This serendipitous bike ride forever changed how I travel

I’m sitting in a cafe when a bloke rolls past on a bicycle. I know he’s a “bloke” because his rugby shorts are short, his singlet is loose and he looks like the kind of guy who knows his way around a pack of Winnie blues.

After a quick conversation, I learn that he’s just cycled from Hua Hin to Prachuap Khiri Khan. It’s a 150-kilometre journey along the Gulf of Thailand, where you’ll find amazing seafood, stunning national parks, and roads of the country that are far less travelled. And it’s easy, or so this bloke says.

Get a bike, put it on a cargo train heading north, get off at Hua Hin, and cycle south until you make it back to PKK where you started.

Maps?

Nah, mate, no maps, just keep the ocean on your left and the oncoming traffic on your right and you’ll be sweet.

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At this point, the bloke sparks up his third cigarette of the coffee and my wife figures that if an overweight, middle-aged chain smoker can do this cycle, then surely we have a chance of doing the same.

I have my doubts. My body resembles a sponge and the only thing I have done to work up a sweat in the past few months is eat spicy food. The furthest I have ridden on a bicycle is to the beach, and after I get there, I usually have to sit down for a bit to recover.

But if there is one person I absolutely love proving wrong, it’s myself. So, the next thing I know, we’ve borrowed bikes from our guest house and are heading north in the cargo compartment of a passenger train, stretched out on hard benches, sweating in a carriage where air-conditioning means sticking your head out the window.

When we get off at Hua Hin, the feeling is incredible. It’s like being a kid and travelling for the first time again, this indescribable mix of freedom and excitement as the whole world opens up in front of your feet. I look at my wife, she grins at me, and then a literal crocodile runs across the bike path, making us burst into laughter at the absurdity of it all.

Our first day on the bikes is not all sunshine and crocodiles. It’s brutally hot, wrong turns are not uncommon, and there is nothing quite like watching a YouTube tutorial on how to change a punctured inner tube as a storm rolls towards you.

Our legs ache, our hands hurt and our backsides feel as though they’ve been used to crash test wide-body aeroplanes.

And yet, when we wake up the next morning, we’ve never been more excited to get back on our bikes.

It would be easy to chalk up our enthusiasm to the usual tropes. That we were seeing parts of a country we’d never otherwise see, connecting with locals we’d never otherwise know, and eating an extra 4000 calories of Thai food in a day.

But the true beauty of this ride is the way it makes me feel like I’m that kid again, the one who first left home and never looked back. All the fear, all that nervous excitement, everything I thought age and wisdom had stolen from me, bike touring stole right back.

I love that feeling and will chase it until the day I die. It has dragged me across Korea, pulled me around Taiwan, and pushed me into the depths of the Mekong Delta, all thanks to this one, serendipitous ride that showed me how two wheels can make that feeling a little bit easier to catch.

Paul Marshall is a Sydney-based travel writer who got lost on the Banana Pancake Trail and never found his way back. A champion of backpacking and budget-savvy travel, he specialises in B-side destinations and learning just enough of the local language to order a beer (but no follow-up questions, please). Follow him on instagram.com/paulmarshalltravelsConnect via email.