We got up early, banged out a quick 50 kilometers to the Chomphum pier in the morning, and caught the 1PM fast boat to Koh Tao. That’s about all I’ll be writing today, as I am taking my rest day pretty seriously.

We have a lovely room on Sairee Beach at a little resort with a pool, and I’m planning to eat, drink and relax so hard I may melt into the woodwork. We even found multiple vegetarian restaurants—no Seven Eleven noodles today. See you again in (at least) 24 hours. Thanks for your understanding, and for anyone on Facebook, i.e. 99% of the world, today is a great day to donate to this nonprofit or any other that inspires you to give. My understanding is that Facebook will be matching all donations today, Tuesday, November 27th. Thanks again, all the love.
Julia

Biking Toward Empowerment

 

Language is the liquid that we’re all dissolved in
Great for solving problems
After it creates a problem

I was listening to these Modest Mouse lyrics from “Blame it on the Tetons” yesterday as I pedaled along Route 4 somewhere around Namtok Huai Yang National Park. The song was part of a playlist I made in June or July for my Sunday nights bartending at the Narragansett Inn on Block Island, Rhode Island. My main job was at another restaurant owned by the same family, and that establishment was a well-oiled machine that could churn out a thousand meals at lunch alone on a summer day.
The Narragansett was different. A beautiful, classic old wooden bar built into a turn-of-the-century Victorian inn, it was the kind of bar that calls to mind another era. Almost never packed or rowdy, it was a bar where one could nurse a Dark and Stormy or a pint of beer for a full hour and the bartender wouldn’t mind a bit; indeed, she’d be pleased to have the time to converse and get to know the regular patrons.
It was a bar where the sunsets lingered for what seemed like hours, the light filtering in turning opalescent as the boats in the harbor of Great Salt Pond caught the last smoldering embers of the setting sun. If it hadn’t been my place of employment, it would have been the kind of bar I’d have happily patronized on a regular basis.
Apart from the night of respite it provided from the controlled chaos that was my main gig, my favorite part of bartending on Sunday nights at the Narragansett was that I could play my own music. I may have mentioned already (in fact I’m certain I have) that curating evocative playlists is something I really enjoy doing. Music has shaped who I am in so many ways, and a good playlist can take me down so many roads paved in memories and emotions.

The Modest Mouse song was part of an eight-hour, 126-song compilation I made for the Narragansett called “Sunday Cruisin'”. I put it on yesterday because it was Sunday, and, well, I was cruising.
I’ve always been struck by those lyrics, the words creating an image in my mind of humans floating in a sea of words, words in every language—words of kindness and anger, words of reconciliation and misunderstanding and distrust and empathy and love.
One of the little heartbreaks I’ve always experienced when I travel is the impossibility of conveying anything beyond the most basic expressions of greeting, appreciation or humor without a common language. Language is as important to me as music, and both can be vessels to carry the most precious and enigmatic of gifts—the sensation when a song or a poem or a piece of literature moves you so much it’s like your heart shatters, but in a way that also feels good.
I rode 100 miles today, past gilded temples protected by golden elephants, past thousands of coconut trees, up hills that formed a constant undulating pathway; one never ended before the next began.

I picked up “Sunday Cruisin'” where it left off yesterday (although it’s now Monday), and David Bowie’s “Space Oddity” was the perfect start. The list meanders through a few Beatles songs, some Bob Marley, Bob Dylan, Lauryn Hill, more Bowie—the kind of music I’d like to hear in a bar, or maybe fall in love to. Or both.
The playlist wraps up with three Susan Tedeschi songs, Lorde’s “Royals” and Ray Charles’s “Georgia on My Mind”. This seemed like such an appropriate progression to end the sixteenth day of my bike ride for women’s empowerment, each in its own way representing the brilliance, the anguish, the consummate strength and power and spectacular, mind-blowing love of which women are capable. If “language is the liquid that we’re all dissolved in” it’s time to listen to every word, every voice, even the voices so distant or soft they’re nearly swept away in the tide.
Incidentally, this summer was the last season for the bar at the Narragansett Inn. Dinners will no longer be served there, and Dark and Stormys won’t sit collecting condensation as the sun sinks down over the harbor. Still, I like to think in my playlists it lives on.

