After leaving China and landing in Bangkok with my final destination in Phuket. I met up with Mia Gillow and Lance Horowitz one of our Best Team riders living there. They offered us the best hospitality. A super cool, young couple, running Solid Air a marine business in Phuket. All while sailing, kitesurfing, surfing and shredding at the numerous cable parks in Phuket.
After landing Mia drove us home where we chilled by the swimming pool along with Mia’s friends and later Lance went straight from the marina to the cable park, even though I was tired I did not hesitate about it and joined them.
I’ve only been to a cable park with a 2.0 system twice. Never in a fancy cable park, where you go around with plenty of obstacles such a this one.
In a few minutes I got the handle of it and soon started to slide over the rails and hitting the kickers. As my confidence increased I thought that I could go for a handle pass while going into a slider…..well I couldn’t, I end up with an big hematoma on my left leg and limped for a couple of days, but we all know that “No pain no gain”.
The next day we drove around Phuket looking for wind as the season has not started in this part of the world. The wind will start blowing around mid December through February so we ended up driving around this lovely touristic Island. Day 3 the forecast seemed more promising so we went to another cable park this time around only to pick up our young team rider Sylvain Seynaeve a 15 year old Belgium resident at Full moon Island in Thailand. We drove south and managed to have a good time with light winds riding the Roca’s at the Chalong beach on the south tip of the island.
I must say life in Thailand is exceptional, food is great, massages are affordable, people are friendly and the weather is warm. You can always do the classic visit to Patong where you can find the world famous Ping Pong show, fish shows and other crazy shows and things that you only find in this part of the world. Drag queens trying to entice you to go to their show, strip joints and lady boys are all present in this small one way street populated with the most insane sex oriented stuff from our civilisation.
Day 4 two Best ambassadors from England Jason Turner and Vicki Grayson met us at Lance’s secret spot where we tried to kite but even with two stacked kites was it was impossible to kite. We decided to call it a day, had a team lunch and then headed to the cable park. The traffic in Phuket is crazy, it took us a couple hours to get to the cable park.
We had a pretty cool ride that night, riding hard, doing double runs and push each other up but this time around I decided not to try the handle pass into the rail which was good, I end up coming out free without injuries! A cool thing was to meet some country mates from Maven wakeboarding school in Castelo de Bode Portugal that kindly let me used they gear instead of using the rentals and made my session a lot better.
Day 5 me and Jenn Traynor our international sales manager, we jumped on a bus that end up being the coolest ride of my life not because something “cool” happen but because was cold…I can officially say that I travel 6 hours inside a bloody fridge and for the first 3 hours on shorts, t-shirt only covered with a thin blanket to incredibly survive under 18˚ celsius as we headed north to Hui Nui to meet Iran who runs the Kite Boarding Asia and check the local spot. Luckily at the first time the bus stopped I went down to put on all my clothes and ask the driver if he was thinking that the passengers where penguins. At the end I manage to survive to the coldest trip of my life in a tropical country.
As we arrived Hui Nui a small beach and again light winds prevail but the local market with amazing food made up to it as in the next day we hit Bangkok in order to fly to Saigon. We had an afternoon and evening in Bangkok where we visit a temple, went for some food at Khaosan Road and enjoyed a drink at the roof bar of the hotel with the skyline of the city of Bangkok.
Next morning we hopped on a taxi and went into the chaos of the city in order to go to the airport to fly to Saigon. I’m currently in Mui Ne and I’m loving it. After a long and crazy taxi ride from Saigon to Mui Ne I now have time to kitesurf, chill and organize 900GB of video.
Peace
Pedro
[pexnivoslider pex_attr_sliderid=”125″][/pexnivoslider]