The text below is an edited version of Williams account of his travels from Bangkok in a long loop through Southeast Asia that eventually took him to Kuala Lumpur then to Singapore. The original version was hand written in a notebook & sent to me from Singapore in August 2017 via international recorded delivery.
It's fairly self explanatory & will be 'published' in a number of sections.
Clicking on the link at the bottom of each section will take you to the next part of Williams journey.
After a flight from Ankara via Istanbul to Bangkok I spent a few days there with an old friend of mine whom I hadn’t seen for a decade or two. He had moved to Thailand from Sydney in the early 90s. I stayed with him & his Thai wife, they run a low cost hotel mostly for budget tourists with a restaurant attached that does delicious traditional Thai food. They helped me find and buy a Motorbike, a 1998 kawasaki ZX-9R at a very good price on which I intended to drive north through Thailand, into Burma & on to Tibet. They thought I was crazy, both agreed that it was geographically possible and probably very dangerous.
But on a wet warm day I said goodbye to them both and left Bangkok with a couple of panniers on the back of my rather lovely metallic green Kawasaki. It also proved to be extraordinarily reliable in spite of the knock down price. It never let me down and did all that I asked of it and more.
The journey north was mostly uneventful along beautiful roads, once I’d got out of the urban sprawl around Bangkok. I travelled through jungle, paddy fields, along the edge of and across mountain ranges. It had been a while since I’d ridden a motor bike but I soon found myself easily connecting with the bike . It had obviously been well looked after by its one owner. In spite of potholes, sudden turns in the road, the need to brake often for hordes of scooters driving on what seemed me to be the wrong side of the road, the suspension, engine, steering and brakes felt like a much younger bike than its actual 20 years.
I’d bought a small tent & a sleeping bag in Bangkok but mostly I didn’t need to use either as I stayed in cheap hotels where the rooms were comfortable and the food wonderful. I wasn’t really in any hurry but knew that in a few weeks the monsoon rains could arrive and travelling on a motorbike would become rather challenging. I made around 150 kms a day though some days rather less.
I drove for miles through landscapes rich with greenery, flowers of all shapes and colours, occasional glimpses of the bright plumage of birds in the trees or a high flying buzzard over head with sitings of deer and once I caught a glimpse of a leopard crossing the road a hundred metres or so in front of me. Sometimes I wished I hadn't decided not to buy a 'smartphone' or camera. A decision I had taken in Bangkok to limit distractions so that I could be as much in the here & now as was possible.
People live in all the national parks, which after all are a comparatively recent invention, so the jungle sometimes opens up into small holdings or villages surrounded by a patchwork of paddy fields. Most of them being planted with rice by men, women & children in preparation for the hoped for monsoon rains. An event that my friends in Bangkok told me had been late for the last 2 or 3 years.
Occasionally they would stop from working at the sound of my motorbike as it wound its way along the road beside the fields. They would stand up and wave at me. I'd always slow down, wave back and call out the buddhist blessing that my friends had taught me.
"Khuṇ s̄bāy dī mī khwām s̄uk̄h s̄ngb læa s̄bāycı"
"May you be well, happy, peaceful & at ease"
Hopefully my rather bad Thai accent didn't totally destroy the meaning of this blessing! But I think the sense of it mostly got through as they would invariably smile at me, press the palms of their hands together over their hearts & incline their heads.