To contribute to women’s voices being heard, soft or otherwise:

Biking Toward Empowerment

Well, we didn’t take a rest day. We rode 131 kilometers south instead. But we made a plan to take a rest day, and we even booked a ferry and a hotel for said rest day.

Now we just have one more long day tomorrow and a half day the following morning to complete the 200 km to Chumphon, where we will catch the 1PM fast boat to Koh Tao on Tuesday afternoon. To say I’m kind of looking forward to it would be an understatement akin to “the ocean is kind of big” or “haggis is kind of gross”.

Backtracking a moment, part of the reason we decided against taking a break in Cha-am was the mediocrity of the beach itself coupled with the almost complete unavailability of vegetarian food. For a seafood lover it’s an absolute dream, with huge fresh calamari and lobster sizzling on every grill, but there was nary a cube of tofu in sight.

We ended up having a half annoying, half comical experience at dinner when we tried to order the red pork curry with just vegetables. The German owner of the restaurant came out to talk to us upon hearing there were vegetarian Westerners looking for something without meat, and he insisted on cooking our dinner himself.
This was nice in theory, but we really wanted Thai food, and what we ended up receiving was two identical plates of sautéed vegetables and potatoes topped with overcooked eggs with some plain spaghetti and a random side of beet. It wasn’t particularly good and the bill was three times as much as we normally pay for dinner. This might sound minor or petty, but when you are cycling eight hours a day food becomes really, really important. Bad food or not enough of it or both just breaks your heart when you’re that excited about your meal after so many hours of calorie burning.
We picked a bay called Ao Manao on the map last night because it looked like it had a pretty beach and it was exactly 130 kilometers south of Cha-am. It turned out to be a private beach run by the Thai military. Foreigners are allowed in, so we cycled in and had a look around, but though the beach itself was gorgeous there wasn’t any budget accommodation and there were only a couple of seafood restaurants.

We turned back to the equally lovely Prachuap Beach a couple of kilometers back north and found a nice guesthouse a two-minute walk from the sea.

It also turned out to be a two-minute walk from a little restaurant where a very nice Thai lady agreed to cook us her red pork curry with only vegetables, and she even thoughtfully offered tofu instead. With happy bellies filled with curry and spring rolls we now drift off to the crooning of Thai karaoke being sung in the streets. It’s sometimes overwhelming, and it’s often off-key, but with a good meal, a comfortable bed, and the sea a block away, this evening it seems the sweetest of lullabies.

To make a contribution to our mission toward women’s empowerment:

Biking Toward Empowerment

I’ve dreamed of this day for weeks. I’ve pictured the way the sand would appear at the highway’s edge miles before the actual water, spilling over, the way the beach always greedily extends its salty fingers as far as they can stretch into the rest of the world.
I knew the way the air would smell, and the aquarium-lined restaurants that would appear along each side of the road, crustaceans scrambling over one another in the endless murky tanks.
I’ve seen the kitschy souvenir stands in my mind filled with tie-dyed sarongs, neon-colored inner tubes and shell jewelry. Even the tacky tourist bars lined with overweight farangs hoping to get lucky with the one Thai bar girl that truly loves him for who he is—even this, is part of what forms the beach scene in this part of the world.
Kitschy souvenirs and all, I love the beach in Southeast Asia, and I’ve been looking forward with baited breath to the day we would set eyes on the blue vastness of the Gulf of Thailand. Today, as you may have guessed, was that day.

