February 16th: Si Prachan to Sai Noi District – 74 km
Day 126
Not wanting to wander aimlessly in the intense heat at the end of the day, we researched some hotels and found one at a reasonable price of 500 Baht. However, when we arrived we were quoted twice as much. Maybe it’s the high season or maybe it’s because we were English-speaking tourists. We were in the middle of nowhere, on narrow broken concrete path, next to a drainage ditch, so we decided to keep on pedaling.
I had saved a lone hotel on the outskirts of Bangkok on Google Maps as a backup plan. It’s always a bit of a gamble when there is only one hotel on the map in the area. We have often found that it doesn’t exist and we have to keep going. We were fortunate to find a big “resort” at a dusty barren crossroads. For 580 Baht we got our own little love motel room from the future, from an 80’s perspective. Light pink walls, blue trim, green plastic carpet and a mirrored ceiling, no wi-fi, no window. Apparently this was a strategic location and the hotel was filled despite the high price and shoddy construction.
Later that night we were inundated by mosquitoes and we couldn’t find out how they were getting in. There were no widows and the door was closed. As mosquitoes buzzed in my ears and bit my forehead, I lay staring at the ceiling in the dark, when I noticed light coming in around our light fixtures. Basically we were in an interior room, with a single layer ceiling, under a large barn. This also explained why our room was still hot despite our air-conditioner pumping away at 20 °C. Our ceiling was just a 1/4 sheet of particle board. We lit a mosquito coil and managed to get 4 or 5 hours of sleep.
We would need the sleep because tomorrow we would enter Bangkok and we hadn’t planned on where to go, assuming we would have wi-fi due to the proximity to a big city. We needed to catch a 4:30am bus to do a visa run and that was all we knew. Why do we never learn to plan better?