Day 71, Trat to Chanthaburi

15 seconds after the starter gun,
Katie is in second place

It is time to catch up with the blog. So, the road from Trat was so easy that we had arrived in Chanthaburi by the afternoon, which wasn't our plan. There is a reason, we took the main road that is perfect for cycling thanks to the good concrete and the large cycle lane. The downside is that it's not a particularly interesting route. We felt like cars today : driving on a kind of motor way and stopping in petrol station to fill our fuel tank, aka our stomach.

We passed through a city in the middle of nowhere that seemed to have much more money than previous places, there were huge nonsense art monuments sprinkled on the road. I can bet you that this place has a relation with gems. After having checked with the wonderful GPS camera and my favourite web-search site, yes it is, thanks technology (Another solution was to scratch the name of this town when crossing a road sign).

A temple...

We arrived at Chanthaburi at 1pm and we wanted to find a decent hotel first. We are so bright that we had taken pictures of the pages in a guidebook about Chanthaburi. We had also taken a picture of a map of the city. We spent half an hour cycling in town and turned the camera on all sides to understand where we were. Our "find a hotel" scheme finally lead us to another place, a vegetarian food festival. From the 8 to the 16 of October (the ninth lunar month) there are religious rituals like vegetarian diet and being dressed in white. That is why there were plenty of vegetarian food stalls around shrines (a French bookseller had told us that the day before). We ate very good food but we still hadn't found a hotel. Two hour later and a U-turn on a bridge we were in one of the hotel recommended by the camera, ie a virtual guide.

...and its vegetarian festival

Afterwards, we had a stroll in the city and exercised in a park. The way of life is really different from the country we visited before. We were partly surprised to see people running and doing some stretching. We went to another vegetarian festival place for dinner, what a surprise!