It all started so well, with us having a chilled breakfast at our cheap and clean hotel. With free coffee and tea, and with me even having remembered to buy fresh milk last night. All was well. A brief loop round the inner city, maybe lunch and then a light 200km to get to a hotel near the Thai-Cambodian border. Easy, right?

Not quite as it would turn out. The city was nice, but nothing to linger too much. We thought of maybe hanging around for a coffee or so at the riverfront. However, we did not find the place recommended by the Lonely Planet. Instead, we settled into a pretty restaurant / juice bar, as the only patrons for now. Their shtick is a strawberry slushy – so I naturally went with that while Nina opted for the orange version.

Well cooled down and with high spirits, we saddled up once more to get on the road … and failed! Rocinante would not start, the battery was drained. Oh, well. We did a bunch of short rides since yesterday and I was not sure if I had pulled the plug for the GPS. So not a big reason to worry.

Due to the language barrier, I did not just get a jump start but instead the restaurant manager took off with my battery to get it recharged somewhere else. Ah well, we were behind with blogging anyway and their food looked delicious, so hanging around till lunch did not sound too bad. Even Nina came round to my thinking after a little nap on the table. Lunch was amazingly good, the best fried rice I have tasted in a good long while, and all fresh. Soon after, the charged battery appeared back as well and we were good to go again.

Or so we though. We only made it just out of town, then the bike stopped again. The electronics had shut down while the engine was still running – a really bad sign. Once stopped, there was not enough power to get the bike started again.

Deflated and quite hot, we got Rocinante into a car workshop across the street. After a frustrating little while of hitting the language barrier, I got my point across that I was looking for a bike mechanic. Calls were made and we were asked to sit down. A couple of minutes later, someone appeared on a scooter – the BMW and Harley logos on his shirt looked promising. He one legged pushed me with his scooter to his workshop, in the local fashion. Luckily, it was just across a little bridge, 500m back. A tiny hole-in-the-wall kind of thing, a chop shop really. Bits of bikes everywhere.

We got to work, and I pointed to the regulator / rectifier as my suspected culprit. This is what was hit when the bike fell way back in Malaysia and where I found the singed connector. Sure enough, a bit of diagnostics with a glow lamp showed that it was not shunting the excess voltage from the alternator sufficiently. The part is pretty much a black box, if it is broken, you need to replace it. Easier said than done in a country with a 100% tax on “big bikes” over 300cc.

So we got fixed with a brand new but tiny reg/rec from a 200cc bike. I did not fully share our mechanics confidence, but the bike started and without a multi meter there was not much more we could do to check. We paid for the piece but got the service for free and got on our way.

It was so nice while it lasted. We were on our way, through light hills, afternoon light glowing when 50 km later the battery ran dry again. Apparently, the setup did not work. We stopped dead this time and with the last stutters just managed to get in front of a Honda dealer. In Thailand, there are two types of Honda shops. Most are smallwings, selling the range up to 300cc. Only a handful of bigwing shops exist which sell the larger range (but never have sold my European Transalp). They were no good and some calls to the bigwing dealers in Pattaya and Bangkok did not get a quick solution either.

We therefore decided to get the bike onto a pickup and back to Chanthaburi, with at least some chance to get something organised tomorrow. The pickup cost us $35 and loading the bike was a bit of a mission with no ramp available. She got lifted onto the back safely by 5 guys in the end. I got to make doubly sure it was tied down properly.

We decided during the truck ride back to book a nice(r) hotel for this night, broken spirited as we were. Though once again, the language barrier struck. We got dropped off at the same shop that got us the undersized reg/rec two hours before, instead of the hotel where we wanted to go. Some calls were made for us and both the mechanic and the owners of our homestay showed up at the same time. Finally, we had someone with good English skills to help us a bit. The mechanic kept Rocinante over night (it was quite dark by now) and we took all our gear back to the hotel in the owner’s car.

Devastated, tired and dispirited we arrived at one of the most beautiful places we stayed at on our trip so far. The owners were lovely and tried their best to make it nice for us. What really started to help was when I could reclaim some agency over our fate and spend the rest of the night researching regulator/rectifiers, how they work and where to get one for my bike. Not all was lost …