Singapore - Pinang - Phuket - Ranong - Bangkok

  Bangkok, Thailand
Thursday, September 27, 2007

Itinary : Singapore - Pinang - Phuket - Ranong - Bangkok
Date : 23rd September to 27th September.
Mileage so far : 2332 km.

Finally in Bangkok, took me about 4 days with an average of 600 km per day.
A lot of rain! Especially from Phuket to Ranong where it rained the whole time during the 7 hours I was on the bike! There was floods a bit everywhere along the way but nothing can stop this GS and it just goes without complaining...Tasted my first Durian on the side of the road on my way to Phuket...Not really an exciting fruit I must say and was extra careful not to burp in my helmet after that...I dont want to reach Iran with a durian smell still lingering in my helmet!

The durian experience...

My first day was a night ride on the malaysian highway going to Pinang. The ride was relatively boring until I bumped into the police at the petrol station where I asked if I could have a picture with them and the bike. After all those years of kind donations and financial support to the malaysian police, I thought I deserved at least one picture! They were not so convinced by the idea to start with but after couple of minutes of negociation where I explained that my french friends would like to see how the malaysian uniform looks like, they accepted...You will see that they are rather serious on the picture...On the other hand, when I arrived in Bangkok I opted to run off instead...For no evident reason except to maybe see the bike, the thai policeman wanted to pull me over at a traffic light in Bangkok, but I couldn't help myself from waving "hello" back at him and ride around him (he was in the middle of the road)...The policeman at the following traffic light was informed of my passage and so had to wave "hi" again! It was way to hot in the bangkok traffic for me to stop for a little chat with them and I couldn't wait to arrive at the hotel...

Malaysia, with the friendliest police in the world

Nothing special in Ranong where I basically spent a couple of hours just to sleep. The only exciting part of Ranong was actually in the hotel room with the phone! It was equipped with the usual red light diode which turns on when you have a message. So nothing special about that until I had a closer look at the phone and realised that there was a mistake...it was written "massage" instead of "message"! Welcome to Thailand...

View of Ranong area...

I finally met the famous Kevin when I arrived in Bangkok. By the way...dont ride a GS with the side paniers on if you decide to ride into Bangkok! Have a look at the pics below to understand...

Traffic traffic traffic...

Bangkok traffic...

A bit disappointed that Kevin didn't have red curly hair...The only Irish I could see in him was the beer intake! We had a chat about the itinary and I decided that it's maybe going to be hard and time consuming to get into Syria then ride south up to Jordania. Without forgetting that I will have to redo the whole process again to make my way back up to Turkey...So we decided that we will do a week more here and ride the northern part of Thailand then into Laos before coming back to Bangkok to send the bikes to Nepal.
Then once in Kathmandu, we will try to enter the tibet to ride the peace road in the mountain until Lhasa. The ride to Lhasa and back to kathmandu will take about a week. So I just traded my 2 weeks of Syria-Jordania against a Thailand-Laos-Tibet. Not so bad as well...

Finally, just to play it safe and to not have to do it myself later on, I had the bike serviced and the oil changed in Bangkok...I hesitated a bit when I saw the shop but I've been told to go there and that the guy knows what he is doing...He had a couple of old BMW so fair enough I let him do the job and it was done very well. Even better, I took off with a motorcycle taxi to go buy gloves because the new ones I had lasted only 4 days!!!

Shop where I did the oil change...hmm...

Motorcycle taxi...Not at ease...

You will see that I took a picture of a red K1 the guy had in the back of his shop! Special thought to Jean-Noel who had a blue one and could get a red one because this one is for sale! Jean-Noel it's a joke! Dont buy it...

The BMW K1 for Jean-Noel!