Cycling Nong Khai, Thailand

'round the Mulberry Tree

We arrived in Nong Khai in style - in a first class sleeper on the overnight train from Bangkok. We were only in first class because everything else was booked out for the King's birthday long weekend but let me tell you, there's a LOT to recommend first class train travel over a day long bus ride. You can even brush your teeth in your own private cabin, very fancy. This time we arrived at our destination with smiles on our faces and our pelvises in good working order. Hurrah!

Nong Khai forms part of Thailand's northern border along the lazy, hazy Mekong. It's a quiet little town with a huge number of wats and a lot of French influenced architecture. There's a crumbling esplanade and lots of happy locals and extremely contented tourists and ex-pats everywhere. There's quite a lot to do but no big brand name sights to see, so everyone is puttering about under their own steam wasting time and thinking it well spent all the same.

Doug has promised me he will write a post on the remarkable sculpture garden in Nong Khai. What I wanted to tell you all about was a little adventure that turned out to be one of the highlights of four months of travel for me – a simple bike ride on the back roads of the surrounding villages.

Armed with a few hand drawn cycling maps and a couple of double-seated ancient Raleighs (older than the first bike I ever owned and feeling their age) with baskets on the front and very high handlebars, we teetered and squeaked our way along the river to the eastern edge of town. Nong Khai is perfect terrain for cycling. The roads are quite good, the traffic very light and the grade utterly flat. Heaven on the legs, eyes free for looking and mind free to wander. Only the occasional motorbike piled high with teenage girls whizzed past us.

Before we'd even managed to get out of town the chain fell off my bike. It had a chain guard, so Doug and I stood around looking mournful and trying to get our fingers in to pull it off – probably the most futile operation ever undertaken. After a couple of minutes of this a barrel-shaped local man wearing a woollen beanie (northern Thais all dress like eskimos in 27C weather) swooped in on his motorbike and parked right in front of us. Without speaking a word, within a minute he had fished tools from his “glove box”, whipped off the chain cover and fixed the chain. He also adjusted the wheel to ensure it wouldn't fall off again. He didn't speak any English, but a lady from across the road tottered over to see what the fuss was about. She asked me where I was from and if I was in the army (I was wearing a khaki coloured cap). She also asked me if I was cold in my t-shirt and offered me a giant wind-proof jacket. When I politely refused she tut tutted and hugged her arms close to her, mimicking the chills. She passed on our thanks to our strange rescuer on his Suzuki and as we waied (bowing the head with the hands steepled before the nose) to him he beamed with rosy cheeks, looking for all the world like a swarthy Swiss mountain climber.

We pedaled past vast armies of fighting cocks and gently tinkling, bell-covered water buffalo, through the grounds of a small temple and a primary school. Eventually the concrete sealed roads gave way to hard, dusty red earth and we were riding between paddies and ponds filled with pink lotus, stretching out over flat floodplain as far as we could see. We passed small bamboo houses whose occupants were gathered around tables on the front verandah. These entire families, from babies to wizened grandpas, would look up from their breakfast, Thai TV soaps and their work (mending nets and chopping vegetables) as we bumped past on our Raleighs and enthusiastically call “Hello! Sawasdee!”. We waved and called back. Thin, mangy dogs curled under the tables halfheartedly barked at us and made the children laugh. Rice harvest was just finishing and workers still in the paddies beamed and waved from under cliched but highly effective conical hats. Apart from cock crowing and cow bells, the only sound we heard was the odd swallow call and the wail from my squeaky pedal. If it got any sweeter or peaceful I was going to choke.

We traced our path back to the market and this time we followed the main road out of town. With the election looming, anything beside the road was plastered with various candidate posters and everywhere campaign cars slowly cruised, blaring out propaganda to music ranging from the Star Wars theme to Bollywood classics. At one house teenagers lounging in the back of a ute, grasping the necks of large Thai beer bottles, invited us to come drink with them, screeching, laughing and gesturing. Eventually we turned onto a quiet path through the forest where the air was almost viscous with butterflies. Just off in the green pungent forest mysterious wells and abandoned huts were tantalisingly revealed. Eventually we reached what the map described as “the rickety old bridge”.

Rickety? Bridge? Could the choice of these words to describe this particular, err, structure, be any more under AND overstated?

We laid our bikes aside and gingerly stepped out to the middle of the “bridge”. At each step the entire span tipped, wobbled and creaked in protest. We laughed a little and discussed the lunacy of wheeling the bikes across. Eventually, since it was late afternoon anyway, we decided to turn around, but while Doug ventured into the bushes for a pee stop a couple of local lads approached, laughing and waving me across the bridge. They smiled encouragingly and indicated very reassuring things with hand gestures. I was skeptical. Doug came back and tried to explain that we were happy to cross on foot, but taking the bikes across seemed risky. In answer, each boy grabbed a bike and, without hesitating or in any way reacting to the violent quaking this caused, simply carried them across the bridge. A great deal more khawp kooning and waiing from us, which the local boys thought was hilarious.

What awaited us on the other side was a fascinating juxtaposition of modern, freshly painted, multi-storey concrete stores mingling with one room huts held together by nothing more than the power of believing they would stay up, squawking featherless chickens, naked children, wood fires, ancient manual rice mills, stooped crones carrying faggots tied with string, rabid ridgebacks and bamboo rice steamers piled with fried insects.

As we passed beyond the village I believe my jaw had quite dropped onto my handlebars and it reached the pedals as the trees opened out into fields of golden flowered tomatoes, the river winding its way southward into infinity (or at least into the smog cloud) and jerseys snacking idly on brilliant green grasses. “This,” I said to Doug “ is why you always have to brave the rickety bridge” and he agreed.

So it was that we rode home with the setting sun dropping beneath the boughs of the mulberry trees, feeling that the simplest, unlooked for adventures are often the best.