Steep climbs and wildflowers
Sorry we've been remiss in keep updated, but between biking and fumbling around in Thai we've kept quite busy. Mae Chaem ended up being a very pleasant town, I could definitely see it taking off as a road biking destination with easy access to Doi Inthanon, a laid back feel and several roads out of town. For us, it basically ended up being a launch point into the interior of the Mae Hong Song loop. Typically people take a relatively flat (this is still quite relative) road to the south into Mae Sariang then north to Mae Hong Song. However, we thought that deviating into the interior of the loop would help us stay on quieter roads and perhaps see some more unusual sights. With this in mind, we pushed our wake up time to 6am, ate a light breakfast purchased at the 7-11 the night before, and rolled northwards. A few local Thai folk had told us stories about other tourers who had been turned back by the difficulty of this northern route, and blogs from 2014 suggested the road conditions were horrible. While the climbing truly was unrelenting - 9000ft over 55 miles - the pavement and lack of cars exceeded the low bar we had in mind.
Our original plan had been to reconnect to the Mae Hong Son loop, but as we started the one and only prolonged descent of the day, we noticed an English language sign leading off the main road to a waterfall. Brooke beat back my inclination to press on by arguing that random side trips like this were why we brought the bikes in the first place. Two minutes later, we turned around, rode back through a sleepy police checkpoint, and pulled into a quiet set of bungalows that seemed to have hit their peak five yesrs ago.
Next morning, we again struggled up with the sun, and tried to talk to the owner over our breakfast of khao dtom - a chicken broth and rice dish, heavy on freshly sauteed garlic, which seems to be popular in the region. Generally, we can get basic ideas across in Thai, and understand some standard responses. However, either our brains or luck were not on our side, and we left without knowing whether he thought we were coming back, or if today's road even existed past the waterfall as our map showed. Playing it better safe than sorry, we left the majority of our bags at the hotel and began the uphill ride. While this road continued the trend set by yesterday's serratted elevation profile, sun flowers soon began to populate the road side. About 2500ft above our starting point, we passed through a field of blossoming yellow flowers stretching along the entire breadth of a rather precipitous hillside. Apparently, this area is known for its wild sunflowers, and Thai tourists flock here to take selfies in the mountains. Somehow, trucks hauling cabbage to market were the only traffic we faced as we passed through fields of tomatos, sunflowers and then cabbage on the way to the waterfall. The Mae Surin waterfall, falling about 200 meters through a narrow gap in overgrown limestone cliffs, impressed us, but I think the ride through the flower-hillside will probably stick around in my mind longer as a the kind of random, surreptitious sight we hoped to find while traveling by bike.
With our waterfall / flower deviation being even slower than we expected, we arrived in Khun Yuan (yesterday's goal) and decided to call it a day at 2pm after only 35 miles. We passed the afternoon checking out the Japanese-Thai Friendship museum, which houses a bunch of World War II relics from the Japanese occupation of Thailand and their war with the British in Burma and India. While I haven't detected any hint that World War II has left the same imprint on Thai psyche as other Asian countries, the museum did seem to paint the occupation in a fairly friendly light. Esteemed sources such as Wikipedia imply a more complex relationship in which a demagogue supplanted the Thai monarchy, and managed to salvage some face in the country's relationship to Japan by conceeding to many of their demands in exchange for territortial claims in Japanese occupied lands around Thailand. As the tide of war turned against Japan, and with it economic conditions in Thailand, a plot to overthrown the Japanese occupation and side with the Allies began to materialized. However, with the abrupt end to the war, Thailand failed to live up to its name as the Italy of Asia.
But enough of Thai wiki history ...
Our short day had thrown off our plan to spend the next two days biking to Cave Lodge - an Australian run hotel which 30 years ago catered to spelunkers but now serves predominatly foreign backpackers in an out of the way spot next to the Burmese border. To fill the time, I began scanning the smaller roads heading into the hills off the Mae Hong Son loop. One small city - Ban Rak Thai - sat on the Myanmar border around a small lake, with only a single road entering and leaving. Brooke previously had read about small outposts of Chinese nationalists under Chiang Kai Shek who had fled into Myanmar and northern Thailand following China's communist revolution in the 1940s. Our friend Stuart in Chiang Mai had suggested we check out the city of Chiang Dao in order to see this fairly obscure group of Thai people. It turns out that Ban Rak Thai is a much more remote outpost of the same Chinese refugees, which is how we found ourselves midway through a 1000 meter climb six hours into our day.
As the climb leveled off, it became obvious that the 50km deviation from our planned loop had been worth it. Bamboo forests faded into pine mixed with rice fields, which were replaced with hillsides covered in tea bushes as we neared the village. Passing under the dragons guarding the city gates, we could hear both Chinese (supposedly a Yunan dialet) as well as Thai. Tourism and tea harvesting seem to be the main economic activites, but despite a new hotel being built above the city, we saw only a few other tourists. Vendors politiely asked us if we wanted to taste the local tea - orange oolong, jasmine and an unknown blossom tea all were all delicious to my amateur estimation - before we sat down to a Chinese dinner by the lake. Stewed fatty pork served over vegetables fermented in a mysterious blend of spices topped the list, but tea leaf salad (similar to papaya salad but with tea leaves and ground chicken), black chicken stew, with steamed buns to sop up sauces rounded out a dinner unlike any I've ever had.
