Admittedly, and with due deference to both sanity and self-preservation, I did choose a sunrise start and a relatively quiet island backwater to take my birthday ride.
I hopped, oh, alright then, ‘creaked and groaned’ onto my saddle one dewy morning at the southern end of Kata Noi Beach, in one of our island’s most beautiful bays and at that early hour the road was quiet, bathed in early-morning sun dapples and very inviting even to an aged cyclist.
Off I set heading north with the beguiling Andaman Sea dancing softly on my left and the sweep of forested hills punctuated by building developments in varying states of legality, completion, or indeed deconstruction, to my right.
ICONS
The island’s once verdant spine unfortunately represents an irresistible temptation to Phuket’s ever-more rapacious property developers to build more of those multi-million-dollar luxury sea-view mansions, whether all the requisite acres of paperwork have been legally obtained or not.
Only a few months back, torrential rains brought down cascades of illegal structures sitting right below the implacable, and one can only assume, completely astounded, gaze of the Big Buddha atop Nakkerd Hill. Tragically, 13 people were killed in the huge mudslide and fingers were pointed at the potential illegality of the construction around the Big Buddha itself.
Mysteriously, all seems to have gone eerily quiet on the ‘rigorous and unwavering’ investigations which were promised into this catastrophe.
Such were my early morning musings as I plied this lovely beachside corridor adjacent to Phuket’s beautiful spine. It represented a trip through the past for me passing various glorious Phuket icons where I’d spent many happy times in the early days of my island explorations from 2005 onward.
Up the steep headland and past the lovely Mom Tri’s Villa Royale, once the home of Mom Tri Devakul, Harvard-educated member of Thailand’s royal family, not to mention one of the island’s most extensive and prestigious wine cellars!
CHARISMATIC
Then down the steep hill I plunged, brake-blocks screaming, past Mom Tri’s Boathouse where I’d spent many fabulous wine-drenched evenings at sundry gourmet dinners, writers’ nights, music concerts, or common-or-garden suppers with friends and island luminaries, though there was never anything common-or-garden about the cuisine, the service, or the stunning views from the Boathouse.
Nor, indeed, about its charismatic General Manager Max Chin, with whom I had the pleasure of working over several years. Max was the quintessential, larger-than-life GM, brimming with charm, fun and ebullience. He was the perfect leader for the Boathouse where such global superstars as Peter Ustinov, Rudolph Nureyev and countless royalty and nobility had held court down through the years.
I then cycled the road along Kata Beach itself and over the next headland between Kata and Karon past the hilarious Mini-Golf and Dinosaur Park… surely one of the only places in Phuket where you can be, “Two under par going into the final hole, thereby achieving a Tyrannosaurus as opposed to an Eagle!”
Onward I pedalled north along Karon Beach past the dilapidated sports ground on my right, where in 1997, when a little blue pill had just been legalised in Thailand, I saw the venerable Phuket Vagabonds rugby club become unofficially re-branded as the Phuket VIAGRABONDS! Happy days!
Onward I rode adjacent to Karon Beach to the roundabout at the far end, then straight ahead to cycle a loop around the little lake there, then finally on to the beach for an exhilarating dip to cool down after my monumental aged exertions.
Unlike the journey of reaching the age of 76 itself, I’d planned this as an out and back ride, so I retraced my cycle tracks back to have a coffee with my old friend Richard Pope, the genial developer of the wonderful Kata Rocks Resort, with whom I’d worked on branding and communications in its early days.
Sitting on Kata Rocks’ glorious poolside terrace on the rocky headland overlooking the Andaman Sea and Pu Island, reminiscing with Richard about the ‘good old days’ on Phuket made me realise that no matter how much the island changes superficially, I was indeed most fortunate to be living out my cycling dotage in such a delightful location.