After the slight delay on Saturday morning, while Marco, Markus and Khun Jame (I have gotten the spelling right for his name now!) went to fetch the bicycles from the train station, we were off in the van for the drive through the outskirts of Chiang Mai. Rather than spend two hours cycling on the crowded highway, we motored until the turnoff that went west up into the Doi Inthanon National Park.
My rather ambitious plan was to get in a good long, tough climb on the morning of the first day, thinking that the next few days would be relatively easy as we worked our way towards the west and over to the border with Burma. However, this was one hellish climb and, combined with some serious jetlag, made for a rather brutal morning and early afternoon of riding.
I'm using two systems to keep track of the ride, both the www.motionbased.com site (which is being decommissioned ) and the newer Garmin site, www.garminconnect.com . The Garmin Connect site still has some bugs and doesn't create a nice blog-compatible viewport like Motionbased does. So, here are the two:
1) The Garmin Connect site: http://connect.garmin.com/activity/1905263
2) The Motion Based Viewport:
At this point, I may have been calling for more fluids or complaining about the number of 15% grades up the mountain.
We visited the highest point in all of Thailand, in Doi Inthanon park.
And then, it was all downhill, mostly ,to the hot springs at the end of the day. The descent, which was one of the longest and steepest in my life, was not the nice fast graceful curves, but what Khun Jame called a "local road" where the drivers would honk on the curves. I was very glad that we had gone up the other direction, because this road was really, really steep. At about half way down the hill, I had to stop to let me rims cool due to the braking friction. The major part of the descent was from 2565 meters to 350 meters in about 22 km (in US terms a drop of about 6,500 feet in 12 miles.
http://connect.garmin.com/activity/1905262 and
We spent last night at the Thappahanom Hot Springs, where we had a nice four-room bungalow and ate a huge meal.
One of the coolest things about these hot springs were the egg baskets. We were a little surprised at breakfast that they had on one of the side tables these woven baskets full of eggs. We asked and found out that you can buy the basket and the raw eggs and then head out to the hot springs, up to the spot in the picture above, where the water is 90 degrees. There, you use a stick to lower the eggs into the water for three minutes and, voila!, boiled eggs.
So, after a breakfast of deep fried omelette and rice (no boiled eggs), we were off heading towards the south and then picking up Highway 108 towards the west and eventually Mae Sariang.
Khun Jame had assured us that the day's ride would be up and down. Well, it was up and down, but the first "up" lasted 26 kilometers and climbed from about a thousand meters in under twenty-eight kilometers. We do not listen to Khun Jame anymore when he says something like, "oh, that is just a little hilly."
http://connect.garmin.com/activity/1905261 and
After a lunch of bananas, yellow sweet cake and Gatorade by the side of the road, I took off alone for the final descent into the town of Mae Sariang. Of course, Khun Jame said it was all downhill, but it was down and up and down and up and then one of the fastest, longest descents I have ever had in my life. The really scary thing about these fast descents is the unpredictable nature of Thai highways, where a nice road can go to crap very quickly. So, I don't think that I sped faster than I can see ahead, but there were some moments when I had to hope that the road on the other side of the turn that I was taking at 60 kmph was in good shape. Anyway, I made it down the hill:
http://connect.garmin.com/activity/1905260
So, after two days of riding with lots of hills, we found these nice cabins in Mae Sariang for 7,000 bhat a night each (about US$21 each.) Because we had started early from the hot springs, we finished our ride at about 2:00 pm and I took a delicious nap (particularly welcome since I had been up since 2:00 am with jet lag.. which had made for an even longer day.) But, this spot has Wi-fi (US$3 for about two and a half hours) and we found a wonderful restaurant in town for dinner.
Tomorrow, we are heading north along the border with Burma for about 100 km and will drive the rest of the way into Mae Hong Song. The road should really be just "up and down" and we are hoping for no big hills since the route will turn really vicious as we had back towards Pai on Tuesday and Wednesday.
I'm holding up well and hope to get a full night's sleep tonight since the bright light of day and the nap should have corrected me into this time zone, finally. I also bought a pack of cookies just in case I get a case of severe calorie depravation, like last night. Nothing like burning an extra couple of thousand calories, but Thai food is not the best for packing those calories back in again for day-after-day riding. As much as I would love to drop down from 82 kilos to 75 kilos, this is not the week to lose weight.
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