 

As we rolled closer and closer to the sea, our legs must have sensed how close they were to floating in salt water and lazing on soft sand, because our pedal stroke increased by something drastic and we covered 34 kilometers in one hour this afternoon. Despite getting a late start waiting for our laundry to dry (Oh yeah, we did laundry! Like, in an actual washing machine!) we pedaled the 129 kilometers between Samut Sakhon and Cha-am Beach in record time. We even checked into our hotel well before sunset and laid around relaxing as smugly as one can relax, patting ourselves on the back for our good decisions and athletic prowess. I even shaved my legs.
When I calculated our totals including today, the day that completes a two-week stint on the road, I realized we hit another important milestone. We’ve cycled over 1,000 miles, 1,014.7, to be exact, or the more impressive sounding 1,633 kilometers. This is also half of the total distance of the whole Vietnam to Singapore route, so…drumroll please…we’re halfway there. This fills me with so many emotions, from pride to shock to more pride to a certain sadness at the finite entity a trip like this is by definition. When we pedal into Singapore, that’s it, we’ll eat some good street food, get on an airplane, and “real” life will begin again. Still, over 1,000 miles when neither of us had ever embarked on a multi-day cycling trip ever—and the beach, our long lost friend, is at our doorstep.
We watch the one-day-waning moon, still heavy and round and metallic, rise over the gulf, unfurling a silver ribbon on the water’s surface leading to the sand. We stare at the water; we hardly ever hold hands but we’re hand in hand now. We might even consider taking our first rest day tomorrow. Maybe.

Today. Oh, today, today, today, today. It’s 10:45PM and we just checked into our room fifty minutes ago. At that moment  we managed to wrench straight our gnarled and cramping limbs into some semblance of a normal human walking position (I think I was waddling as a result of about eleven hours on a bike seat) and Frankenstein it into the building.
We’ve ridden over 150 kilometers, a hair under 100 miles, and I can’t specifically recall a time I’ve felt a greater degree of both mental and physical fatigue as I do at this moment. When we had already ridden about 135 kilometers into Samut Sakhon from Nong Khae, just south of Saraburi, we began the ill-fated search for accommodation.
Now, to be fair to both Google maps and the fine country of Thailand itself, the little bed icons that symbolize accommodation, appearing in pink when one scrolls in tight on a neighborhood, had thus far failed us on only one occasion. Even if the room was no more than a bed and a toilet, there’d pretty much always been an actual bed where Google helpfully suggested one would appear. Well, whomever the faceless IT figure-outer people behind Google maps’ accommodation are, they may need to make a reconnaissance mission down to Samut Sakhon and update the ol’ database, because not a goshdarned single pink bed icon in a twenty mile radius panned out to be a hotel of any kind.

Again and again we pedaled away in the dark from a dead end clue from GM, like a dismal scavenger hunt that revealed no treasures, only locked doors and dark windows. We bickered amongst ourselves. I fell in a ditch again, but this one was filled with mud so I didn’t get hurt. Just very, very muddy.

We carried the bikes up narrow cramped stairs to a highway overpass. I was irritated at Dave and insisted on carrying my own bike, even though I could barely walk and nearly fell down the stairs. I still feel I won.
Around 9PM we stopped at Seven Eleven  (of course), bought noodles and chips and beer, and Dave booked a nearby room. An expensive night for us at $19USD, but I’ve probably never been so grateful in my entire life for a bed. Not just a promising pink bed symbol on a map, but an actual, almost soft, clean-sheeted bed. I’ll be utilizing that now.

A belated Happy Thanksgiving to all of my friends and family in the USA, and if anyone feels like giving to support Women’s Empowerment, you know what to do.

