That’s a crunchy, fresh and healthy day today ;-) I would not say organic though (unfortunately), so maybe it’s not that healthy… Well, it doesn’t matter because I’m talking about travelling, not food. Hey hey hey, wait a minute. Food is important too! With bad food and bad luck (like the nice night I’ve spent in that temple vomiting everywhere) you can not travel anymore. So, healthy food + good cycling = nice travel. This is the magic trick :-) Ok, ok let’s start the visit…
Map.
Hmmm, we are not starting as early as we expected but that’s ok because there not any competition going on. We thanked this nice family and will start riding in a minute.
Until now the road was nearly straight and super flat as usual but… What going on there?
OK, I’m not having hallucinations, we are in the country side and here there is a huge plane.
Obviously it’s not going anywhere but I’m wondering why this plane is here and how they brought it here! We don’t want to spend the time to find out so my questions will remain without any answer…
We keep on going.
Interesting water culture here.
I’ve observed many times now that Thailand is suffering of a very dry season. When they need water, Thai farmers use the engine of their own tractor (if I can call it this way) to run a pump that will transfer the water from the river to their field or from one field to another.
Live picture :-) They use a belt to connect the tractor’s engine to the pump. Sometimes the belt can be 3 or 4 metres long!
They also use that same tractor to pull a trailer and move around their property. Clever!
Let’s have a break in this city. I don’t know really where we are so I have no name in hand.
I like the colourful buses here. That’s more Brazil style than Thai but it works as good :-)
We keep going along that surprisingly green area where water doesn’t seem to be a problem.
Feet in the water until their knees, the farmers collect this plant that will end in my plate soon I’m sure.
Few metres further, a letuce field.
Thousands of lettuce here!
Green day as I said previously :-)
Crunchy day too! No, I haven’t try but I’m sure they are.
This one is not a field but the river! It’s completely recovered by a plant that comes from Indonesia.
A long time ago, a member of the royal family who had the right to travel abroad, during a trip to Indonesia discovered this plant. He thought it had very nice flowers and decided to bring it back to Thailand. Hundreds years ago later, that’s the result. Thai doesn’t know how to deal with the thing now… It’s out of control.
That’s remind me the rabbit in New Zealand or the frogs in Australia and certainly many other cases around the planet. Each time human imported insects, animals or plants to solve a problem, they destroyed the environment more than anything else. The worse is that we don’t seem to learn from our mistakes. Our short term and narrow vision will kill us.
Anyway, that’s too much writing and it’s too hot now. Let’s have some lunch :-)
After lunch we moved to this shed and waited, read, wrote until the sun was low enough to keep cycling without being transform like a banana on a barbecue (yes Thai love barbecue banana, especially Pita :-)
Let’s go! Since I’ve seen that house at the palace now I can observe them everywhere. It’s like they just popped up from the ground.
The river would look twice wider without those bloody plants.
Finally we done well today and passed the 50km limit. I don’t push Pita. She does haha. We arrived at a temple and were very well welcome to stay. The last French couple I met told us that they were refused several times. Normally monks cannot be in contact with woman (They used to considered them like snakes, dangerous creatures who attract men. Brrr! This is scary). These modern monks do not follow strictly the original and ancient rules and talk with anyone (maybe not foreigner women).
Once the monk showed us all around and tell Pita the story of the temple, we must pass through the temple immigration too! That’s hard… Come on cats, be quicker! Can I open my bag now?
The camp site is installed.
Well, mine is, haha :-)
This temple is very quiet. On the other side of the river there is another one. Maybe that’s the same temple I’m not sure.
That’s with a nice sunset river that we are going to finish this day.
We go to eat something outside and then… Sleep! Good night!
Sont prévoyants les thaïlandais, les maisons sont sur pilotis !!
A mon avis, scaroles, pas laitues, mais au moins elles poussent dehors, pas sous serre. Elles sont appétissantes en tous cas !
Très beau coucher de soleil !
Beautiful sunset…