New Year, New Kickapoo Joy Juice
Week 47 - Back in the saddle after Christmas, Mark and Ellie celebrate the start of 2026 with a whole new country after a sticky situation delays their exit from Thailand.
A pack of press photographers surrounded us and snapped away as the Minister for Tourism ceremoniously presented Mark with a large packet of crisps, shaking his hand and formally welcoming him to Malaysia.
It was 8am on New Year’s Day, and this was the border crossing of our wildest dreams, or at least of crisp-loving Mark’s.
Behind the photographers all snapping away, two large mascots, a monkey and a sun bear, waddled around accompanied by three beautiful women in ornate Malay headdress.
The border crossing had begun innocuously enough, and we were patting ourselves on the back for having decided to get up early on New Year’s Day to avoid the queues. We were about 6th in line behind a gaggle of moped drivers when Mark pointed out a guy launching a drone a few metres away from us.
“You’d probably need some kind of security clearance to do that around here,” he commented to me.
And then a doorway opened and a stream of photographers, personal assistants, security personnel, mascots and associated hangers-on swarmed out, surrounding the short, vivid-shirted figure of the Minister for Tourism. We had become unwitting participants in a PR photo opportunity for the Malay government’s tourism-boosting “Visit Malaysia 2026” campaign.
The Minister presented us with goodie bags, posed for photos and moved on down the queue. We opened our bags and looked in: they each contained a bag of crisps, a handful of vouchers and a key ring in the shape of a bear.
Anyone who has been reading these pages with any regularity will know that crisps hold an almost inexplicably special place in Mark’s affections, and that if 2025 taught us anything it was that we don’t like encounters with bears.
So if the PR company responsible for Malaysia’s tourism campaign for 2026 had wanted to come up with something symbolising highs and lows for Spoke Yokes, they couldn’t have done better than a bag of crisps and a small bear.
Under the Visit Malaysia 2026 logo, our goodie bags were emblazoned with the words “Surreal experiences.” And that too was apt.
Country no. 19
We left the border, managed to find an ATM to withdraw some Malay Ringgit, had an excellent breakfast at a roadside stall, and cycled off excitedly into the first day of 2026 and the 19th country of our epic pedal.
In the first two hours in Malaysia, cycling the quiet country roads of Perlis State before any New Year’s revellers had shaken off their hangovers and/or sugar comas, we found an impressive dead cobra on the road, saw a troupe of monkeys, stopped at a roadside stall for chilled mango juice, and discovered that Malay 7-11 shops carry totally different stock to Thai ones, including a lemonade-like fizzy drink called Kickapoo Joy Juice.
Malaysia was playing an absolute blinder on New Year’s Day and our spirits were high as we cycled tiny laneways through canals and paddy fields of flapping storks, electric blue kingfishers and huge water monitors paddling the waterways casually, like prehistoric nightmares.
Although southern Thailand had had a higher proportion of Muslims as we moved towards the Malay border, the proliferation of mosques, the prevalence of veils on women, and the return of the call to prayer all signalled that we were now back in a majority Muslim country, our first since Kazakhstan, and the fifth of our journey so far.
Islam is the religion of almost 65% of Malaysia’s population of 35 million, and is strongly linked to Malay ethnicity, where ethnic Chinese and Indian Malaysians are much less likely to be Muslim. As with other countries we have loved like Turkey and Kazakhstan, we think we’re already seeing glimmers of the hospitality toward travellers that is built into Islam here in Malaysia.
On our second day cycling here, very hot and running out of water, we stopped in a garage and raided their fridges for blissful cold drinks. A lovely man came over to chat to us and, having asked us heaps of questions about our journey so far and our future route, insisted on paying for our drinks.
Leaving paradise, or the islands of the Lotus-eaters
It was a good thing we were warming so quickly and thoroughly to Malaysia, because it cut through the difficulties we had been having in leaving paradise.
It’s hard to describe the incredible beauty of the islands on the southwest coast of Thailand in any other way, really.
In terms of dazzling white beaches of fine coral sand being lapped by water so crystalline that you can see the ocean floor as clearly as if there was no sea there at all, the beaches we visited on Koh Rok, Koh Haa and Koh Ngai were the most beautiful I have ever seen in my life.
In Homer’s Odyssey, Odysseus and his men land on an island whose inhabitants live in a state of drowsy bliss because of their diet of the narcotic fruit of the Lotus tree.
