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Early Morning Ride

6K views 16 replies 9 participants last post by  Michael 
#1 · (Edited)
Early Morning Ride; Phuket, Thailand

Phuket has a few potentially enjoyable roads and a number of interesting places to visit, all on an island about 50 km long and 20 km wide. However, particularly in the southern half of the island, roads are congested with ill disciplined traffic. They are poorly designed, and poorly maintained compared to roads in other provinces (for various administrative and political reasons). For the most part getting around is a battle, not a joy.

Early morning, however, provides an opportunity to enjoy a ride in cool fresh air, with little traffic. Sometimes I like to do just that. This is a trip that I started before dawn recently. Covering a loop of less than 50 km (30 miles) in three or four hours, it included a variety of roads, and some interesting sights.

To illustrate this report I have mostly used pictures taken at the time, but the first few of the Patong Hill Road were taken at another time, during the day.



https://maps.google.com/maps?saddr=...HYdeCKlUqIuSm9cedTjzFQMDHYdeCKlUqIuQ&t=m&z=12

The first part of the trip, was just a couple of km through town, and then several of dual carriageway. Boring stuff, but by day you always have to keep your wits about you in the traffic. It was easy going early in the morning.

The road over Patong Hill, one of Phuket’s busiest roads, is more interesting. In about 2.5 km (1.5 miles) it rises from about 15 metres (50 feet) to I guess 100 metres (330 feet), then falls to about sea level. It has a number of tricky corners. Add in some heavy traffic with crazy drivers, and you get over a thousand accidents a year, or about 3 per day.

When it rains after a dry spell, on some of the steep sections it gets hilarious. Impatient drivers in overpowered cars often lose traction and land up spinning their wheels, going nowhere.

Patong Hill starts with moderate slope increasing to a steep pitch around a 140º bend



From there it is a gentle slope on a short straight and for the first part of a 160º bend. Toward the end of the bend it gets into a fairly steep incline. Large vehicles often break down here; buses with inexperienced drivers stall, and trucks shed insecure loads. Concrete mixers frequently spill some of their contents, so it is quite bumpy in parts.



Leaving that section, the road goes around a sharply rising 80º bend, which is quite challenging.



There is a Chinese Temple at the highest point. The deity that it houses likes drivers to toot three times as they pass by, so it is a noisy place. He also likes movies and brawn. If prayers are answered supplicants pay for a movie to be shown by the roadside in the evening, or make an offering of a pig’s head.





From the top the road falls away sharply over a blind brow, and into a tricky blind 70º bend, a bit like The Corkscrew at Laguna Seca.



The road continues down steeply through a series of gentle bends, into a sort of a big dipper, where sink holes occasionally open up after heavy rain!



Soi San Sabai in Patong, is a busy thoroughfare on privately owned land. In the early hours of the morning it would have been chocker with motorcycles parked 2 deep, each paying 20 baht to be there. At 5.15 there were just a few left and night owls were making their way back to their digs before dawn broke.



To be continued, if anybody is interested..... If you prefer Nantucket, Empty Sea may oblige
 
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#8 · (Edited)
Yes, please continue. Great pictures and narrative! I'm enjoying your ride.
Yes, I find the narrative to be the best part.
Thanks all; it could be next weekend before I get on to the next leg. Even then, depends on how much work I have to get done (hopefully a lot will come in this week), and the weather. The past few days have been quite stormy, so I was inclined to stay home more than venture out.

Thanks to Aargee for inspiring, and then prompting me to have a go at doing a trip report.

You're getting very good with that new fangled digital camera of yours, Michael. Great pics, very interesting. Keep 'em coming. ;)
It is fun checking out all the functions and trying different things. Good to be able to do some editing with iPhoto too.

I miss the optical viewfinder for framing shots, and keeping the camera steady. In due course I'll go for something like a Canon G series, or a Fujifilm 10X. Still I appreciate the ruggedness of the Olympus TG310, which makes it a good choice to carry around on a motorcycle.

Nice report. I'm trying to figure out how to plot the map the way you did and then save it, but I'm not having the best of luck with google maps. Great pics and narrative.
Thanks to Autfitt, spdklls, and etiainen for pointing me in the right direction in this thread:

http://www.cbr250.net/forum/test-forum/4612-belatedly-going-digital.html

First plot the route using the "Get Directions" function on Google maps. That gives the route marked in blue.

Then I took a screen shot as suggested by etaiinen for Mac. ERrunner tells how it can be done on a PC.

