Bike Race and Koh Chang

So its been a while since I have posted on here. Sorry about that, I'm kind of lazy. Anyway, I guess it was 3 weeks ago I went to a bike race in Rayong, one province over. I didn't do particularly well or anything, fell on the downhill and racing my heavy trail bike cross country when its 100 degrees was a little rough. And I'm out of shape as far as racing bikes up hills goes. Regardless, it was a lot of fun, great to meet people who like to ride bikes and hang out, even if the whole language thing was still an issue sometimes.

Apparently there is pretty big series of bike races. Unfortunately the next one in Phuket I can't make it to because there is a Peace Corps , meeting, but I plan on trying to go to several of these races. The Rayong Mountain Bike club has offered to give me rides so why not?

Oh and I never ever thought I would be doing bike races during Peace Corps. I suppose Thailand is far different now than in 1962 when Peace Corps first went there


Last weekend I headed over to Koh Chang, the second biggest island of Thailand to hang out with some friends. Lots of rain kept us from backpacking like we had planned, but it did make the waterfalls particularly pretty. The beach was also beautiful, white sand and very clear water.














This is me with Melissa and Kale, who live up in Surin in Eissan (the north east section of Thailand.) There was some excellent swimming here, just jumping in at the bottom of the waterfall and letting the current carry us down. Fortunately we got there early enough before ridiculous amounts of tourists started showing up.






So the last day Kale and Melissa had already left since they have a longer trip back to site. We had been trying to find trails that trekking companies on Koh Chang guide on. This was way harder than we thought, and it turns out they keep the trails secret so you have to pay them to take you.

Looking at their brochure, I realized that from white sand beach I could see one of the mountains they hiked up. So, I figured if I could see it, I could probably hike there. I started out by walking along the road through town until I found a creek going under the road. So I climbed over the bridge into the creek, gathering some strange looks from other people around, and proceeded to hike up the creek. It started out a trash filled wash, but after maybe half a mile the trash was gone and it began to turn into a series of beautiful waterfalls and pools that I would swim/wade through and climb up. After maybe 15 or more falls this died out and I began to bushwack up towards the mountains (bushwacking is particularly difficult in a rain forest.) However soon enough came across the trekking company's trail which took me up to the top and some beautiful views of the island. I ran back down the trail, intent on getting back to my hotel room in time for a shower before checkout at noon. The trail as it turned out came out several miles up the mountain in the back of someone's fruit orchard and then right next to their house. The people were very friendly though, and kindly pointed me the way back to the main road, which I quickly walked down back to my hotel.

Oh, and the trekking company says this trip takes them 7-8 hours. I did it in 4, with no trail on the way up, an a good hour of walking on roads. I'm pretty sure my way was more fun than paying 1000 baht to wait for some middle aged out of shape tourist to go up the mountain and stop every 5 seconds, probably to complain.

Monkeys!

Saturday I was remembering the first time I came to visit my site 2 months or so ago, and remembered these small but really steep cliffed out mountains that I saw on the way in. So I decided to go ride my bike to check them out more, which turned out to be an awesome decision.

After discovering that a lot of the cliffs I had seen were up against a quarry that was being mined for gravel, I continued to ride my bike around the little range of mountains. I started to see little caves into the rock.

Around the next corner I came to a bunch of old abandoned temple buildings, a small shop, lots of Bhudda statues, caves, and monkeys everywhere. I think these are called gibbons. Anyway, I went into the shop and talked to the lady running it, who told my I should "kun khao" or climb up the mountain. She offered to watch my bike for me, so off I went, slowly walking past the monkeys to the set of stairs ascending the mountain.




The monkeys mostly got out of my way, walking up the concrete path in front of me as I took pictures of them and the scenery. This is probably one of the coolest places I have ever been. There were huge Bhudda statues everywhere, caves heading back into the mountain that I decided best not to explore alone, and crazy buildings and pathways built into the side of the rocks.

The scenery was also epic. In between this Bhudda and the rock, you can see Khao Kitchakut, 1500 meters high, the biggest mountain in Chanthaburi. In the other direction the horizon was the ocean.
This bridge went from one little peak on the side of the mountain over to the main portion. There were lots of monkeys on it, probably took me about 15 minutes to get across because one of the monkeys did not want to move. Eventually he went over to the side and let me past.









This is looking up to the north. The hills you can see to the left is Khao Wong, which are cliffed out and filled with caves on the other side. My house is about 15 km back behind them.



Anyways, things are still good in Thailand, meeting lots of people, my Thai keeps getting better, and I may be doing a mountain bike race this weekend.