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Bicycling Bourton with Phuket veteran Bill Dobbs
Bicycling Bourton with Phuket veteran Bill Dobbs
Sunday 27 July 2025 02:00 PM
My good friend, 83-year-old Bill Dobbs, first set eyes on Phuket some 73 years ago, in 1953, when he was a mere slip of an Irish lad of ten summers. Bill’s father had spent his career in international shipping based in Singapore and Malaysia and had taken the family, including young Bill, for a holiday to an undeveloped and largely empty island called Phuket, about which he’d heard glowing reports.
Beat a retreat from the heat
Beat a retreat from the heat
Sunday 11 May 2025 02:00 PM
I was feeling frazzled of brow and lazy of cycling leg as Phuket’s annual super-hot season started to take its toll, draining my motivation to get up at an ever-earlier hour in order to avoid the scorching heat and morning rush-hour mayhem of the island’s roads.
Cycling down memory lane
Cycling down memory lane
Sunday 6 April 2025 02:00 PM
Turning 76 while riding a bicycle, as I recently did, is not for the faint-hearted, well not in Phuket’s torrid maelstrom it’s not!
Phuket needs more shady deals
Phuket needs more shady deals
Sunday 16 March 2025 11:00 AM
There’s a creeping blight of Seven-Elevens, Makros, SuperCheaps and Tesco Lotus’s slowly eating into the leafy fabric of once pristine Phuket. We all know that.
The art of ‘Slow Cycling’
The art of ‘Slow Cycling’
Sunday 7 January 2024 02:00 PM
Fighting my way through a forest of jostling ‘selfie sticks’, I hopped off my bike atop Promthep Cape at sunset in order to take in the iconic moment when our great scarlet solar power station dipped below the horizon. The selfie sticks clashed and bristled like febrile insect antennae and a collective explosion of ‘influencer’ verbal ejaculations ran through the assembled ranks of ‘content generators’ as the sun finally disappeared for another night.
Blazing Saddles: Have a Nice day!
Blazing Saddles: Have a Nice day!
Sunday 15 October 2023 11:00 AM
I awoke to the seductive aroma of freshly baked croissants and brewing coffee and realised that despite the dream I’d just been having about a gang of bikini-clad ladyboys fighting a pitched battle against a rabble of unregistered taxi mafiosi in Soi Bangla, I was in fact a long way from Phuket!
Blazing Saddles: A Year in Phuket
Blazing Saddles: A Year in Phuket
Sunday 3 September 2023 12:00 PM
I moved to Phuket to live and take over the editorship of Art Asia Publishing’s Phuket Magazine in 2006. I’d jumped from the grinding maw of an exceedingly high (blood) pressured career as an advertising agency Vice President, based in Bangkok…. one of the hottest, congested and polluted cities on Earth. 
Blazing Saddles: ‘Kayaking Commuters’ Down Under
Blazing Saddles: ‘Kayaking Commuters’ Down Under
Sunday 30 July 2023 12:09 PM
Forgoing my normal morning bike ride at six o’clock and the terror of Phuket’s daily road mayhem, one recent chilly and misty dawn, I found myself wolfing down a bacon and egg roll and coffee at a little Rose Bay café on the southern foreshore of Sydney Harbour. Nothing unusual about that you might say, until you notice that I’m wearing waterproof shorts and a spray jacket and that my knees are knocking uncontrollably together.
Blazing Saddles: Cycling with Serendib
Blazing Saddles: Cycling with Serendib
Sunday 11 June 2023 02:00 PM
Coined by the early Persian traders for the island also known to British colonialists as ‘Ceylon’ and today as Sri Lanka, Serendib is a lovely word with a delightful meaning. The Oxford dictionary defines it as “the unplanned discovery of charming or beguiling experiences” and it can be a part of travelling even in these frenetic days, IF you take the time to slow down and let the magic of happenstance divert you.
Blazing Saddles: Peddle, paddle, pain au chocolat
Blazing Saddles: Peddle, paddle, pain au chocolat
Sunday 1 January 2023 11:00 AM
One early morning last week, I discovered the meaning of life and also the secret of eternal youth, which is not a bad morning’s work for what started as a routine bike ride in southern Phuket.
Blazing Saddles: Cycling with Steve
Blazing Saddles: Cycling with Steve
Sunday 18 September 2022 02:00 PM
It was the mid-1990s and I was working as a senior vice president for one of the world’s largest communications groups based in Bangkok. I seemed to be forever jet-lagged from flying around Asia-Pacific to various meetings. I had high blood pressure, took sleeping pills to cope with work stress and jet-lag and had intractable sinusitis from the acrid air pollution of the city.
