Mine wasn’t in a good way either barely making it up the hills with a horrible rattling noise coming from the engine. By this point though, Seb’s bike was pouring smoke out the exhaust which turned out to be all of his engine oil being burned up in less than 100km. The views were amazing and it felt great not to be in a huge rush for a change. We left at about 10am for Chiang Mai and quickly ended up on beautiful mountain roads with hardly any traffic. Nothing really happened in Sukhothai, because there’s not a lot there and all I wanted to do was eat and sleep. Long, hot, tiring and painful, the last 150km in the dark and gale force winds were a lot more fun! This was another race to ride 450km in one day so I won’t go on about it. After one hour, a useless sim card and a visit to Bankok University to find Wi-Fi, I managed to contact Seb who turned out to be waiting at the next town about 30 km away. After about an hour on the main highway Seb and I managed to get separated as Seb was fearing for his life and pulled off onto a smaller road. We set off at 8.30 and set about trying to get out of Bangkok without ending up on any motorways. We got our Vietnam visas from the embassy, my motorbike start lever broke off and went flying across the road so some tuk tuk drivers and I fixed it with some wire coat hanger, then we left the next day. We got so lost that we had to wave down a motorbike taxi and pay him 100 baht (about £2) to escort us to Kao San Road, a place I didn’t like the times I’ve been and never wanted to re-visit and because of that I’m going to skim over the two nights there. We headed of towards what we assumed was Bangkok and spent the next 2 hours dodging traffic on all sides and basically trying not to get hit by cars, buses and scooters. Apparently motorbikes are not permitted on the motorway! Luckily he radioed his boss and told us to get off at the next junction, which left us 40km outside of Bangkok with idea where we were going, but that was nothing new. After a couple of minutes, I turned around to see Seb with the exact same expression on his face as mine and was clearly thinking the same thing, ‘Where are all the other bikes? Oh crap!’ As we pulled up the toll booth queue a very surprised and confused attendant waved us down, shouting something we didn’t need to understand. Surprisingly as the sun was setting we joined the main motorway for the last 50km into Bangkok. The scenery was stunning and the temperature somewhere up near 40 degrees, so we both acquired lovely Keith Lemon’esqe t-shirt sun tans.
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March 2023
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