$\"\"$ <\/a>

In July, the king’s birthday month, it was requested that people wear yellow to show their support of the monarchy… so a lot of yellow things were on display.<\/p><\/div>\n

We are posting this after having left the country (that could send you in jail, the internet is scrutinized thanks to Chinese technology!), because any criticism of the monarchy is absolutely forbidden. The king is yet nothing of a model \u2013 no charisma, trying to transform the country into an absolute monarchy with the help of religion and the army, and in-between has for goal to become in the top-of-the-top-wealthiest list on earth. For the joke, he spends most of his time only an hour away from us in Germany in Starnberg (a nice town, we must admit, in case you are visiting Bavaria!), but to a point where he was considered a full-time resident and asked to pay several billions of euros of inheritance tax when the dad passed away.<\/p>\n

$\"\"$ <\/a>

Living just one hundred kilometers apart from one another in Bavaria!<\/p><\/div>\n

So, across the country, we felt that there were fewer schools than in Malaysia- particularly in the backcountry- but there is overwhelming presence of some propaganda to force everyone to revere the king. Each establishment was required to have a picture of the king hanging on the wall. Think of a mix of king Louis XIV in France for the costumes, Kim-Jung-Un in Korea for the kitsch paintings and slogans type \u2018our king brought science to our country\u2019 or \u2018our king knows how to educate dogs\u2019 (veridic), and some current oligarchies where the ruler is also the super-hero of the nation. I am not going to do any prognostics, but Thailand is not entirely cut off from the rest of the world, so I doubt that people will remain na\u00efve and trusting for the whole reign of the current king. The propaganda really reminded me of Hosni Mubarak while visiting Egypt in 2002\u2026 and look what happened. From what we understood, the father and previous king (who died in 2016) was smart enough to still improve the economy a lot during his reign, remained politically in the shadow, and was thus overall appreciated. The son however, seems to be a little less wholesome (John Oliver called him a buffoon, that\u2019s seem quite accurate), and is therefore a lot less in the Thai\u2019s hearts. But again shhh, it\u2019s not allowed to say it \u2013 as a foreigner you\u2019ll get into trouble, as a political opponent you may end-up in the jail\/crematorium which is literally located under his palace in Bangkok.<\/p>\n

$\"\"$ <\/a>

With no good options, we decided to head somewhere with better weather! Note Cassie’s Thai alphabet skills!<\/p><\/div>\n

On another note, as you may have noticed, we have jumped over a few countries and are now in Central Asia, a little different from our original planning. A few reasons for that:<\/p>\n

We had no intention to have to deal with the Chinese authorities. There is a taboo about what is going on in the west part of the country and the actions against \u2018non-Hans\u2019 have apparently increased since 2017. Getting a visa is now more difficult, it implies having to close our eyes in a train across half of the country and dealing with dictatorial police. Not interested! From a few feedbacks of other fellow-cyclists, going through China just does not seem particularly neither scenic nor enjoyable.<\/li>\n

From northern Thailand we could have gone towards Laos and Vietnam, but it is a very bad timing with the monsoon (it is raining heavily and non-stop, with landslides, a dam that collapsed in Laos, and you probably heard about the cave flooding story).<\/li>\n

Myanmar could have been another possibility, but we are also not interested in visiting a opium-producing (45% of the foreign trade, not even counting Meth and other funny products) rogue state (although its current prime minister and the Buddhism clich\u00e9 make it look shinier than Afghanistan). We got a glimpse of Myanmar refugees in northern Thailand: Thailand organizes some human-zoos of long-neck-women who get no refugee status whatsoever and are forced to stay in villages transformed into amusement parks where visitors can take an almost original \u2018National Geographic explorer\u2019 type of picture. To visit the tribes, tourists unload from buses and are charged exorbitantly to see the woman. The tribes people (refugees) do not receive any of the, and if they complain, they get sent back on the other side of the border. We still try to have a bit of ethics, so no thanks! That\u2019s also why we do not have any pictures of children dressed in traditional costumes (the parents are usually cashing-in next to them), or other sorts of human-trade. Maybe you will remember when your friends and colleagues will show you their pictures taken \u2018remotely in the jungle\u2019.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n
Thailand was a nice country to visit, we enjoyed very much our almost 6 weeks and 2000km there, we felt that we have seen a good part of it, but we both also said that we would not particularly want to come back there on vacation in the next years.<\/p>\n
$\"\"$ <\/a>
Nightly food stalls, we will miss you<\/p><\/div>\n
We just felt like posting a last post about some continuous weird feelings we had across Thailand.<\/p>\n
FYI, we are now very much enjoying riding through Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan (and hopefully the upcoming following countries).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Overall about Thailand, we really enjoyed the facility of cycling across the country. The roads are excellent, the traffic fairly good (okay, except larger cities), and multiple alternatives to the highways. There are a lot of people in the country, but people usually pass cyclists with a lot of space, do not drive too fast. It is sometimes too slow! …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":2129,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0},"categories":[183,196,3,2],"tags":[],"post_mailing_queue_ids":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/talkie-walkie.us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2126"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/talkie-walkie.us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/talkie-walkie.us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/talkie-walkie.us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/talkie-walkie.us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2126"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/talkie-walkie.us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2126\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2133,"href":"http:\/\/talkie-walkie.us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2126\/revisions\/2133"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/talkie-walkie.us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2129"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/talkie-walkie.us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2126"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/talkie-walkie.us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2126"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/talkie-walkie.us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2126"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}