We woke the next morning in the dark that only blackout curtains provide. On this trip, my body clock was programmed to wake me about half an hour before Dalma. I lay for a while in blissful half-sleep, then geared up. I’d seen a cafe at a petrol station the previous night. It was far enough away to try something.

I’d occasionally been offered plastic bags for my coffees, which puzzled me. Two coffees, two hands, right? Then I saw a Thai get two bagged coffees and hook them over the handlebars of his bike. The bag had a divider, which kept the cups upright. Dalma awoke as I left, sat upright, looked unhappy, and then went back to sleep. I rode to the cafe, obtained the coffees and bag, and rode back without spilling any. Once she regained the power of speech, Dalma was grateful.

We were to ride from Dan Chang to Hua Hin today. We needed to stop for a few days and do some work. It would be the longest trip we would undertake, nearly 300km. This may not seem like a lot. In Australia, I’ll regularly do 400km plus, and have once done 650km. I have a motorcyclist friend who revels in doing long trips, including riding 750km to meet me at the Queensland border. But these distances didn’t transfer to countries in Asia. I’d have thought it was the scooters, but it happened in India, too, on Himalayans. So 300km would be a long day.

We started early. We rode back to Route 1 and headed south. We left the cane fields behind us, and the road became increasingly urbanised, open fields giving way to towns, houses, and factories. With the increasing population density came an increase in drivers acting in a pushy fashion. At one stoplight, Dalma came across a particularly egregious example. I’ll let her tell you this story.

About halfway to Hua Hin, I started to feel the traffic getting more and more… offensive. Our route alternated between back roads lined by farmland and crossings through busy small towns packed with cars and trucks pushing their way through in a way that was not characteristic of the Northern parts. In one of such intersections, we went to the front as all motorcycles do, but this time it was just the two of us on bikes. We took off next to the cars on the inner lane, one of which ignored the fact that the road narrowed down after the intersection In Thailand, the roads are typically wide, but everyone seems to ride big pick-up trucks.

A white truck simply pushed me off by its sheer size while overtaking me. Seeing how the side of the behemoth was coming towards me, I pulled out to the loose, sandy gravel covering the wide space between the road and some shops to avoid being hit. A more skilled rider may have been able to stay upright, but I wasn’t. I managed to keep the bike stable for a few meters while gradually slowing down, but it eventually wobbled and ran out from under me, spinning onto a grassy patch. The grass protected the bike from scratches, and the gear protected my skin and bones, but the hard fall led to some nasty black bruise on the side of my butt; the kind that takes weeks to heal, while going through the stages of various abstract paintings.

As David was ahead of me, I yelled in the comm, “I am down! I’m fine, but I am down” so that he would stop and not leave me behind. He realised quickly which car was at fault, as the driver noticed my fall and pulled over. It was a woman, terribly scared – not sure whether from David yelling at her ‘You stay here!’ or by the fact that she caused an accident. I was furious, and I could feel the anger building up inside me out of control, like when I crashed last year near Udaipur. David tried to calm me down and eventually, the woman came back to me shaking and crying. She was apologising profusely, and she looked so distraught that I ended up comforting her while she was sobbing on my shoulder while I was thinking, “Hey! Hold on! I am the one who fell and is injured!”

It reminded me of a childhood experience when a man stole my father’s coat from the hall when he left the apartment door open. He recognised the coat a week later when the thief was lurking around the apartment again, grabbed and got him inside to confront him about the coat, and ended up giving him lunch, too, after being presented with some sobbing story I no longer recall. Whether this woman was really so traumatised by what she had caused, or it was a tactic to get away from being held responsible, is impossible to tell. Either way, the need to comfort her forced my brain to shift its focus from my hurt feelings and rage, and the empathy seemed to have consumed the surplus adrenalin that suddenly rushed into my limbs. By the time David picked up the bike and we took our leave, I felt as calm and normal as always – however “normal” that may be.

As motorcyclists, we ride two-wheeled heavy vehicles. Only pushbikes and perhaps unicycles are more vulnerable. The possibility of disaster is everpresent and perhaps one of the things that makes us ride. In the Star Trek movie Generations, in a simulated world, James Kirk jumps a horse over a gully that scared him in the real world. He realised that if there is no danger, there is less reason to do it. We could do these journeys by car or bus or train, but, like Kirk, if there is no danger, why do it? We rode for the feeling of riding and perhaps for a little bit of the danger.

Let us return to our now vertical heroes. Dalma, adventurer that she is, jumped straight back on the bike. Among the long list of very impressive things about Dalma is the long way she’s come in three years of riding.

We took off again for the south. Pretty soon, we passed a truck festooned with mirrors. There must have been ten on each side. We barely had time to wonder what they meant when we passed another with even more. No one could want to see the road behind them that much. We passed a third that must have had eighty or more. They were on each side and all along the top where they were of no use. It was like they were trying to turn the truck into a mirror ball. This was incomprehensible, but we occasionally encountered things we wouldn’t understand without the cultural references. We shook our heads and motored on.

Riding down the road, we were suddenly accosted by a giant swan-boat and an enormous statue of a monk. We’d stumbled across Wat Sa Long Rea. Thailand really is the land of Wats. You can hardly lob a brick without hitting one. Not that you would, of course, because they are uniformly spectacular. This was particularly arresting. The swan-boat is in a large artificial circular lake with turtles and koi. We walked around this (in a clockwise fashion of course), somewhat dazed, past the monk and ended up in an entrance room. This led, through the throat of a giant guardian spirit, to a series of bizarre panoramas. Chickens with breasts? Rats swimming in milk? People feeding their own entrails to birds. It clearly meant something to the locals, but for us, it was incomprehensible. It was just one of those things that happened on the road.

We were now on Route 4, the main route south and clearly in the city now. The drivers were pushier, and the sun hotter. Occasionally, we’d pass a hill jutting out of the otherwise flat landscape, a series of cliffs all around it, like a scoop of ice cream dropped on a pool table. Some of them were spectacular.

Eventually, we turned off Route 4, and a few minutes later, we were standing in front of our hotel. This was more a condominium than a hotel. It had a series of interconnecting pools and a gym.

There were also a lot of young Russian families, presumably refugees from Putin’s war in Ukraine. I’d read that young Russians who didn’t want to be conscripted had escaped to live out the war in Southeast Asia. Thailand, in particular, had generously opened its doors, granting them 90-day visas. It was a kind act. Who wants to fight in a war in which they have no belief or stake? Unfortunately, some Russians had reportedly repaid this kindness by treating locals with disdain and starting fights, but there were bad eggs in every batch. The Russians in Hua Hin weren’t exactly the friendliest of people, returning my warm smiles with icy stares, but they kept to themselves. I didn’t mind. They were refugees from a war.

So here we are in our small apartment in Hua Hin. We have a few plans, mostly revolving around work. It’s comfortable, with an enormous bed and space to write. We’ll be fine here for a few days.