Tomorrow we'll decide if we want to drink more tea and explore the local area, or get back to the Mae Hong Son loop.
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| A very steep staircase to a small temple |
Our original plan had been to reconnect to the Mae Hong Son loop, but as we started the one and only prolonged descent of the day, we noticed an English language sign leading off the main road to a waterfall. Brooke beat back my inclination to press on by arguing that random side trips like this were why we brought the bikes in the first place. Two minutes later, we turned around, rode back through a sleepy police checkpoint, and pulled into a quiet set of bungalows that seemed to have hit their peak five yesrs ago.
Next morning, we again struggled up with the sun, and tried to talk to the owner over our breakfast of khao dtom - a chicken broth and rice dish, heavy on freshly sauteed garlic, which seems to be popular in the region. Generally, we can get basic ideas across in Thai, and understand some standard responses. However, either our brains or luck were not on our side, and we left without knowing whether he thought we were coming back, or if today's road even existed past the waterfall as our map showed. Playing it better safe than sorry, we left the majority of our bags at the hotel and began the uphill ride. While this road continued the trend set by yesterday's serratted elevation profile, sun flowers soon began to populate the road side. About 2500ft above our starting point, we passed through a field of blossoming yellow flowers stretching along the entire breadth of a rather precipitous hillside. Apparently, this area is known for its wild sunflowers, and Thai tourists flock here to take selfies in the mountains. Somehow, trucks hauling cabbage to market were the only traffic we faced as we passed through fields of tomatos, sunflowers and then cabbage on the way to the waterfall. The Mae Surin waterfall, falling about 200 meters through a narrow gap in overgrown limestone cliffs, impressed us, but I think the ride through the flower-hillside will probably stick around in my mind longer as a the kind of random, surreptitious sight we hoped to find while traveling by bike.
With our waterfall / flower deviation being even slower than we expected, we arrived in Khun Yuan (yesterday's goal) and decided to call it a day at 2pm after only 35 miles. We passed the afternoon checking out the Japanese-Thai Friendship museum, which houses a bunch of World War II relics from the Japanese occupation of Thailand and their war with the British in Burma and India. While I haven't detected any hint that World War II has left the same imprint on Thai psyche as other Asian countries, the museum did seem to paint the occupation in a fairly friendly light. Esteemed sources such as Wikipedia imply a more complex relationship in which a demagogue supplanted the Thai monarchy, and managed to salvage some face in the country's relationship to Japan by conceeding to many of their demands in exchange for territortial claims in Japanese occupied lands around Thailand. As the tide of war turned against Japan, and with it economic conditions in Thailand, a plot to overthrown the Japanese occupation and side with the Allies began to materialized. However, with the abrupt end to the war, Thailand failed to live up to its name as the Italy of Asia.
But enough of Thai wiki history ...
 |
| Mae Surin waterfall |
Our short day had thrown off our plan to spend the next two days biking to Cave Lodge - an Australian run hotel which 30 years ago catered to spelunkers but now serves predominatly foreign backpackers in an out of the way spot next to the Burmese border. To fill the time, I began scanning the smaller roads heading into the hills off the Mae Hong Son loop. One small city - Ban Rak Thai - sat on the Myanmar border around a small lake, with only a single road entering and leaving. Brooke previously had read about small outposts of Chinese nationalists under Chiang Kai Shek who had fled into Myanmar and northern Thailand following China's communist revolution in the 1940s. Our friend Stuart in Chiang Mai had suggested we check out the city of Chiang Dao in order to see this fairly obscure group of Thai people. It turns out that Ban Rak Thai is a much more remote outpost of the same Chinese refugees, which is how we found ourselves midway through a 1000 meter climb six hours into our day.
 |
| Entering Ban Rak Thai |
As the climb leveled off, it became obvious that the 50km deviation from our planned loop had been worth it. Bamboo forests faded into pine mixed with rice fields, which were replaced with hillsides covered in tea bushes as we neared the village. Passing under the dragons guarding the city gates, we could hear both Chinese (supposedly a Yunan dialet) as well as Thai. Tourism and tea harvesting seem to be the main economic activites, but despite a new hotel being built above the city, we saw only a few other tourists. Vendors politiely asked us if we wanted to taste the local tea - orange oolong, jasmine and an unknown blossom tea all were all delicious to my amateur estimation - before we sat down to a Chinese dinner by the lake. Stewed fatty pork served over vegetables fermented in a mysterious blend of spices topped the list, but tea leaf salad (similar to papaya salad but with tea leaves and ground chicken), black chicken stew, with steamed buns to sop up sauces rounded out a dinner unlike any I've ever had.
Tomorrow we'll decide if we want to drink more tea and explore the local area, or get back to the Mae Hong Son loop.
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