Memories of a True Rock ’n’ Roll Dad
Memories of a True Rock ’n’ Roll Dad
Sunday 14 August 2022 11:30 AM
My dear friend of many years, Sam Wilkinson sadly passed away some weeks ago back in his home-town of Liverpool, in England. Sam was a wonderful character, known and loved by many in Phuket and around Thailand. He was a sort of romantic troubadour and wandering artist of abundant talents… in music, words, wit and just the noble art of enjoying life to the full! Sam was always kind and loving, sometimes almost unworldly and seeming to belong in a kinder, gentler era than the one we now inhabit.
Blazing Saddles: Count your blessings… and your livers!
Blazing Saddles: Count your blessings… and your livers!
Sunday 8 May 2022 02:00 PM
I am sitting in the lovely We Café by Rawai Beach enjoying a healthy salad lunch with one of the most remarkable cyclists I’ve ever met… hell, he’s one of the most remarkable humans I’ve ever met!
Blazing Saddles: Let’s Play at the PlayYard!
Blazing Saddles: Let’s Play at the PlayYard!
Sunday 6 February 2022 02:00 PM
It’s a glorious sunrise morning at 6am and I’m sitting at the edge of the beach on Phuket’s north-east corner, overlooking a stunning vista of the lapping sea channel which leads to Phang Nga Bay framed by a series of glorious rolling hills beyond.
Blazing Saddles: New Year Revolutions
Blazing Saddles: New Year Revolutions
Sunday 2 January 2022 11:00 AM
Making ‒ and often immediately breaking ‒ New Year’s resolutions is an age-old tradition all over the world as we pass from one year into the next. Hope, and its close cousin, self-delusion, are abundant at this time of year as we promise to be better and brighter versions of ourselves. In Thailand, in fact you get not just one, but three clear chances to make and then try to keep your resolutions, as Thailand munificently celebrates three separate New Years – Gregorian, Chinese and Thai!
Blazing Saddles: E-Zee does it!
Blazing Saddles: E-Zee does it!
Sunday 12 December 2021 01:30 PM
If you Google “E-biking and the Covid pandemic” you’ll be deluged with over 160 million listings extolling the many superb benefits of adopting this mode of transport during the haunted days we presently inhabit. Another Google deluge you’ll frequently receive concerns the fact that we humans have only got until about next Wednesday to do something drastic about climate change and our addiction to carbonising our environment. So, in the grip of this pandemic which has made us realise that social-distancing, being fit and healthy, avoiding obesity and getting lots of fresh air and vitamin D, going out for a bit of a bike ride has become something of a “no-brainer”.
Blazing Saddles: A Bumpy Ride
Blazing Saddles: A Bumpy Ride
Sunday 26 September 2021 02:00 PM
A few months ago, I returned home from a fairly punishing ride in deluges of monsoonal rain. Generally, I don’t mind cycling in the rain as long as there’s a hot shower afterwards, and I was enjoying exactly such a treat when I happened to make the mistake of looking down at my dripping torso. “Good Grief!” I shrieked. “What on Earth is that?”
Blazing Saddles: A dam fine ride!
Blazing Saddles: A dam fine ride!
Sunday 1 August 2021 11:00 AM
“Dam!” I thought, “they’ve actually got it right.” It was early on a sodden Sunday morning in June and that very weekend the Meteorological Department had said with all-knowing solemnity that the day would mark the start of Phuket’s “Rainy Season”.
Blazing Saddles: Sane Sane, but different
Blazing Saddles: Sane Sane, but different
Sunday 16 May 2021 02:00 PM
Much beloved by me and many other local cyclists is our bicycle’s ability to take us to relatively quiet, undiscovered corners of the Andaman which have remained fairly unblemished by the ravages of mass tourism and commercialisation. One such beloved corner of ‘forgotten Phuket’ is Ao Sane Cove, with its three little beaches overlooking the much larger and more commercial Nai Harn Beach in the island’s southwest corner.
Blazing Paddles: Strokin’ in Phuket
Blazing Paddles: Strokin’ in Phuket
Sunday 28 March 2021 02:00 PM
Yes, you read correctly, it’s not a typo. This week Blazing Saddles is taking to the water, which as we live on an island surrounded by the stuff, isn’t very difficult to do. 

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