flooded roads or roads without bridges or petrol stations or meeting death-wishing truck drivers. After Bangkok I took a recommendation from Kasia to go to the Khao Sok national park on the way South through Thailand. Great recommendation; riding up to the Khao Sok national park with lush green vegetation and near-perfect road surfaces is like being back in Western Europe, whether the UK are part of it or not. Don’t get me started on that ridiculous debate, I’ll be here for hours! In Khao Sok I left the bike at a friendly guesthouse and booked an overnight stay on a floating bungalow on the Cheow Lan lake. The Cheow Lan lake is a manmade dammed reservoir stretching 165 square kilometres through the national park, filled with amazingly warm but ridiculously deep fresh water. It looks for all the world like a Scottish loch, especially on the day I arrived which had black storm clouds brewing overhead, but Scottish lochs tend to be quite cold, whilst this lake is at bathwater temperature, even during the sudden Monsoon storm where the rain was so hard and heavy it bounced off the surface of the lake. Over dinner on the floating restaurant, just down the gangplank from my floating bungalow I am struck by the irony that my crazy home nation has just voted to remove itself from Europe whilst I sit here with a selection of Dutch, German, French, Spanish and Belgian travellers whose only common Lingua Franca is English, and who all think that the British have gone mad. I’m inclined to agree, I like being part of this little European community on a lake in Thailand.
Three hours south of Khao Sok the famous part of the Thai Southern peninsular starts; Phuket, Krabi, Phi Phi Islands and the like. It really feels like I’m on holiday now, my only stress is figuring out how to book the bike on an air-freight out of Kuala Lumpur and whether I can get it in and out of Singapore in a few weeks’ time. Whilst in Krabi I take another fantastic recommendation from Kasia, who’s stuck back in London, that is to do a SCUBA diving course. The first and only time I’ve been diving in the past was not a good experience, I ran out of air in the Irish sea and was not fully briefed on the procedure! So with some trepidation I signed up to do the Open Water PADI course having spent not an inconsiderable amount of time researching a decent dive school in Krabi. The Kon-Tiki dive school, run by some British and Swedish guys is, thankfully, a super-professional, super-helpful and totally confidence-inspiring outfit. All my previously found fears and misconceptions have been alleviated and I am now a fully-fledged convert to deep sea diving, and a certified Open Water Diver; how cool! And how come I always manage to pick some of the most expensive and inaccessible of pursuits … skiing, diving, motorbike travelling … crazy fool! Over the last couple of days I’ve seen the underwater world for real: Blue Sea Star and Crown of Thorns Starfish; Black Diamema Sea Urchins; various Sea Cucumbers; a Peacock Mantis Shrimp (which has the fastest, most powerful claw punch in the world), schools of Damsel fish and Yellowback Fusiliers; some Bannerfish; Trumpetfish; Tigertail Seahorses and an aggressively territorial little Tomato Clownfish!
Now I’m sitting in another idyllic beachside hostel bar looking at the Andaman sea on the island of Ko Lanta off the West coast of Thailand, it being low season I have the bar and most of the beach to myself and I’ve just met a crazy Thai guy who is supposed to be running this bar but has nothing to do due to the lack of tourists so he’s offered to take me on a guided bike tour of the island tomorrow. He’s got an off-road scramble bike so this is going to be interesting … looks like I’m going to get at least one more crazy adventure on the bike before heading to the relative civilisation of Malaysia.
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