December 23, 2025
Day 112 — Khlong Wan to Bang Krut
Marilee here.
Settle in, get comfy, dear reader. This was a long day and may make for a long post. I’m limbering up my thumbs to get ready for all the tippy-tapping.
We left the odd little town of Khlong Wan early and it was a cheerful, bustling scene of morning noodle stalls and fruit vendors and scooters loaded with people heading to work or school. All this life and activity was going on between and around the big, fancy, but deserted resort hotels dotted randomly along the main street of town.
The hotels were so sad — each one evidence of somebody looking at all the baht being raked in at Hua Hin and Sam Roi Yot and other resorts along the coast and thinking, hey, why not Khlong Wan? And they found investors and built the hotel of their dreams, and no one came. And I’ll tell you, disappointed hoteliers, why not Khlong Wan. Because seaside is not the same as beachfront, and there is no beach in Khlong Wan. Or at least it’s not in town. We had tried to walk out of town a bit where the beach might exist, but it was too far and too hot. There is the beginnings of a nice municipal seaside promenade, but except in the evenings that’s just a place to be hot and unshaded and wish you could get in the water.
But the rest of Khlong Wan, which wasn’t trying to be anything but a normal little town, seemed like a friendly, cheerful place.
We were starting our day on the coast and ending there too (well, further south, we hoped, but still coastal), but there was no road running along the coast for any length of time. So Tom had devised a jig-joggy route of intersecting backroads that would keep us close to the water, if not directly along the seaside, and off the busy highway as much as possible.
The first few kilometers were right along the water and it was lovely, so when Tom said “we should turn here” (to go inland) I said “no let’s keep going and see what happens”. Well, what happened was the road (after taking us past an observatory, many science museums, concrete dinosaur statues, and other unexpected beachside entertainments) ended at a big headland, and it looked like we would need to backtrack. Then a man on a bike came along and said (in a thick Scottish accent) “oh I think there’s a way through” and led us up sandy tracks through the jungle to a train station. He was going towards the Myanmar border for a day ride there and back through the hills. We took the overpass over the tracks and continued south in the flatlands.
The next couple of hours were pure pleasure — quiet shady roads through farmland and sleepy little towns. Lots of cows grazing under palm trees. We played tag for a while with a pickup truck collecting cream cans from small dairy farms.
Then we had a couple of encounters with barky dogs, which left me less enthused about the small rural roads. Then Komoot really wanted us to get on some road which didn’t exist and there was no other choice except up to the highway. As busy highways go, it wasn’t bad— the shoulder felt luxuriously spacious after narrow Japanese roads. But the noise of trucks thundering by was a poor replacement for the birdsong we’d been listening to for much of the morning.
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After a few kilometers along the highway we turned off at road leading down towards the coast, into another national park. This time there was a gate, with an admission fee for foreign tourists. We were getting ready to pay when a Thai cycle tourist rode up and told us we shouldn’t have to pay if we were just going through the park. He talked to the warden staffing the gate, who seemed confused and consulted a kid sitting across the road (our new friend, who spoke excellent English, said, “he’s new, he has to ask if we can ride through”). The kid agreed, yes we could go through for free, but there seemed to be differing opinions about whether it was possible to ride all the way through the park. Our friend said “we have to ask the staff inside the park”. So off we went.
Our cyclist buddy was Nid, a Thai name he said means “little” (it was hard to know how to respond to that piece of information). Nid was a few years older than us and near the end of a cycling trip from Chiang Mai in northern Thailand. He was an experienced bike tourer, planning a trip to Japan in the year ahead so we had a good talk about cycling there.
After a nice toodle down a traffic free road we arrived at the park administration centre, adjacent to a big beach campground (a campground! And all our camping gear on a boat headed for Taiwan! Damn!). Nid went in to make inquiries, and came out with a mixed report. The park wardens said no, there was no way out of the park other than the road back up to the highway. The woman running the lunch counter (less constrained by official protocol) said yes, you could cross the park on a bike.
We chose to believe the lunch lady.
I’m not sure, in retrospect, that the lunch lady had ever tried to get a bike through those trails. Oh, it was fine at first, nice paved bike paths — very civilized. Then, less so. But we were all feeling courageous by virtue of being a bigger group, and Tom and Nid were looking at their navigation apps and agreeing that if we just pushed up this trail a little ways, we’d meet a road. (This all appeared as road on the navigation apps: Tom). Well the trail got smaller and the jungle got thicker and soon we were forcing the bikes through tangles of vines and picking ourselves off thorny branches. But we were all pretty jolly about this unexpected bushwhack. Then came the downed trees.
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In the end it wasn’t very long that we were lost in the jungle, but we all came out decorated with scratches, adorned with burrs, and very very sweaty from the effort of heaving loaded bikes over trees. Nid, who was trying to get further than we were in this day, rode off pretty quickly, before the crazy canucks got him into deeper trouble. As for us, our hopes of avoiding the worst heat of the day were doomed to disappointment by this lengthy bushwack.
First we stopped at the first little roadside shop we passed for rejuvenating cold drinks and a chance to sit in the shade and let our body temperatures return to something closer to normal. That made us realize we were hungry, so then we stopped again five minutes later for noodle soup (yes, soup sounds like a crazy lunch choice when you’re literally dripping sweat, but its rehydrating) and iced coffees. And meanwhile the clock was ticking and we weren’t getting any closer to our destination.
So back on the bikes, for the last push down the road to our destination! The afternoon featured more zig-zagging along backroads and secondary highways, complicated by the railway line which cut straight through the region. There was no road paralleling the railway, instead roads from one small town to another leapt back and forth over the railway line — and there were no level crossings, just huge unshaded concrete overpasses. One hundred percent of our elevation gain for this day of riding was from climbing up overpasses. We must have crossed the rail line at least six times.
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It was just after 3pm by the time we rolled into the small beach town of Ban Krut, our destination for the night. We had booked ourselves into a resort for a couple of days of Christmas relaxation — and when we presented our extremely sweaty selves at the reception, the manager immediately pushed cold bottles of water into our hands and made us sit down before doing the paperwork. Perhaps we looked a bit done in?
Well, needless to say we were glad to arrive at last, and looking forward to a few days of doing nothing much. We won’t be posting about the next couple of days — our Christmas gift to our readers (and ourselves!) is some time off.
Happy Holidays!
Today's ride: 81 km (50 miles)
Total: 5,076 km (3,152 miles)
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