From Hull to Everywhere Else

Now that I’m heading north in Vietnam I’m anticipating two biker loops near the Chinese border: the famous Ha Giang loop and the not so famous Cao Bang loop. I haven’t done much by way of planning for either of these yet. What I do know is that most people do them in groups with what are called Easy Riders. Easy Riders are what you get when you hire someone to ride the bike (or more likely scooter) for you, while you sit pillion and take loads of photos. That way you don’t have to worry about riding around a loop filled with, I presume, sharp hairpins and vertiginous drops. Or rather you can still worry but you’ve abdicated responsibility to someone else who you hope knows what they are doing.

Of course that’s fine for normal people. But for we actual bikers - who in my experience are not normal people - that prospect doesn’t appeal at all. We want to ride it ourselves. So with that in mind I’m casting my mind back to the Mae Hong Son loop in Thailand which I rode back in early January. I’ve been meaning to write it up from a biker’s perspective for some time and I’ve got a couple of hours to spare so here goes. I just hope I can remember everything I wanted to say. By the way this essay is for bikers only. If you’re here and you don’t ride a bike, there are plenty of other things you can be doing right now. All much less fun.

So the Mae Hong Son loop is, as its name suggests, a loop, perhaps 400km long, running around northern Thailand. You can obviously start it from anywhere but I did it starting and ending at the city of Chiang Mai circling anti-clockwise via Pai, then heading west towards the Myanmar border; from there more or less due south via Mae Hong Son itself and then back to Chiang Mai. I rode it over the course of three days. 400km doesn’t tell the story though. What makes it great from a biker’s perspective - I would go as far as to say it’s Biker Heaven - are the supposed 1850 or so turns swoops and switchbacks that you get to negotiate on the way - that’s about 4 turns for every kilometre you ride. If you can’t corner well by the start, you should be able to by the end, or I’ll want to know the reason why.

There are plenty of sights along the way. Plenty of things you can stop off and do. The city of Pai is well worth a visit. But I’m not going to talk about them. This is about the experience of biking the loop. If you want to read about sightseeing the loop, there are plenty of other blogs, I’m sure.

There isn’t one definitive route. I followed the one in Madornomad (www.madornomad.com/the-mae-hong-son-loop-motorc…). I set off on 4th January, my birthday (I decided doing the loop would be my present to myself) having hired a Honda CB750X from Mister Mechanic’s bike shop in Chiang Mai for about $30 a day. You can hire bikes much more cheaply - a scooter will cost you less than ten dollars a day and sometimes as little as five - but I wanted to do the loop on a proper bike. There was also the option of a CBR500 but as I haven’t ridden in a while I was a little worried about being on a sports bike. Not from a speed or control perspective but from an, “I’ve just turned 56 and am worried about my knees and hips being able to cope with three days on a sports bike,” perspective. You know what I mean.

Now for those who are reading this and who are in the IAM I’m going to say one or two things in this essay that might be a little controversial. The first is that I wasn’t wearing full gear. I did have a helmet. I did have good (but non-biker) boots. And no part of my body was exposed. But I wasn’t wearing protective biker gear. And that’s because none was available. Everyone here rides scooters but I don’t think I saw anyone wearing protection (…steady…) apart from bike tourers on their own bikes from elsewhere. I did search around a number of bike shops in the city to see if it was possible to hire some but couldn’t find any. So what to do? If you’re utterly strict about ATGATT, that means you simply cannot ride in these countries, but given that many millions of people do and moreover do so wearing T-shirts, shorts, sandals and without a helmet, that would seem a bit odd. Especially as being an IAM alum, I would hope I should be able to ride to a higher standard than most of the locals. So what to do? I take and took the view that the sensible approach is to moderate one’s speed (although see later). After all if you’re on a scooter going little faster than you can go on a bicycle-bike then you should be able to wear what you would be happy to wear on a bicycle-bike. For those of us who do ride bicycle-bikes, that normally means that all that separates us from the elements and from the road should things go wrong is a thin layer of lycra (or lychee as autocorrect would have it - next time I go cycling I’m wearing lychees).