Biking Toward Empowerment

I came to a realization yesterday that’s been a true game changer as far as enjoyment even of the long, hot monotonous stretches. That epiphany came from the recollection that I have headphones and a phone loaded with hundreds and hundreds of songs.
Now, don’t get me wrong, it’s not that the idea of listening to music simply hadn’t occurred to me at all, but early on in the ride I felt safety in traffic and being able to easily communicate with my cycling partner took precedence. Those precautions have been overruled as of late by the pressing, almost desparate need for some mental stimulation.
So the headphones came out, and with them the soul-massaging joy with which every true music lover is acquainted.
I put on this playlist I made this past summer called “Happy Day”. I didn’t really remember what was on it, but it seemed a fine enough theme for today’s ride.
Inexplicably, the playlist, consisting of 53 songs of absolutely no discernible connection except that I like them all enough to download them, seemed to go along with the sections of my ride as a good soundtrack should complement a film.
I put the headphones on this morning, to be perfectly transparent, because I wasn’t having such a “Happy Day”. My left knee had started bothering me, and I was afraid I knew the diagnosis.
Two winters ago when I was living in Aspen, Colorado, the same injury had plagued me when I was clumsily learning to snowboard. I was also running and climbing regularly at the time, and I came to find out that it was an overuse injury common in athletes known as “water on the knee”. That winter my knee swelled up to the size of a melon and I could hardly walk for several weeks; now the same symptoms were beginning to materialize and I wasn’t feeling good about it. I began compensating with my right knee, but this also proved problematic as that was the knee I’d ripped open a few days prior. I’m a decent outside-the-box thinker, but I couldn’t come up with a way to ride my bike without bending either knee, so I just rode through the pain.
A couple of hours into the morning, however, I began pedaling from a dead stop using my left knee first, and I actually cried out loud from the searing pain. It was at this point that I popped a 500 milligram ibuprofen and put in the headphones. I needed comfort and distraction, and I needed them now.
There was a long hill not long after I hit play on “Happy Day”, one of those incredibly annoying neverending hills that barely registers as an incline to the naked eye yet leaves one red-faced and huffing and puffing. That kind always makes me wonder if passing motorists think I may be having a heart attack, gasping away while the terrain looks hardly elevated. A quick glance back at Dave, pouring rivulets of sweat as well, assured me that it was indeed a hill.
The song that came on as I battled this sweat fest of an incline was none other than “Let’s Go Crazy” by, of course, the late great Prince. Holy crap, what a solid motivational song. Like I said, this hill was truly annoying as hell, but it was clearly no match for me and Prince. I heard him sing-
Are we gonna let the elevator
Bring us down, oh, no let’s go
Let’s go crazy, let’s get nuts
-and obviously I knew the “elevator” to which he was referring was the hill. And the answer, sweet Prince, is that nope, we weren’t.
A little later as I was getting down about my knee again (and the heat, the ever present smoldering heat) this Michael Franti song came on that absolutely never, ever fails to make me grin. This song actually happens to be his biggest hit, and before other fans get all snooty I’ll mention that I have probably listened to every single song Michael Franti has ever written, seen him live at least four times, and enjoy lots of his lesser known songs. But sometimes songs get popular for a reason, and in my opinion “Say Hey (I Love You)” is one of those songs. It’s just beautiful and happy and joyous and sweet. And it makes me feel good, god damn it, and it came on in a crucial moment where I really needed a lift.
Later on in the afternoon, as the ride mellowed out and the heat began to recede and the sun lazily drifted down, Van Morrison’s “Tupelo Honey” and Otis Redding’s “These Arms of Mine” were the heartwrenching soulful slow jams so apropos of winding down a sweltering afternoon. And when song #53 came on, Mason Jennings’s half touching, half facetious folk ballad “Your New Man”, I knew I had to let that song, always a crowd pleaser, close the day.

I’m not sure what tomorrow will hold, but luckily I spent much of my free time this past summer compiling dozens of agonizingly hand-picked playlists, the various moods and nuances of which only my utmost subconscious is privy. They just make me feel good, god damn it.

To support our cause, always most appreciated: Biking Toward Empowerment

Today’s stats: 135 km, 84 miles

Current location, 85 km to Bangkok:

I probably should have mentioned yesterday that we surpassed the one-third point of our journey’s completion, but it only occurred to me just now as I was crunching some numbers. As of today we have cycled 1214 kilometers (754 miles) through three countries. In case anyone is interested in what that looks like, it happens to be the distance between the middle of the state I grew up in, Massachusetts, to the middle of Dave’s home state of North Carolina. It’s almost the exact distance between Melbourne, Australia and Port Macquarie, and for the European contingent, it turns out to be the distance from the northernmost tip of France down to Barcelona. We haven’t hit the mileage I had hoped to average, but there were a few things I wasn’t anticipating or underestimated, like the mountains of northern Laos and the inescapable lethargy brought on by extreme heat.

