Off-Road Scooter’n

22 May 2010

James and I re- hired our scooters from the previous day. Koh Samui is of a decent size and will take you a couple of hours easily to drive around.

James and I took off on our scooters with the intention of checking out a paintball activity shown on my tourist map.

It took us quite a while to find the place which we put down to the poor map quality (It was this same map which had led us astray when looking for the Half Moon Party the previous night). We spoke to an English guy who runs an ATV tour business (the paintball was run from the same location). We were informed that it is too quiet at this time of year and that we would need to pull our own group of people together if we were to have a decent battle. However he was able to recommend a drive inland to a lookout point, he warned that part of the road wasn’t so suitable for scooters.

Not suitable for scooters, yeah right!

James and I ended up driving off-road for over an hour on quite difficult dirt terrain. Our scooters held up with just the odd scary moment when a wheel got tracked in a rut or the back/front slid out on too hard braking or acceleration. We made it to a lookout restaurant where we had lunch and looked into what route we should come back on. If it had of been a lovely sunny day we would have explored more, but it was thundering, starting to rain with the potential for a typhoon, and to top things off I had been running low on gas from the start of the trip almost an hour ago.

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Through broken English and poor sign language we were able to determine that we could keep going over the top and come down on the other side, it was supposed to be a similar distance but with less sealed road.  Going down I don’t believe we encountered any harder terrain than going up and we saw something different. Overall it was certainly worth the trip, good fun.

The name of our hilly destination has got to be one of the longest names in Thailand, try and pronounce that!

[pe2-gallery class=”alignright” ] Offroad Scooter-2.JPGCrazy Name-1.JPGCrazy Name.JPG[/pe2-gallery]

We got back to our accommodation soaking wet from all the rain to find out that the areas power was down, so much for that hot shower to warm up. Later that night I find myself typing with a filthy scooter, covered in mud parked outside, I feel inclined to give the bikes a good wash before taking them back tomorrow.