That left an image on the desktop to upload to the image hosting service. Once there it can be used just like any other picture.


Nice ��- how do you incorporate the photos with the words?
I know I must sound dense.
Cheers Paul
Not dense at all. A month or so ago I knew nothing about all this. With the help of others, and some experimenting I now know a little. The Test Forum is there for you to try things out.

Incorporating photos with words..... as I tell my students, it is all about taking time, and planing. When I went out I already had in mind some of what I wanted to do.

I chose the pictures I wanted to use, and uploaded them to Tinypic.

After writing the text off-line and planning where to put the pictures, I went on-line. There it was copy and paste the text, then formatting it as I added the pictures from Tinypic individually, in the appropriate places.

..... And then I appreciated the effort that others have put into their trip reports!
 
#5 ·
Nice report. I'm trying to figure out how to plot the map the way you did and then save it, but I'm not having the best of luck with google maps. Great pics and narrative.
 
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#9 · (Edited)
Bangla Road in Patong is a walking street from 6.00 PM to 6.00 AM, so the next part of my jaunt was on foot. About 250 metres long, it is Phuket’s Party Central from dusk to dawn. Within a 500 metre radius you can find everything from international class nightclubs where the Beautiful People hang out, to humble bars where beauty is often in the eyes of the beer-holder. Of an evening Soi Bangla is a mass of humanity, from honeymooners through party people to honey-hunters from all over.

Depending on the mood of the constabulary, bars close at 2.00 AM, but clubs and discos are usually allowed to open until about 4.30. By 5.30 it is just the stragglers left, but they are still being catered for from motorcycle mounted kitchens.

Pad Thai (stir-fried noodles) for sale.



BBQ chicken an other morsels such as dried squid (yummy with a beer).



Beer on ice in a polystyrene box attracts post club honey. The girl leaning forward wanted her photo taken. I though she had quite an attractive face, so I obliged, without realising it also caught rather unflattering view of her bosom until I downloaded the pictures.



I bought a beer for those who didn’t have one, and joined with them for a few minutes to be entertained by a Thai ladyboy having an argument with a drunken Westerner across the road.



At the seaside end of the road there were some “tuk tuks” (the local version of a taxi) waiting for fares. They use Japanese “kei” class utes, which are usually pimped out with fancy light and sound systems. The drivers are the bane of life for tourists and locals alike. Rude and expensive, they charge 3 - 400 baht ($US 10 - 13) for just a short trip. For half that you can rent a 110cc motorcycle for a whole day.



There are those like to end their night at the beach, before heading off to bed at dawn.





When I returned to my motorcycle Kung played up to the camera. She stopped and we chatted for a few minutes. She had left her kid with her mother (common here) and come down from Bangkok to check out Patong a month ago. She looked at bargirl life, but reckoned it wasn’t for her, so had taken a job as a cleaner in a small hotel. She was heading to the beach before going to work.



At about 6.30 it was well and truly daylight on Soi San Sabai. I resumed my journey on two wheels.



Last installment to come, maybe next weekend
 
#12 ·
Well, well, this forum hasn't completely fallen to poo. I'm a little surprised.

Nice work pops. Should I make it down there sometime we'll have to go for a ride. Keep it up, so to speak.



3 new Thai made bikes being released in the Big Wing here early next year btw. One will be a 500cc twin based on the 250cc single, one unknown, and the other is rumoured to be a motard of the CRF250L.
 
#14 · (Edited)
Well, well, this forum hasn't completely fallen to poo. I'm a little surprised.
Yes, the forum has changed a little since the early days, only a year and a half ago. Then there were active members from several countries. Only a few, all in Thailand, actually had a CBR250R but there was a lot of interest in it, especially from older riders. I discovered the forum after I saw one for sale, and Googled to find out about it.

Back then there were more trip reports, and that was what attracted me to this forum thing. Yours, and the ones that the Canadian guy based near Thailand's southern border did (on the other forum), particularly impressed me. They were the model for mine, and I dare say the likes of Aargee.

I suggested long ago that there should be a Trip Report section here; others suggested the same. Now we have one I would like to see it used a bit more....

To me motorcycles are things to be used for commuting, traveling, and for the go fast crowd, racing. I have little time for the bike beautiful cult; better to see a motorcycle used and dirty, but maintained, ready to go places and do things.