The map above shows our progress thus far. The green flags are the way I mapped our route as I was planning the trip, and we’ve stuck roughly to that plan as we’ve made our way south. The blue dot and the “D” (for Dave, we keep an open location sharing when we part ways) are our current location on the shore of Lamtakhong Dam in Nakhon Ratchasima.

As you can see, the route sort of peters out somewhere in the middle of Thailand, so that’s something I’ll have to sort out sooner or later (sooner would probably be best). I’d been planning on taking the east coast of both Thailand and Malaysia (I’ve seen a lot of the west coast of both countries, and the distance was also slightly shorter), but now I’m having second thoughts.
We’ve had word from our jobs that we start next month that they don’t mind if we take an extra week or so. This is excellent news for several reasons, the first being that we really, really, really need to do some laundry. And not the wash-it-in-the-sink-with-a-bar-of-soap-and hang-it-on-the-railing-and-wear-it-again-while-still-damp-the-next-day type of “laundry” we’ve been doing for a few weeks. We need some industrial-strength products and some boiling hot water before our clothing could be considered anything close to sanitary.
The more exciting part of having extra time is that we may yet have an opportunity to indulge in a rest day or two in the next few weeks, and that opens the navigational realms of possibilities even further. Our Dutch friends are flying into Phuket tomorrow, so if we can figure out a way to meet up with them somewhere on the west coast that might drive us in that direction. But…I’ve also been wanting to check out Ko Tao for years. In order to stay on schedule we still won’t have much extra time, but the thought of taking one single day without pedaling is sort of alluring at this point.
More importantly than any of the other random statistics I listed above, I just surpassed $1500 raised for the Asia Foundation’s Women’s Empowerment Fund. This works out to 49,416 Thai baht,  12,817,623 Laotian kip, and a very respectable 35,005,668 Vietnamese dong. For everyone who has contributed, I am so incredibly grateful. I’m proud of the 1214 kilometers, but these are the numbers that really matter. My goal is to hit $2,000 by December 1st, so anyone reading, please share away.
So much love.

Biking Toward Empowerment

In closing, here’s a picture of me in the rad feminist hat my best friend Deb designed. It’s gotten a little sunbleached over the last few weeks, but I think it’s appropriate headwear to spearhead my ride.

Every day on the road has its highlights, and every day has its own tribulations. The heat and the sun are constants, so we deal with them as best we can and seek shady solace when they prove overwhelming.
Monotony is a different beast. It can get inside your head and play tricks that make minutes seem like hours and a few miles feel like twenty. When the scenery is picturesque and interesting and varied, of course, the opposite effect occurs. The world is something beautiful and mesmerizing, and you’re just gliding through it, takin’ it all in.
Today was not one of those days. Although I have never cycled through the state of Kansas on a hot summer day, I would imagine it to consist of a similar unstimulating topography and monochromatic landscape as Highway 207 in eastern Thailand, albeit with worse food and people who voted for Trump.
Hour upon hour creep by, the blazing hot and dusty highway left behind me only to appear in duplicate, again and again, in front of me. I sing weird and random songs to myself like “Spooky”, by Classics IV (I Googled the artist just now). You know the one:
Love is kinda crazy with a spooky little girl like you…
If you don’t, perhaps you should.
Oddly, I also find the theme song from childhood favorite Punky Brewster stuck in my head:
Every…time…you…turn around
Baddum bump bum
Your spirits lifting me right off the ground
Standing there…
Every…time…you…turn around…
You get the idea.
We begin to take breaks with a little more frequency than usual, because the hottest part of the day happens to coincide with some of the dullest stretches of desolate highway, and the combination can get disheartening.
And then I do look around, after staring at the asphalt for ages, and notice the road workers crouched on the fresh, hot black  tarmac, pouring concrete by hand. The heat rises in a visible shimmer hovering around them like a low-hanging fog. Their arms and legs and faces are covered to shield them from the heat and sun, but all the clothing must be stifling as well. They are mostly men, but there are women there too, and I’m reminded of the project I should be focusing on instead of mentally whining about my own temporary discomfiture which, additionally, I chose for myself. I decide to focus on being less of a privileged asshole as much as possible, and as we complete the last twenty kilometers today I sing along out loud to “Spooky”, get mentally back on track, and cap off the evening with a true score: a bungalow in Non Daeng decorated in full Playboy regalia. Things were clearly taking a turn for the better.

