The Minkey is fried. Literally and figuratively. It is day 14 here in the Bangkok area – and the temperature never drops below say 85 degrees … and the humidity, I don’t think drops below 95%. I feel like I’m living in the center of a volcano. And we have spent every day outside pursuing some form of physical labor. I do need to describe some of our building experiences, but first let me relate today’s activity; bicycling through Bangkok and it’s outer environs. Yes – you heard me correctly – we rented bicycles and rode through the alleyways, byways and canals in Bangkok. People, this is not for the faint of heart. Or those with pacemakers, or any other device that might lose it’s regulation if your heartbeat dramatically increases.

We had a very knowledgeable guide who appeared to be intimately familiar with our route and was able to provide us with excellent historical illustrations when we stopped at various sites. One such site was an old fort on the Chao Praya river, Fort Pong Patchamit. (Bay Area people, special prize if you can count how many Thai restaurants are named after Chao Praya!) There were no route maps this was strictly follow the guide or the person in front of you….

I have never been on a bicycle ride that had quite so many twists and turns … we basically zig-zagged through back alleys and side streets as we moved towards the river. Let me explain what I mean by zig-zag. Go 10 feet and make a hard left – and I mean a hard left, and then go 5 feet and make a hard right, same same but different. If you happen to misjudge these turns, you are going to hit something, like a wall, or run straight into a small vendor’s shop. I begin to think that the main source of income for people in Bangkok is to open up a storefront – and this could be sitting on the sidewalk and laying out your wares. In any case, there were plenty of hazards and distractions in these alleyways – there were motorbikes, people, dogs, cats, carts, and general disintegration of the pavement. More on that later. Also, you were sometimes limited to say 4 feet widths on these alleys. Sometimes less. My brain is parboiled, so I may be overestimating the amount of room we had. Sometimes we rode along a canal with nothing separating us from the drink but a railing – and sometimes there were no railings at all… (more on that later). You really needed to focus on riding in a straight line and managing the constantly changing pavement as well as avoiding all the things in your path.

Luckily for us, the Thai people are all so friendly they just waved and shouted ‘Hello’ or Sa Wat Dee Kah (hello in Thai)… or other unintelligible things. Thailand – the land of smiles. Anyway – we eventually made it to the river – where we paused for a group photo. A pause in the ride was always a challenge because the full force of the heat would hit you. Think easy-bake oven. The scenery changed as we moved into the township (or whatever you call it) right next to Bangkok. There were banana farms (?), papaya groves and occasionally I believe, rice. I am not 100% sure because I did not really notice. I was too busy making sure that I did not end up in a canal. At least, I think we still would call them canals or stagnant ponds, or even cesspools.

We ended up riding on an elevated pavement, (and I use the term pavement loosely) maybe 20 feet above these waterways, and they were perhaps 3 feet wide? I was petrified. And I have been on a bicycle fairly regularly for about 15 years. There was no margin for error. If you made a turn incorrectly or missed a turn or lost your balance – you were going into the water. I use the term water loosely. This is the part of the story where we talk about railings – or the lack thereof. I don’t know which bothered me more. But I do know, that when I hit some no railing areas – I dismounted and walked the bike. No way was I going to trust myself on a strange bike with no room to maneuver.

And I’m not even mentioning the steep ramps, kind of like mini-bridges, where you had to really pump those pedals to get up the ramp and then on the other side control a very short but very steep downhill – sometimes with one of those hard right or left turns at the end. Wow. Oh yeah, those mini-bridges often had speed bumps. Because otherwise motorbikes would hit those going 60 mph. Ha. We had some interesting conversations trying to tackle those mini-bridges… usually shouting at the person in front to keep it moving. We had several near misses – whether it was an out and out crash or a rear-ender. The turns were the worst though – I think I was off the bike or had a foot on the cement for many of those – they were 90 degrees with no extra pavement for the corner – just a drop off into that water. Our guide treated us to the story of a Dutch tourist who missed a turn and went head over handle bars into the drink. These canals are like garbage dumps with an excess of polluted water. You don’t want to have any open cuts if you go into that water! Apparently the tourist was fine, but stank to high heaven and they were forced to find a hose somewhere along the route to clean him off. Nasty. We had no such casualties.

There were sighs of relief once we reached terra firma again – but that was short-lived, because the quality of our path was questionable. Now instead of being on 3 feet wide walkways, we were on 1 foot wide rectangular cement blocks. The kind that you might use to lay out a path in your backyard or something. And, these cement blocks were not flatly laid out, but jutted up at weird angles, or were falling apart, or balanced unevenly on the ground. Most of the time on this path there was more of a ditch on either side, sometimes a swampy ditch. Either way, not a destination for you and/or your bicycle. I rode this part only briefly – with frequent outbursts as the pavement shifted beneath my wheels. I’m sure those closest to me were entertained. Soon, I was off and walking the bike on these paving stones. At one point I was sure there was a critter attacking me as I heard lots of rustling by my foot – naturally I screamed, but it was just my pedal caught in some underbrush. Remember how I said I was entertaining everyone? This is probably where that stopped being the case!

Sooo…. very exciting trip out – and we did have frequent rest stops to take on more water and to check out different temples. Thailand is like 90% Buddhist and they have temples everywhere. We saw some that were 600-700 years old … At a couple of places they were building new temples – generally with a foundation shaped like a boat. The idea is that once you stop ‘swimming’ in the sea of humanity with all it’s vices and temptations – you board the boat with the Buddha and sail to Nirvana. I may be simplifying things a bit – but you get the general idea.

Overall – it was a great bicycle tour – I can’t complain about getting a chance to see part of Bangkok that a tourist would never go to – or to check out suburbia and how some of the farms work. In spite of the heat which was hot enough to melt flesh, everyone really enjoyed themselves. And we made it back to the bike shop in one piece – immediately adjourning to a local pub for an ice-cold Singha.