In the early days there was a bit of banter; there always has been between Antipodeans and those from the British Isles, and even the politest people on the planet, the Canuks. Now the forum is dominated by old glory wavers, a lot of whom are new riders on new bikes. They are often wannabes with a penchant for farkles, who know farkall......

And they don't like it up 'em......! It's cute when they bite!!

Some already do, but hopefully in time more will be bold enough to go beyond their backyard..... and report on their experiences.

Edit: This is what Soi Sansabai looks like at about 8.30 PM. It gets a lot busier an hour later. Bangla Road nightlife does not really kick in until after 10.00. It is a bit late for this old farm boy who remains an early riser..... better paired with a bird in hand than some flighty creature of the night.

 
#15 · (Edited)
The final installment

I continued south to Karon. Phuket’s West Coast Road winds up down and around the hills from the airport to Cape Promthep, the southernmost point. It offers a variety of scenery, along with some challenging slopes and bends.



However spirited riding is not advisable; around any corner the road can spring many a surprise…. Wet patches, sand, gravel, broken seal and so on, before even considering Phuket drivers.



A few years back I helped a young fellow out of the ditch near here. He had been on a motorcycle that had been rented in someone else’s name, because he was unlicenced. Four hours into his Phuket holiday he had a suspected broken arm, and no travel insurance.

His mates turned up a few minutes later, drunk and useless. I paid a tuk tuk driver well over the odds to take him to Patong hospital, and left the others to sort out the motorcycle, which would have been uninsured (small rentals never are in Thailand). Having checked that he made it to the hospital, I had done my bit and cleared out.


Karon Beach is a long stretch of soft golden sand, that squeaks when you walk on it. From November to April it is gently sloping and lapped by benign little waves, the kind of thing tropical holidays are made of (but a little boring from my point of view). The lifeguards’ base pay is about 10,000 baht a month ($US 320). Here they top that up a bit by renting out sun loungers @ about $US 6.00 a day for a pair with a sun umbrella.



Come the monsoon, like many of Phuket’s beaches, it turns evil. The waves are not big, but the beach becomes steep as rips and undertow take sand away. They take a few unwary swimmers each year too. Unlike many other beaches, often Karon currents do not even return a body; only the motorcycle the victum arrived on remains. It is best to stay out of the water at Karon Beach from May to November



Kata Yai is my favourite of Phuket’s main beaches. Snorkelling around the rocks, there is a variety of environments, with coral and anemone beds full of colourful fish. There is a reef that runs parallel to the beach, beyond which it falls away quite sharply. It can be interesting to explore in scuba gear. I took some divers there when doing PADI Divemaster.

I also played the victim amongst the coral for Rescue Diver trainees…… Stopped in one spot for a while, I would get entranced by the antics of small creatures. Then, sadly, some student would come along and "save" me.

During the monsoon Kata can be a bit dangerous with rips and undertow too, but it is not as bad as Karon. There is often some OK surf, though there has not been much to get excited about this so far year since a week or so back in May. The best months are yet to come.





Storms over the past couple of months have taken away a metre or so of sand. Come the end of the monsoon it will be returned



Getting hungry, I started to make my way home for breakfast, going over the main range of hills again on my way to Chalong.



I didn’t stop to take many pictures as the battery in the camera was getting flat. The roads were starting to get busy, and there is not so much to catch my interest on the eastern side of Phuket. I may take a couple more pictures to add to this leg in the next day or two, for the sake of completeness.

I did swing on down the road to Chalong Pier. It is the main departure point for diving, sightseeing and transfers to various islands nearby. The bay is very shallow, so the pier is about 1 km long.

Speedboats depart directly from the beach. Here is one with 1,125 Honda horses on the transom



Well, that's it for that trip. Just a short one to try things out. It has been an interesting exercise for me, and I have learned a few things in the process. Maybe others have learned a bit too......

If so, now we have the Ride Report forum, please post yours. Motorcycles are just machines to be used to go places and do things. Some like to ride more, or race. Others like to get off the bike and do something else.

I, for one, find where people go on their bikes, and what they do there, far more interesting than how they tart them up, and traumas that could be solved with a bit of common sense and the Owner's Manual.
 
#17 · (Edited)
I just had to add this Phuket News story...... a great picture of an incident at the bottom of Patong Hill, where I took the second picture in the first post.

Power pole truck set for takeoff in Phuket

A one off......? Nope. Several times I have seen trucks stopped there having lost their load. It is just a normal sort of day on Phuket roads.

And a good reason for riding a motorcycle here, to cut through the traffic back up after such incidents.
 
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