So having hired the bike, conducted my checks, deposited my rucksack in storage at the Yellow Fellow Hostel where I was staying in Chiang Mai (and on departing the hostel clearing my head of the strange smell that emanated from the odd cigarettes that virtually everyone there seemed to be smoking), I was ready to set off on my way. However, getting started, that is getting onto the loop itself, wasn’t as easy as I thought it would be. I had my phone mounted on a phone mount. But the protective case for my phone was just ever so slightly too big for the mount itself. Not so big though that I actually noticed this until it was too late and the phone fell from the mount onto the ground as I was riding away from a set of traffic lights. Fortunately the case did it’s job and the phone was fine. It was picked up by a kindly pedestrian who returned it to me undamaged. Worryingly now, though, to get the phone to fit into the mount I had to take the case off. Which was at odds with what I would want to do as obviously now if the phone fell out, the chances are it would not survive. So I found myself checking the mount every few minutes to ensure that it was still firmly holding the phone in place. Just to add to the tension the mount had a tendency to unscrew itself as I rode. But to alleviate any sense of impending doom and keep your blood pressure low, dear reader, you’ll be pleased to know the phone did survive the trip and is still with me now.

Two other things delayed my enjoyment of the route. The first was the geography of Chiang Mai. I was attempting to follow the google maps route uploaded by Madornomad. But whichever route I took I seemed to get stuck in terrible traffic. Generally, the traffic was fine, but whichever route I tried it seemed to take me to one particular street where the traffic was literally jammed. It was not moving at all. The only alternative, which I eventually took, was a detour which probably added an hour to the time it took me to leave Chiang Mai and get onto the loop.

The second thing was the police. Now I have my driving licence with me but I do not have an international driving permit. The last time I had one of those was when I went to New Zealand just before covid. But that expired after a year. And yet apparently you need one in Thailand. If you get caught without one, you are liable to a massive fine of 500 baht (about £11.47). You get issued with a piece of paper which says you’ve been fined and that you have three days to pay. Now the good thing is that if you get stopped again within those three days you wave this piece of paper at the police and you won’t get fined again. You have three days immunity in other words. The bad thing is if you don’t pay in those three days, the fine increases considerably.

Now I had heard or read somewhere that if you did get fined you shouldn’t pay the police there and then as really they were looking for bribes. So, not wanting to do that but also not wanting to be stuck miles from anywhere when my three day grace period ran out I decided to head to the city police station and pay the fine before I left Chiang Mai. I was not the only westerner there doing the same thing. It would appear to be a nice little earner for them. But at least this meant they were efficient. I was in and out in five minutes.

But these three incidents, the phone, the traffic and the fine, meant that although I had set off about 10am, it was now 1pm and I was still in Chiang Mai, frustrated and not in the best frame of mind. Now we all know from reading Roadcraft that one of the checks you should do before you set out on any ride is on yourself so I decided that if I was now about to head into a challenging set of bends, I should have a break and sort my head out. Which I did. I stopped for coffee for an hour to calm down - although I’m wondering if coffee and calming down really go together?

But do you know what is also a great way of getting into the right frame of mind for riding? It is getting out of the city and suddenly finding yourself on arguably the best motorcycle route in the world. Five minutes out of Chiang Mai and I was suddenly onto a road full of bends, sweeping left and right, punctuated with tight turns, switchbacks, as many overtakes as you could manage and everything else you could want as a biker. All in a jungle setting which would suddenly open up into views of hills, mountains, terraced paddy fields and then back to jungle. Five minutes in and I had completely forgotten the stresses of earlier in the day and was in my element.

The next three days were exactly the same, except of course nothing was the same. Each bit of road, each bend, was different with its own unique set of challenges. Over the course of those days I almost fell into a meditative state where not only was I riding, but I felt that I was observing my own riding from outside and as I did so I felt like my riding reached a different level - a level where bike and I became one and shortly after that I became one with the universe and … sorry that’s veering into the realms of BS there isn’t it? Nonetheless, there is some truth in it.

So, avoiding the esoteric, here are some of my more down to earth observations. First, as bikers we aim to be prepared for pretty much any eventuality and for those of us who’ve done the IAM training, being prepared for the unexpected is pretty much at the top of the list right? One thing I wasn’t prepared for though (and for this I blame the IAM for an obviously glaring omission in their training) was snakes in the road. The situation was this: I was rounding a corner and saw a green patch on the road ahead of me. Nothing too concerning - probably a patch of grass that had been blown onto the road or a piece of vine that had fallen from above. No problem, I thought, I’ll just aim to the left of it and it’ll be fine. But just as I am approaching it the green patch resolves into a green line and not only that - it starts slithering. Until you have seen a snake moving on a road you haven’t seen anything. It moves in its characteristic S-shapes but nothing can prepare you for what it looks like until you actually experience it; it just looks so weird. Anyway I’m aiming just to the left of it, as it starts slithering towards the left aiming for the same bit of road. I have absolutely no desire to run over a snake. Who knows what bad luck that will bring? Also, I guess it’s at least possible that doing so will upset the bike. So I do a last minute swerve even further to the left and just miss him - or her. Good job I regularly practise my swerve drills (as outlined by Fast Eddie on his Moto Jitsu channel - www.youtube.com/watch?v=_O0aEN-fN00).

