For most part of the way today, we had to retrace our journey from 2 days ago. Almost 50km back towards Kanchanaburi before we turned north and into a new direction, towards Bo Phloi. The traffic today made it clear that we were lucky to be in Erawan on weekdays! It was very very busy in the direction of the park, mostly cars with a Bangkok registration so presumably weekend trippers. Not all would be going to Erawan, for sure, but the camp site had already clearly indicated that the park sometimes gets much more visitors than we saw while we were there - and the weekend will be busy. If you ever go there and have a choice: avoid the weekend...
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| Signs along the road, warning for elephants - unfortunately we did not see any (nor any traces) |
The road back was a bit boring, it was already on the way in but only got worse now because of the heavy traffic. In our direction it was not too bad, but because the other direction was so busy it was really disturbing. We then finally got onto a smaller and much quieter road, with headwind ok but that didn't matter so much. It was nice cycling again, and the scenery was clearly changing. We're getting into the drier part of Thailand, the greenery is more bush rather than forest, with dry red earth in between - much like it was during the "winter" months where we lived in Thailand (in Isaan, northeast Thailand). The air is also drier here, our lips and skin are getting a bit dry from it. It's nice to have a bit a change of scenery, I think it will be mostly like this for the next few weeks.
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| Stop along our way for a daily portion of fruit; today we had a very nice, tasty papaya |
Talking about "winter": it got really "cold" last night in Erawan, I guess something like 18-19C. We definitely needed our sleeping bags, and it was soooo nice. Where we are now, in Bo Phloi (after 94km of cycling by the way) it won't get that cool, but the evening is still really pleasant and at night it will go down to 22-23C. Lovely!
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| A view over Bo Phloi from the restaurant |