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Short blog and a short ride today.

The amazing sunrise from our Nana Resort beachside hideaway near Chumphon


Waking up in the beautiful Nana beach side resort which was only AU $40 a night myself and Paul met in the breakfast hall at around 7am. Enjoying some delicious waffles, fried tofu and some fruit and cereal we decided to reconvene for lunch at 12:30 and then get ready to head off afterwards.

Drying some clothes on a canoe next to the beach.

One of the major considerations when bikepacking is washing and drying your clothes. It’s bad enough being stuck in a soaking wet, soggy and sweaty bib shorts for 6+ hours let alone not having them properly washed and dried. Worst case scenario you can get some nasty saddle sore infections if you are not careful!
That being said, I retired to my room to wash and dry my clothes and get updated on my blogs.

After meeting back up for lunch we decided to try and head into the city of Chumphon on the way to our next accommodation to see a biycle store as well as try and buy a new phone with a better camera for myself as the current one certainly wasn’t impressing me (no auto focus of moving objects!).

Covid-19 coronavirus meant everything was closed! Except well… Everything we actually needed.

We found a cool bicycle store that was quite comprehensive and I purchased a ‘luxury’ item (an expensive Camelback podium water bottle that stays cooler) and also enjoyed some locally made icecream. Paul would have happily eaten all the cheesecake icecreams he could fit in his mouth I would hazard a guess! haha 😛 He’s a growing (or shrinking?) fellah.

We finally made our way to the accommodation which was very very ‘local’ with coconut husk mattresses, tree stumps in the floors of the rooms, wooden slide locks on the doors and the whole place was strangely endearing, albeit somewhat uncomfortable. It was certainly enjoyable and I had a ball being in the middle of the jungle.

The little jungle huts with a rope walk. Neither of us ‘farang’ were too keen on testing it’s structural capabilities.
The cool jungle huts. Notice the floor where they would just cut and grind the tree stumps out.

The idea of today was twofold. The first was to have a rest, the second was Paul’s strategy of getting us as close to the foothills of the mountains so that we could have a clear shot of making the crossing from the east coast to west coast in the morning.

Black circle is our accommodation and highlighted route is the mountain crossing.

By this stage it is also safe to say that I had been missing my wife Katie and new born son Ardan quite a bit!

Tomorrow will be a monster ride and will certainly test my mettle! Time for bed.