Ron McMillan's Blog
Two Wheeled Frolics
I went cycling in Bangkok, once.
A city so big that nobody seems able to say to any degree of accuracy how many people actually live there (estimates vary from three to eight million) might not strike you as a place particularly well-suited to recreational cycling. And even if you discount over-population you’d still be right, for no reason other than the climate.
Bangkok is so stifling that I have seen Asia virgins, fresh from Europe, wilt under waves of perspiration that continued for the entire duration of their stay. Thais, meanwhile, confound us by somehow being able to live and work in 35-degrees-C heat and 90-plus percent humidity without so much as minor dampness of the brow. It is a display of evolutionary adaptability that would have impressed Charles Darwin himself.
Sukhumvit is the longest continuously-named road in Thailand, stretching several hundred kilometres east from Bangkok all the way to the border with Cambodia. But from a modest capital city soi, or side lane off of Sukhumvit, operates a tour company with the rather clunky name of Amazing Bangkok Cyclist, whose urban cycling adventures can occupy entire afternoons - and feel far longer than that.
One July day, I participated in the afternoon tour, which surprised me by almost immediately showing the snaking train of fifteen cyclists a side of the city that we had never seen before nor even imagined might exist. Leave behind the city’s pulsating arteries, and in the lea of bigger buildings live little communities, village-like neighbourhoods (albeit still of cement) whose residents meet the marauding line of fair-toned Westerners with welcoming smiles; children in mismatched flip-flops and on cycles sprint alongside, reaching out for contact with the farangs, or foreigners.
Bangkok’s Klongtoey district wraps itself along the east bank of the thrumming Chao Phraya River, and like port areas the world over, it has embraced poverty for generations. Makeshift homes cobbled together from packing crate debris have the look of decades of habitation; I last passed through here in 1990 on a photography assignment, and the district has not only grown in size, but has done so without shedding its feeling of impermanence. This is long-term, trans-generational squatting, squalid, dirt-poor – and yet presents no threat to the familiar daily parade of prosperous farangs on two wheels, each one of us devoting to an afternoon’s diversion enough Thai Baht to feed a Klongtoey family for a week.
On the other side of the river, which is a giant café latte-coloured shipping treadmill, lies a few hundred acres of land all-but enclosed in a vast riverine loop. The transition from the heavily-developed high-rise eastern bank to the sparsely-populated muddy western loop is astonishing. Here, simple dwelling houses stand on stilts that hint at catastrophic ingresses of river water that must flood the fruit farms that occupy much of the boggy land. Even the internal roadways – such as they are, at no more than four feet wide – sit atop poles lodged in tangled tropical tree roots and river silt. The trails have no side railings, and it is with real fear in my heart that I follow the tour guide as he nonchalantly sweeps through right-angle turns with four-foot drops on either side and his infant son at ease in a kiddy seat behind him.
I resort to foot-paddling my way around the turns, much to the amusement of fellow tourists from more cycle-friendly Continental nations, who quickly gather momentum and soon follow our leader with casual aplomb. And so a Scotsman and a couple of Americans keep up the rear, slowing the entire procession.
It was not the most dangerous experience I ever had on a bicycle. That came in the mid-1990s on a cement contour road high on a hillside on Lantau, the biggest island in Hongkong. It was at the end of a long hard off-road ride, and I sat in the slipstream of a Canadian friend as we laboured towards an appointment with an inter-island ferry and a couple of cold ales. In front of me, Peter slewed gently sidewards to avoid the end of a stout, crooked tree branch that, as I came by a second later, rematerialised as a startled five-foot-long King Cobra, hood flared and fangs bared. My reaction was instinctive, instantaneous and in complete defiance of the laws of physics. I gave that bastard a nine-foot berth on a six-foot-wide trail.
Scotland in the meantime offers no such hazards, though occasionally after Old Firm matches my local cycle track is littered with bottom feeders in football jerseys with price tags to match their owners’ IQs. I never thought I’d see the day when I would rather share a trail with disenchanted serpents.
Returnees to cycling should make use of the wondrous cycle track network reclaimed from decommissioned railway trails all over Britain. Check out the routes at the Sustrans Website; so comprehensive was the rape of the rail network after the Beeching Report that the chances are a custom-built cycle track is only a short ride away.
Anyone interested in the astonishing quality of off-road cycling available in Hongkong ought to make use of the Hongkong Mountain Bike Association webpage here.