They left at once and met the Lotus eaters,
who had no thought of killing my companions,
but gave them lotus plants to eat, whose fruit,
sweet as honey, made any man who tried it
lose his desire to ever journey home
or bring back word to us—they wished to stay,
to linger there among the Lotus-eaters,
feeding on the plant, eager to forget
about their homeward voyage.
Like Odysseus’ men, we too temporarily forgot our Odyssey and lingered too long, losing our desire to journey home or even send back word: it’s been a long time since the last Spoke Yokes newsletter, had you noticed?!
This was partly a planned break from the digital over Christmas, but as days slipped by, we did enter a slightly somnambulant, hard-to-motivate state.
Don’t forget your shoes
One day on the island of Chang Ranong, where we spent three days for Mark’s birthday, we were sitting at a beachfront bar slurping on chilled coconuts when a moped taxi pulled up to bring a man to the ferry.
The owner of the resort, a lovely older woman who presided over her raggle-taggle of stoned German retirees and errant backpackers (weed is not only legal but widely tolerated, so it’s not uncommon to be having your breakfast alongside the kind of hardened smokers who like a joint with their morning coffee) with maternal affection, started gently haranguing the mildly baked lanky European as he attempted to assemble his belongings and prepare to leave the island of the Lotus-eaters.
“Do you have your passport, your toothbrush?” She probed. “Where is your bag? And don’t forget your shoes!”
He gave her a playful shove and then a hug, and scrambled into the waiting moped taxi….and a second later he was back. He had forgotten his shoes! He picked them up slightly sheepishly, and was gone.
This island is indeed the type of dreamy and serene place where people go barefoot for weeks on end, drift from beach to beach, congregating to chat and then wander off for a cooling dip. It’s a little too chill for the party-lovers of Phuket and so it is largely populated by an older crowd.
When we left, just about remembering our shoes, we had a few pleasant days of cycling towards Krabi, including a morning’s diversion to a hot spring so hot that you can cook yourself a breakfast of boiled eggs in one pool while you soak in a slightly cooler one.
From Krabi, we took a ferry to the far busier island of Lanta for a couple of days’ off for Christmas.
The tourism here was more jarring and extreme than on Chang, and it was peak season and very busy.
I gave myself the Christmas treat of a haircut, and my hairdresser told me that Lanta’s tourism-dependent economy makes the eight month long off-seasons tough, and that there are social problems as a result, including a hard drug problem that tourists may be oblivious to. The rubbish problem caused by the annual influx of tourists is enormous, and there’s a terrible ecological disaster unfolding in the area at the moment: the inexplicable and rapid loss of seagrass beds that provide habitat and food for everything from endangered dugongs to crabs and fish.
But setting all qualms aside to get into the festive spirit, we had a date: we were going to spend Christmas Day island-hopping and snorkelling.
A tale of two arses
As Mark emerged from the bathroom door of our cheap cabin accommodation on Lanta, I turned my back to him and dropped my pants.
The occasion demanded one of Father Ted’s many immortal lines. “Would you believe my own dog did that to me, Father?!” I said over my shoulder, and Mark collapsed in a fit of laughter.
“Your arse looks like a stop sign,” he eventually managed to wheeze out as he gasped for air between laughs. It was true: such was the level of sunburn on my poor bum that I had vivid and contrasting pattern in white and red on my behind.
As Christmas gifts go, a sunburned bum hadn’t been high on my wishlist, but the cause of the sunburn - an entire day’s snorkelling over coral reefs in the sparkling clear waters of the Andaman sea - most certainly had been.
Far from family for the 25th of December, Mark and I consoled ourselves by floating over the coral reefs of Koh Rok and Koh Haa. It was special, and we were back in good time to put in video calls home and wish our loved ones Merry Christmas.
But although I had been sensible and worn a rash vest to protect my upper body from the sun, for two of three snorkelling sessions I had been in bikini bottoms and completely neglected to use any factor 50 on my rear end.
I refrained from telling my family about my poor scorched behind during our festive video call.
This hasn’t been the only bottom-related incident of the past couple of weeks since our last post. Mark, having just turned 51, naturally decided to slide down a kiddies’ slide into a children’s playpool at a strange roadside resort we had stayed in on our way to Lanta.
Predictably, the pool wasn’t drawing enough water for the speed with which he hit it, and so he smacked his arse off the tiled bottom. He has had a bruised coccyx (tailbone) ever since.
Between my sunburn and his aching tailbone, we managed to make right arses of ourselves in our final week in Thailand.
