Clarity

January 2, 2026

Nong Prue to Kanchanaburi

Dear little friends,

Neither one of us liked our guesthouse much. The best thing about it had been a huge bathroom and we both took our bikes in there and gave them much needed showers with the high-powered bum gun. For those who haven’t traveled in SE Asia, most bathrooms have a hose/squirter thing next to the toilet for washing off poop. Some of them work great, some are barely a trickle, some of them would power wash the algae off an Oregon sidewalk. You use them with care until you can discern their velocity. These ones did a great job on the dried mud in the fenders and the dust and scum on the business end of the rear wheel, and just giving our bikes a glow-up.

So in the morning we took our shiny clean bikes outside and loaded them up. No papayas have been seen since before we went to Laos, it’s a real mystery where all the papayas are and we really miss our muesli breakfasts. But in about five or six miles we came upon a cute flowery breakfast place and chowed down.

Today was going to be a short day, 20 miles or so, since we had gotten our asses kicked the day before on Highway 3086. We would have two more days of 3086 to get to Kanchanaburi, and today’s first .84 miles had zero traffic and I was thinking this would be a piece of cake. That changed pretty quickly, it seems like a lot of Thais, like a lot of Americans, had the week off and were going places. The shoulder was very narrow and rough, the main part of the road was smoothish, we would go out there when we couldn’t see anybody coming behind us (thank you mirrors!) but because oncoming traffic was in a hurry and passing into that lane we had to give that up and just bump along.

You don't really need a sign telling that there is a 7-Eleven up ahead because that's what we always think.

Yesterday’s headwind had changed to a side wind, the road gradually improved, the countryside wasn’t as interesting as we thought it would be or maybe the traffic and conditions didn’t leave us a lot of room for looking up and around to see it anything was worthy of note. So we charged along and by ten had reached the nondescript burg we had planned to stay in. But first, coffee.

Sitting in the air-conditioned coffee shop was nice. It was packed with people, our iced lattes were amazing, we both concluded that we didn’t really want to stop in this town, but between here and Kanchanaburi was 25 miles with zero guesthouses. We had to make a decision and once we made it, we booked a room in K-town and then jumped back out onto 3086. For a few yards anyway. Bruce came to an abrupt stop so of course so did I.

This was the fanciest and most expensive coffee of the trip ($2).

Bruce’s bike was “wiggly”, he said. He stood next to it and shook it. It seemed unstable and weird to him. It looked okay to me but I’m not the one riding it. He got back on it and off we went. The wind was at our backs now, it was slightly downhill. Nice wide, smooth shoulder. Nothing interesting to see except sugar cane fields and we have covered that topic adequately already. Onward.

Well, okay. This WAS kind of interesting.

Five miles later on a slight, slight uphill Bruce was suddenly going much slower. C’mon Lellman, speed it up, let’s get to Kanchanaburi! I looked at his rear tire. Oh, hell no.

Yes, friends. Our first flat tire in six bike trips. Well, there was one in Vietnam in 2016 but it was actually a tube failure, not a puncture. That was on a “normal” drive train with a grubby chain and cogs but we knew how to change that kind of tire. These bikes we’re on now are fancy ones, with internal hubs and belt drives and disc brakes and while I had watched a few YouTube videos on removing rear wheels like this I was mostly in denial that we would ever have to. This I knew: if we got a rear flat there was no way we would be changing that tire by the roadside, that would call for emergency transportation.

Oh, and for those who have ever put a Schwalbe Marathon tire on a 20” Bike Friday wheel you know there will be tears and broken fingernails and blue language involved.

I asked my dad for help.

There was a gas station very close by, not one with mechanics or anything, just some shade and a teenager running the cash register, but it was off the road. I scanned the customers for a pickup truck going to Kanchanaburi but that didn’t look promising at all. We got out the tire pump and pumped it up to see if it would hold. It did! So the plan was to see if we could pump it up every five miles or so and limp on to town, still twenty miles away.

