Day 36 – Kanchanaburi to Suphan Buri
Riding downhill with a tailwind and on fresh legs is always fun, I doubt that anyone has ever complained about it. Today we had nothing to complain about. We rode 100kms in just over 4 hours, cruising along at 24 km/hour for most of the morning… Nothing about the riding felt fast, it was just that all of the elements seemed to be in our favour, making it an enjoyable fast ride with no extra effort.
This feeling possibly explains the cycling we did 2 days earlier into Kanchanaburi, with 3 day old legs, headwind gusts, and an ever so slight uphill resulting in an 18 km/hour hard day of riding. Amazing how just by adding a few little factors your journey becomes 33% slower. Today we cycled for 5 hours. If all the elements had been against us today it would have been an extra 1.5 hours on the bike… that sounds a lot more painful.
So today was a great ride. The road was not that amazing from Kanchanaburi to U Thong, but the traffic was light and the shoulder wide, except for a few areas of construction. We cycled the final 10 kms or so into Suphan Buri on an old canal road no longer used by anyone, mostly because it was run down. But, to our luck 50% of it had been resurfaced in the past couple of weeks and it looked like they will eventually be redoing it all in the near future. It will be a nice road to ride if the traffic does not pick up.
We had another cyclist guide today. I’m going with a ‘pilot’, who will guide us around to all the bicycle shops, the post office, the Tourism Authority of Thailand office, and also help us find a hotel for the night. These guys make life so much easier when pulling into an unknown town. Today, Jack, a teacher at the local sports university, and 3 very friendly students showed us around. I really want to thank them more but don’t know how to.
We visited a couple of bicycle shops, Bike Solution and Suphan Bike, both friendly and both in the ‘pro’ range. It’s amazing that all these towns have a few decent bicycle shops. The problem is they are hard to find without local knowledge. That is one of the reasons we collect GPS locations and business cards from as many as possible, so that they can be added to the nationwide index of bicycle shops at http://BicycleThailand.com
We’ve visited Suphan Buri before, in 2010 with the Tour de Thailand. The town centre itself does not have a lot to see but does have a sky observation tower and some crazy giant Chinese dragon thing that are worth a visit.
Today was 118kms, tomorrow will most likely be the same. It looks like the locals will all be at a Cycling Race 20kms outside of Nakhon Pathom tomorrow so we’ll have no ‘pilot’ with us to make our trip super-easy. Luckily we’ve got Natt, and while she might not be able to read maps she does know how to talk to people and that usually helps us find our destinations. Love you Natt!