Using the incredibly kind cash gifts bestowed on us by family (a huge thanks to Teresa, Vicki & Pat, Frank & Wendy and Tadhg) we paid for our snorkelling outing and then for two nights in a far more fancy hotel than the places we have been staying. It was luxurious, and came with a pair of resident hornbills who came to sit on the balcony in the morning, adding a touch of their own Christmas magic, a whole world away from a robin sitting on a snow-dusted log.
When we finally managed to tear ourselves away from Koh Lanta on December 28, we did so in the best way imaginable, first hauling our bikes onto the ferry to Koh Ngai, and to the most ridiculously beautiful beach I have ever seen, and then loading our bikes onto a traditional wooden longtail boat back to the mainland, past limestone karst islands dotted around an azure sea.
What nobody tells you about these beautiful wooden boats is that, as well as being elegant and normally highly decorated, they all smell absolutely amazing as their hardwood tree resins swelter in the sun, like being in a boat made of fragrant incense.
Leaving paradise was tough, but I was relieved to be back in the saddle: like Odysseus, I had been troubled by how easy it was to stay and stay on these paradise islands.
It was time to stop gorging ourselves on Lotus fruit and remember the Odyssey before us.
The pig district
Back on the mainland, we were only about 15 minutes into our short evening ride of 42km to Trang when a young female wild pig ambled slowly and absentmindedly across the narrow forested road we were cycling.
It’s fair to say I lost it a little. All pig family critters, from warthogs to wild boar, are favourites of mine. They have character. They are heavy dudes. They are kings of the animal world.
This little princess was grunting dreamily to herself and wandering from a muddy wallow on one side of the path up onto a forested track on the other side. I pulled my bike in off the road and made after her: when she caught sight of me out of the corner of her eye she rolled her eyes theatrically and made a little grumbling noise and broke into an unwilling trot. I had wrecked her chilled out buzz, but she had made my day.
I think Mark was more entertained by my extreme delight and childish excitement than he was by her Royal Hoggyness.
In Trang, we stayed with Warmshowers hosts Kim and Bua and their 12-year-old daughter Jenna. Kim worked as a builder in Pennsylvania for most of his working life; Bua is from Northern Thailand.
Kim, Bua and Jenna took us to a local night market to eat, and on the way home, Bua was impressed to hear that I knew the Thai word for pig was “Moo.” This was the moment I had been waiting for: the chance to ask a native Thai speaker to clear up some questions I had.
“But Bua, does Moo also mean something like ward or district?” I asked her. Mark and I had noticed that on Google Maps, Thai towns contain numbered areas marked as “Moo 1, Moo 2” etc: in both China and Vietnam we had grown accustomed to this Asian way of dividing up towns into wards. The word is “Phuong” in Vietnamese. We figured “Moo” must be the Thai equivalent.
Jenna and Bua were pretty pleased with me knowing this, but they got a right old laugh out of me trying to decipher and then mimic the (to my non-tonal ears) very subtle difference in intonation between Moo when it means pig and Moo when it means district. As with Vietnamese, Thai is a tonal language where saying a word with a different intonation can mean the difference between a pig and a district.
Another invaluable bit of local knowledge came next morning when Kim casually mentioned that the Wang Prachan border crossing we had intended to use to leave Thailand and enter Malaysia had been closed for several weeks due to landslides on its mountainous approaches.
This saved us a repeat of our Vietnam-Cambodia debacle, so thanks to Kim we plotted a course from Trang for the Padang Besar border, but not before stopping in at the kindergarten where Kim teaches English to tiny toddlers to play them a couple of songs.
Singing to tiny children
We jokingly called this our “first gig” - over the Christmas break Mark did a lot of concertina practice and we’ve both been enjoying singing a few simple songs together
Mark had been having mechanical issues with his rear wheel hub and so after we dropped his bike to a local mechanic we found ourselves haring along on foot, swearing at Google Maps for a pin drop that sent us up a blind alley with no kindergarten in it as the minutes ticked by.
So we eventually found ourselves slightly sweaty and a little bit late, seated in front of a neat square of tiny little open upturned faces, like the world’s most beautiful flower bed.
As first gigs go, it wasn’t bad. In fact, we absolutely killed it if I do say so myself.
We sang them two songs. Some clapped, some swayed, some waved their little arms in the air. Some laughed manically, some squirmed as though they had nappy issues. Like I said, these were very tiny children.
Afterwards, we chatted to Kindergarten owner Parichart, who was sad to hear we were on our way down the road and wouldn’t be staying longer. I’d say if we ever want to book ourselves a tour of gigs for preschoolers in Trang, we’re made.
