Day 134 – We’ve been rolling faster in Nakhon Sawan
The last couple of days we’ve been cycling over 24 km/hour, but the day have only been short 60-70kms. The bicycle is working find and we’re obviously just that little bit stronger for climbing the hills.
Kampaenh Phet and Nakhon Sawan don’t really seam to be outstanding cities, they’re full of chinese shophouses, busy, industrial. And even thou they are on the ping river they don’t really take advantage of it’s peacefulness like Tak. I was hoping some of these city closer to Bangkok on the river would be as nice, but no.
Nakhon Sawan is the location that the Nan river ans the Ping river combine and are renamed into the Chaophraya river that flow thru Bangkok and into the golf of Thailand. In all 5 river join up to make the Chaophraya and it has one distributary (cool, didn’t even know what that was until I did some research).
Nan river has a dam in Uttaradit, Ping river has has a dam in Tak and Pa Sai river in Lopburi these all form part of the Chaophraya and it has been said that mismanagement of of water release in 2011 was partly to blame for the flooding in the central plains and Bangkok, but who really knows.
So it looks like the Yom river is the only one that could be reach by boat from the Gulf of Thailand and take you up to Phayao and/or Nan, but everything else has a large wall stopping you. Maybe next adventure is to kayak from the top to the bottom? lol.
Anyway it’s been interesting to see the rivers change, we passed the start of thew Ping river above Chiang Mai and we’re see the end of it today. Now we’ll get to hopefully enjoy some of the Chaophraya and maybe a nice river side town, but I think the biggest problem is they’re all trying to stop flooding and high walls are the order of the day.
Until today highway 1 has been kind of low on traffic and decent, but this afternoon the traffic really picked up and I’m think we’ve just this the start of clusters of cities close to Bangkok that supply this countries capital will all the crap it needs to keep growing and becoming more of mess than it already is.
I guess we’ll see over the next week how this traffic all pans out, I’m worried the last 500 kms will just be us and trucks, which is total contrast to a couple of weeks ago.
I am looking forward to settle down to tasks at hand in Bangkok and planning with Natt for Your Thai Guide.