Bike work!  I’m at a very happy point with my bike.  There is nothing that I can think of that needs fixing or maintenance.  In the last couple of days I’ve installed a new and loud horn, a voltmeter, fixed my heated grips, and put a piece of rubber where my tank was rubbing on the radiator.  The radiator issue is caused by a crash I had last year with the DRZ and the fact that my tank is plastic.  Plastic + sharp metal != good.

The next post is going to be a full sized post about my Chiang Dao trip to Pai!  Lots of offroad fun.

It was an easy ride to Chiang Mai.  We planned for a big day and started 3-4 hours earlier than we’ve started previous days — 7:30.  Yeah, well, I’m not much for early AMs now that I’m not working.  Anyway, it ended up being an easy day and we made it to Chiang Mai by 3pm with several breaks for food, photos, and near drops up steep offroad switchbacks.

I’m back at the Rider’s Corner enjoying life.. going to get a bunch of bike work finally resolved.

Finally we left Pai.  Today we barely made it out of there by 1 or 2pm after sending a load of things back home.  I picked up a hammock and sent back a collection of maps of Thailand from the 1970s that the former owner of the hostel left behind many years ago.  He ran a tour company in either Pai or Phaeng.  I dont know much about the guy, but he had a huge collection of maps that were both professionally produced and a bunch of hand-drawn maps that contained trails to the hill tribes.

I started to bleed my brakes and realized that I could make a mess so I asked the guest house staff for some news papers to cover the ground.  She then pointed me to this box and started pulling out vintage maps for me to use instead.  As Dean from Oz would have said it, “I nearly had a kitten.”

There was no way I’d let maps have that fate!  I spent the next two hours going through maps instead of working on my bike.  I collected a pile of the professionally produced maps to ship home and I’m going to bring some of the handdrawn maps to a Mx tour operator that I met in Chiang Mai to see if they can be of use to him.

The ride from Pai to Mae Hong Son was all asphalt but is a ride of legend in Asia.  While I’ve never been on the Dragon in the USA, I bet this would compete.  There were many combinations of sweeping turns followed by pinhair switchbacks climbing up and down the mountains of Northern Thailand.  What made this ride challeneging was that the surrounding cities all do tourist rentals of 125cc scooters and don’t require any test of competance to take it out.  I passed several wide-eyed westerners who were attempting to cruise this amazingly twisty road.

I didn’t manage to get any good pictures because it was too forested in, but every once and a while you could get a glimpse of the mountian passes that we were climbing.

Easy day of riding with about 50km of relatively easy offroad.  The original plan was to ride this stretch last night but we managed to find a guest house in Wiang Haeng.   With what seems to be a I had a late night having fun with the locals.   This was the second night in Thailand that I’ve seen the local head of police falling asleep at a bar.
It would have been a horrendously stupid idea as there was a good amount of livestock around as well as a few of the dirt lines would have been much trickier in the dark.  Even though I have a good headlight, it really is a bad idea to ride off road at night.

Pai is an interesting place — it is quite touristy but not exclusively for westerners.  There are tons of Thai tourists wandering the streets snapping photos along side the farang (Westerners).  My guest house is a bit of a dump with no wifi (hence the delay in the post), but it is clean and in a good location.  I went out with a group of French people that Dean met a few weeks ago on Thailand islands and we all had a great time.  Somehow it is nearly 4am as I write this microupdate!

Pai Day Two

I’m really starting to like it here.  I understand why it has a reputation of backpackers visiting and not leaving for a few weeks.  While there really isn’t much “to do”, I’ve been enjoying taking it easy and not having to deal with people trying to sell you suits, massages, or begging for money like in the rest of Thailand’s touristy areas.  It is very nice to not have sex tourists everywhere and the people who cater for them.

Scooter rentals here are cheap!  So there are tons of dangerously mobile tourists that they rent at 100 Baht ($3.20) a day.

Today I pretty laid low and did some bike work– fixed the nozzle on my crappy chain oiler yet again and replaced both the front and rear brake fluid.  The front was already pretty clear but the rear really needed it.

Spyshot of DRZ watercrossing with river up to paniers

We had a late start because I was fixing some bugs with the new forum that I’ve set up for some local riders here called RideAsia.net. Everything is working great there and you should check it out!

Yesterday was an amazing ride. We rode through: five deep and fast flowing river crossings – Walking tracks around a village of an indigenous Thai hunting tribe – 5 river crossings with one where we had 8 people walking the bike across a torrent of a river waist deep – bypassed 2 earth movers as the road was being worked on.

All in all, there were about 25km of offroad mountain track where a 1 KM section took over 3 hours.

No riders down. No bikes broken.

It was a good day.

I’m going to try a new style of updating so that I can actually keep the content more fresh.  A typical blog entry takes a few hours to write and put together the pictures.  Now I’m just going to try to put up what I have without taking hours and hours.  I will then post longer elaboration / photorich entries as I have done in the past.

So.. for yesterday.

The bike is running GREAT!  Drizette’s getting me all over Thailand and not demanding much in return other than the highest quality of Benzine I can manage.  It is amazing to be back on the saddle– I actually feel like a motorcycle traveler again!!

Yesterday I met up with Dean and rode from Chiang Mai to Chiang Don almost entirely offroad.  We took a route given to us by an offroad tour operator with waypoints in the middle of northern Thailand’s forested mountains.  It was an amazing ride that was difficult enough to be challengening but not too hard where it was demoralizing.  The road ranged from clay 4×4 high clearance type to washed out single track up steep inclines.   Absolutely no problems for the DRZ loaded with luggage.  Is this the right bike?  HELL YAH.

Everything didn’t go well though — Dean’s Zumo 660 took a crap followed by my 550.  Fortunately we had finished all the navigational aspects of the ride before mine died.  I was able to fix mine later that night after pulling the battery and reseting the unit, however Dean’s is still broken.

I’m now in Chiang Dao heading west on another offroad track.