And so off to somewhere near Kanchanaburi for the great SUP adventure. My chauffeur, Antony, collects me at 1300 prompt and disappoints by not wearing a peaked cap and saluting, but he does help me load the several kilos of luggage I have accumulated, so he may get a tip at the end of the journey if he continues to behave.
Instructions on the route had been accumulating via a series of mails from Craig, based on offered advice from various “experts”, the end result appearing to be a comprehensive enough guide, split into three sections:
Get yourself to the north east side of Bangkok Find the road to Kanchanaburi Find the resort
The first bit seemed easy enough, and as we headed into Bangkok, we were instructed to turn off onto the ring road. Our other option was to head straight through the middle of the city. Which to choose? In the end we called upon our combined years of managerial experience and prevaricated at length in a vehicle travelling at 140kph until we had driven past the ring road exit and were forced to drive through Bangkok.
Turned out to be a good (total lack of) decision because we had calls from Craig telling us that the ring road was clogged, whereas the elevated road through Bangkok was running smoothly, and, one hundred minutes after leaving home, we were crossing the bridge out of Bangkok and looking for the way to Kanchanaburi.
This is when everything had the potential to turn to umbala. Even the best written instructions cannot prepare you for the mess that is the road system on the north east side of Bangkok. Nowhere you want to go is included on signs, you are just dumped on busy roads and expected to work it out as you go along. I had already had frantic calls from Craig providing additional navigational advice which I wrote down but did not understand. A follow-up call advised there was to be a competition for the team that made the least U-turns; one car was already half way to Hua Hin and very lost.
It was at this point that Antony and I melded into a team of navigational magnificence. Imagine the scene: I am sat with the crudely prepared guide from which I expertly craft a route through the urban sprawl. I bark out terse, yet precise, instructions to Antony who weaves, some would say dances, the car through the gridlock. It’s like a scene from the RAC Rally but with less mud and more Tuk Tuks. It’s also bollocks, we just turned on the GPS and followed that.
I have not experienced a GPS in a car before, but now I want one. The display looks like one of those racing games on a cheap console, and to win the game you just have to follow the road. It’s comes with a whining American woman’s voice which has trouble pronouncing Thai locations and does not provide amusement by saying “you screwed up, motherfucker” when you take a wrong turn; so we turned that off. But it got us through the muddle and we were soon on the way to the resort.
The guide for the last bit of the journey had been provided by the resort so it must be OK. “When you get to the turning to Sai Tok, it is exactly 30 kilometres to the national park and resort.” The GPS disagreed, reckoning it was 52 kilometres. A bit of a let down for technology given that the resort must have measured the distance precisely before including in their “how to find us” instructions. 52 kilometres later, we rolled into the resort…… We were ready for dinner, but had to wait another two hours for all those who didn’t have our navigational resources.
Never mind, this gave us time to appreciate early evening on the river Kwai.
To be continued…
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2008-09-26| SUP Summary | Pattaya Days says[…] Masters of navigation […]