Sorcery and humour and a pig’s head
On what we thought was our last day’s cycling in Thailand, we had slept overnight in a little roadside “resort” - this seems to be the Thai for motel because they are often basic little cabins near the main road.
On our nightly quest for food, we discovered that right down the road there was an enormous plaza entirely dedicated to baked goods, baked onsite, and a “spend 100 baht, get a free drink” policy.
“We’re going there for breakfast anyway,” Mark said firmly.
Next morning bright and early, we were deciding on which baked goods to sample when a lovely, smiling man came over and started to asist. It was the business owner, Yok.
Yok had studied in the US and worked in a service station in Buffalo, New York, where he started off cleaning the floors and toilets in a Burger King, before coming back to Thailand to open his own business.
“Wow, really the American dream then,” Mark said, and Yok smiled happily. His wife is about to give birth to their first baby. 2026 is a big year in the life of this optimistic young man.
He loaded up a basket of extra goodies for us and after we had breakfasted a little too amply on chicken curry puffs, custard buns and banana muffins, we still left with a full carrier bag of stuff to be secreted in our packs. Thanks, Yok!
We had decided to stay near the border in the brilliantly named town of Prik that evening, and to cross into Malaysia on the morning of New Year’s Eve.
But unbeknownst to us, the Cosmic Joker was hot behind us and catching up. We were about to get a spanner in the works that would slow us down for an extra day.
We pulled in out of curiosity at a series of roadside shrines where a lot of people were gathered in front of effigies based on archetypal characters from Nora, a form of dancetheatre from the region we were cycling through.
People were stopping by to leave offerings in front of one particular statue: that of Phrarn Boon, a joker/sorcerer character who appears again and again in Nora tradition.
Magic and humour?! The stuff of this journey. A character we could wholly endorse. Mark set off some fire crackers in honour of Phrarn Boon and we stood and observed his offerings, which included many flower garlands, a huge number of bottles of red Fanta and a pig’s head with a candle stuck up its snout.
Did we do something to offend Phrarn Boon, or did we just catch his attention?!
A sticky situation
Some time later that afternoon, just after we had reached the 17,000km milestone of our journey and stopped to present each other with Michelin dolls nabbed from a roadside scrapyard, we ran into a sticky situation.
Cycling alongside some roadworks which had reduced a two-lane highway to one very narrow lane, we started cycling up the inside of the row of traffic cones, the better to let trucks and cars behind us pass.
Then we hit a stretch of wet tar. Mark managed to steer off it, but my bike is not designed for off-road and has very low forks: this has last been a problem in clay-like mud in Hungary and Romania: the bike just seizes up. And so I had to put my feet down, and then half-carry, half-push my bike out of the tar.
It was completely clogged up. I suddenly realised that this was actually a very serious situation, possibly one which could mark the end of my bicycle’s life.
It really drove home the truth that catastrophe comes in tiny moments, in split second decisions that seem inconsequential and then become vast.
Mark’s bike wheels were in need of a clean, but after a couple of attempts to scrape the worst off, it became apparent that we needed a new plan and were not going to make another 60km to Prik.
And so I managed to ungunk the bike enough to struggle through 8km to Hat Yai and into a roadside resort, and then we went to a DIY shop and bought engine degreaser, oil, washing detergent, gloves, brushes and wipes.
I spent a total of 10 hours - six that evening, and four more starting at 6am the next morning - dissolving the tar and removing it, replacing both front and back brake blocks, and cleaning as best I could.
I swore a lot. But I learned a lot too.
I vacillated between swearing at the Cosmic Joker and embracing him. The roadside inn where we were staying was set between a temple and a mosque, and the sounds of the call to prayer and other chanting and the occasional round of fireworks illuminated the evening air as I worked.
Thailand has saved not only the best for us until last; it had followed this up with some important lessons, and the chance to laugh, and appreciate the magic all around us.
The Cosmic Joker and Phrarn Boon may be one and the same.
The upshot of those extra hours spent cleaning was that we got to spend the last few hours of 2025 on the Thai side of the border instead of the Malay one as planned, and that was fitting too, for a country that has made such an indelible impression on us: beauty and squalor and wisdom and waste and joy and suffering all rolled into one.
We’ll miss you, Thailand. Happy 2026!
Happy new year from Ottawa Canada! Love reading about your adventures thank you.
Och Ellie, all those hours of having to de-tar - admiration for your patience in a super messy predicament. On our way to Sumatra we stayed in a place called Penang in Malaysia , loved it - the street food was exceptional. Lotsa love and good wishes to you guys, hope 2026 brings you another wealth of sticky-free adventures xo