Spooky lyrics © Sony/ATV Music Publishing LLC, The Bicycle Music Company

To support our cause:

Biking Toward Empowerment

Mom and Ralph, (my two readers), I apologize for yesterday. It was a long and tumultuous day of which the low point was me skidding off the road and ripping open a few sections of flesh (as well as my very expensive and nearly irreplaceable at this point bicycle shorts). The high point occurred when an incredibly kind stranger loaded our bikes into his truck and drove us to a tiny hotel well after dark. Sadly, I made some sort of error saving my post on WordPress, and hours of work into which I had poured heart and soul were absorbed into the Internet netherworld.

Here are a few photos that didn’t make it up yesterday:

Today, as most days do, began anew. After the usual morning routine involving prolific sunscreen and Pawpaw application (a magical Australian ointment that cures everything but diabetes) we departed from the village of Khao Yong just outside Phu Pha Yol National Park.
Our first goal was Roi Et, a city almost exactly 100 km from Khao Yong. Our usual plan is to complete the first 100 kilometers, assess the situation, and decide how much further we can make on the given day.
The road today was flat as a pancake, a welcome respite to the steep hills we’d hit around sunset last night in Phu Pha Yol. The morning cycling was easy as the temperature was still nearly tolerable, and a few patches of shade were scattered here and there along the highway’s edge like scraps left for a dog that we gobbled up eagerly.
We took our lunch break around noon (I hate to admit this in a country boasting one of the finest cuisines in the world) with vegetarian bao and noodles from Seven Eleven. They’re just so damn convenient and their air conditioning is always on arctic blast, and they’re also so dependably there. On every corner. Of every town. In the entire country.
It was right after we shared an ice cream bar and got back on the road that the very fires of Dante’s inferno began to emanate from the sun, the sky, the road, even the air itself. Although I wasn’t very exerted, each breath I released seemed to have been stoked from a furnace within my lungs. Within fifteen minutes I felt like every molecule in my body had been drained of moisture.
Barely able to swallow, I pulled over in the shade and chugged another liter of water, my fifth thus far. What I’m trying to say is: it was hot. 94° in the shade, to be precise, and there wasn’t a speck of that on the road for the next forty miles. I found myself trying to savor the millisecond of relief when I passed under the six inch shadow of a lamp post, and if anyone is wondering how relieving that could possibly be, the answer is really not at all.
The oppressive heat slowed us down a little because of frequent hydration and Seven Eleven breaks, but we were still averaging well over 20 km per hour and rolled into Roi Et around 3:45PM. There are some absolutely beautiful temple complexes there as well as Thailand’s tallest Buddha image in a monastery called Wat Buraphaphiram.

 

We had a look around the town, stopped for a beverage at a random expat bar where the eccentric American owner circled around our bikes again and again, marveling at their “simplicity”.
We managed another 44 km to our current location, a small town that appears to be called Wapi Pathum. We’re having a  $15 “splurge” night in a really pretty little bungalow at Nayai Resort just north of town.  We completed today with a total count of 144 kilometers, just about 90 miles, which on mountain bikes in the heat of a thousand suns isn’t a shabby total.

To support our cause: Biking Toward Empowerment

I seriously can’t believe that entire post got deleted. I frantically tried to recover, but it seems it’s gone forever. The main points are I fell in a ditch and kind of hurt myself, still rode another 135 kilometers, and nice Thai strangers helped us. I’ll write again tomorrow. In Word. And cut and paste. Ouch.