Day 3: Phuket Town to Kata Beach and back (20 mi / 32 km)
[ Sally typing ]
Hello friendly followers, thanks for visiting our blog again. Today, we started with some hilarious antics. We had to figure out how to mail our ginormous backpacking packs AND extra huge bike boxes to…ourselves…in the FUTURE! Another time, another place. Three weeks out in Bangkok for one package, and 5 weeks out in Chiang Mai for the second. What happened next was a couple of crazy (and sweaty) Americans dragging huge bike boxes down the main strip of little Phuket Town here in Thailand. Did people laugh at us? Yes.
DHL was super helpful and after about an hour we got everything sorted out. It felt great to drop all that extra bulk and get down to only the necessary good for the bike tour.
Speaking of bikes, we built them up in our guest house room this afternoon and hopped on for a little test ride down and over to Kata Beach — recommended to us by a helpful Thai Tea cart guy here in town. He said, “Kata, wonderful.” Sounded good to us! So off we were, the first time on bikes here in Thailand.
Thailand has its own brand of chaos for American cyclists. First, they drive on the left-side, so everything is criss-crossed and all our years in the saddle did not prepare us for fast swarms of mopeds in traffic circles. That said, the drivers and scooter homies were pretty generous with the road and considering how much traffic density was happening around us, it was pretty do-able.
We definitely need to start supplying you guys with some visuals along with the blog posts, we’ll see what we can do.
On our ride to Kata Beach, we saw a big mountain pop up ahead out of nowhere. Are we gonna have to climb that thing? Then we noticed giant, white Buddha smiling down at us from atop the mountain. The vegetation was so thick that it was easy to see where the road cut across the mountain and the climb wasn’t bad at all.
Did I mention it’s hot here? HOT! Muggy, humid. You might get a comfortable breeze going on the bike, but the moment you start climbing, you’re soaked in sweat. Also (random) there are cute wild dogs all over. We stopped to check the map half way up our climb and this skinny little guy came over to us with a friendly (and hopeful) look on his face. He sniffed around and didn’t detect the presence of snacks, but still kept us company until we got our bearings and pushed off again. [ No Dad, I did not touch or pet him ]
The beach at Kata is really lovely. There’s a bunch of touristy run-up to it. We saw 3 awesome sunburnt shiny pink fat white dudes in a row all riding their own struggling rental scooters up the hills. Haha! But the beach is really nice, especially after a hot ride.
A quick dip, a snack from the bodega and we were back on the road once again — back to Phuket Town. It got dark a LOT faster than we had expected and so we finished the ride at dusk and a bit in the dark but everything turned out just fine.
Tomorrow, we start for REAL! The bicycling begins in earnest. We have a vague idea about a route, but we’re really winging it. Luckily this country and the people here are very hospitable — a good place to do a seat of the pants adventure.
2 years ago