And off we went, I thanked my dad. If you’re confused, let me clarify. My dad passed away in 2012, the day before I was diagnosed with asbestosis-related lung disease. I am a non-believer, but I still ask him for help sometimes. Maybe that didn’t clarify anything. The tire held, that much was clear.

Maybe the flat was just a fluke? Can tubes mend themselves? We didn’t know, we just kept riding as fast as we could. The wind blew us down the highway. We turned onto another highway, it was getting hot, no shade whatsoever but if we had been motivated before in that nice cool coffee shop we were super motivated now. I kept a sharp eye on that rear tire. It held.

About ten miles from Kanchanaburi we were cruising downhill, eating miles like popcorn, feeling good. Four more miles and we turned onto a major road on the outskirts of town and hit construction, gravel, dirt, dust, traffic at a standstill. And the tire gave up completely. Pumping it up was futile. We started walking the bikes. I accidentally bumped the empty iced coffee cup out of my cupholder thingie and heard the motorbike behind me crunch over it. Now I had littered.

When I say traffic was at a standstill I mean we reached an intersection that was at complete gridlock. Everybody was stuck there. Dust, heat, stress. Bruce was trying to lift his fully loaded back wheel as he walked so as to not completely destroy the wheel and rims. Good times, my little friends.

Standing there in this mess, we were behind motorbikes and in front of motorbikes and next to a rusty farm pickup. Their window was open, the farm wife, whose face and head were enveloped in the Thai farmer’s headdress that keeps the sun off, was looking out at us. I could hear her say something to her husband who was behind the wheel. It was hard to read her expression because of her face covering but I’m sure she could read ours. We were fucked.

She kept looking. This light was not changing. I pointed down at the flat tire. She nodded. Her husband was talking to her. Bruce was despairing, I could feel him despairing. I pointed at the back of their pickup and she nodded. The light changed, she pointed up ahead on the other side of the very big, very congested under-construction intersection. And then everything and everybody moved.

“Bruce, they’re going to help us. We just need to get through the intersection!” I don’t think he understood or believed me at first. Despair does that. But he lifted up the back of that heavily loaded bike and moved forward because why not. I walked next to him madly waving at cars to let us through, don’t kill us. Nobody killed us. I could see that the farm truck had pulled over up ahead so I got on my bike and rode to them and we all waited for Bruce to get there.

There was no hesitation, we just started loading into their truck, the last thing was the heavy little lidded pot that the Dan Chang guesthouse owner had given me as a New Year’s present that I had intended to give to a poor person along the way. They wanted us to sit in front and the wife to go in the back but we shut that down immediately and climbed up and in.

There was a fair amount of language and map confusion about exactly where we needed to go but Mister and Missus were game, stopped to get directions, and eventually dropped us off near the guesthouse we had booked from the nice cool coffee house back when we thought we had some sort of control over our day.

Those two kindhearted farmers in their rusty pickup truck had absolutely saved us. We would probably still be out there trying to walk six miles into Kanchanaburi.

After they drove off (and yes, we gave them the New Year’s pot and 300 baht which they tried to refuse but we shut that down too), we shifted panniers to my bike and the front of Bruce’s bike and pumped up the tire and it held the 100 meters to the guesthouse and we were in.

Sometimes it is the poorest people who are the most generous and kind.

The bikes got squirreled away and locked up. The tire is tomorrow’s problem. Let’s take a little walk. Down the street, through a busy temple ground gearing up for some kind of temple festival.

Buy some cha yens and walk down to sit by the River Kwai (yes, THAT River Kwai) where so much history and tragedy has happened but today all was serene. Big fish were jumping in the early evening water that glided by like it had never seen trouble. A few boats went by sending wake waves to lap along the shore sounding like the lakes that Bruce and I grew up with. Koels sang, and there were some other birds too. It was all perfectly clear.

Today's ride: 47 miles (76 km)
Total: 957 miles (1,540 km)

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