Cycling in South East Asia: Day 76, Rayong to Pattaya

Tonight is the eve of our flight back to England. Indeed the 3rd November 2010 we are leaving Kuala Lumpur for London. We have spent exactly three months cycling in South East Asia and making the most of Katie's family in Singapore. This was a great experience.Our desire to push our limits and to visit not only tourist places has been accomplished. We have had real sporting and human experiences that couldn't be truly related through this blog. This is not the last post, we still have half a dozen to make up, but I just wanted to share our feelings before we start a new kind of adventure in the UK.

Nico

Sattahip

We planned to go to Sattahip, which is an old US naval base. We chose to ride on the easy road, the national 3. It was certainly not the most scenic way but, once again, we were more keen to finish it order to lie on a beach. Don't forget we are in Thailand! 3 hours and around 126 000 revolutions of the crank (considering a cadence of 70 rpm) we had made it to Sattahip and were sitting in the terrace of a restaurant to......eat of course. We were on the West side of the coast and realised that the beach was in the opposite direction to the town. The waiter also told us that there are no hotels in Sattahip and that it would be better to continue along the coast. Yes sir.

We started our second journey of the day and decided to go to Pattaya. If you don't know about Pattaya and you would like to know more about, please don't Google image it. At least we were getting closer and closer to Bangkok. 10km before what was supposed to be our destination, I had a puncture. It was not too bad considering that this was the first time. Apart from that the national 3 was always a smooth and boring road.

We arrived in Pattaya at 6pm and decided to find a hotel close to the beach road. This place was crowded and lived up to its reputation and at this point we rapidly decided that this would not be our last day of cycling, we didn't want it to stop here! On the other hand, the advantage was that all the tourist commodities are present. We ate in a clean and air-conditioned food centre .