As I spend more time on the loop twisting and turning one way and then the other I noticed some changes in my riding. To sum it up, I’m getting faster. Speed comes, or should come, with competence, so I hope that means my riding is getting ever more competent. I view each corner as an opportunity to practise, but to practise properly, you have to stretch yourself ever so slightly out of your comfort zone and by doing so you find your limit and then raise that limit so you become a better rider. I think there are two ways of finding your limit: one is to consistently come at it from below (which is my approach) or alternatively to come at it from above. I suppose the latter might be quicker but is obviously the more dangerous of the two approaches because if things go wrong when you’re riding above your limit, they can go very wrong indeed.

Specific things that I’m doing? I’ve completely internalised limit point riding. I’m not having to think about it. It’s happening automatically. On the throttle when the road runs away, off the throttle and (given the frequency and sharpness of the turns) on the brakes as the limit point gets nearer. You’re doing it continuously, and it can’t help but become a habit. Countersteering the same. I’m not only pushing the way I want to go, push left to go left, push right to go right - I’m pulling the opposite handlebar at the same time and - I can’t think of a better way of putting it - aiming the bike where I want to go. This I picked up from I2I training and as a way of steering the bike, I find it very effective. It’s like countersteering but more so.

I’ve learnt many, many approaches to switchbacks. Even in a great riding environment like Yorkshire switchbacks are something of a rarity. Here they are two-a-penny common so you really can practise them. Uphill, downhill; wide in, tight out; tight in, wide out; different speeds, clutch-in, clutch-out, on the brakes, off the brakes. So many ways …

Now a couple of things that may incur a bit of IAM wrath. The jungle isn’t flat. It undulates, sometimes gently, sometimes steeply. And when it is undulating logic would suggest that 50% of the bends must be downhill bends. Which means that you have to be on the brakes into the bend. If you were to be off the brakes the bike would run away from you. So braking into the bends becomes a necessity. The more so as your speed increases. Trail braking in other words. And as your speed increases you aren’t just doing it on downhill bends, you’re doing it on virtually all of them. Not only does it enable you to go through the bends more quickly, it also means that if, which is not that infrequent, there is something in the middle of the road coming the other way that strictly speaking shouldn’t be there (Thai drivers are not the most competent or law abiding), you are already on the brakes, thus ensuring you can stop more quickly and make your turning circle tighter. I had a number of occasions where I encountered a car where it should not have been, but due to the fact that I was trail braking, not a single time did I feel that I was in an unsafe situation. I simply moved gently out of the way and carried on. The tyres will take a lot - and I mean a lot - of braking in a corner. What they won’t take is sudden braking.

The other thing as I progressed: I adopted the approach of Sylvian Guintoli (www.youtube.com/@SylvainGuintoli) in his tutorial videos about superbike racing - ie you should (almost) always be pinning the throttle or on full brakes. Remember this road has the twists and turns of a Cadwell Park so I’m never going at crazy fast speeds as there are simply no straights which would allow you to build up such speeds. But the loop with its twists and turns has the feel of a racetrack. It even - get this for those of you back in the UK - is pretty much pothole free! So I feel I can do this completely safely (or as safely as you can do anything on a bike). Obviously I temper this approach when other traffic - or people / animals - are around. But again this is an approach to riding that I think can be done safely in the circumstances. I don’t ride stupidly. But I do think as bikers we should all be looking to improve all the time and doing so inevitably means pushing yourself. And pushing yourself on a bike means pushing yourself faster while being as safe as you can. I’d be interested to know what other’s think. I’m happy to be disagreed with. We are all grown ups after all.

Anyway this means that over the three days on an unfamiliar road I feel completely safe and even the unexpected doesn’t faze me. I was overtaken only once and that by a pick-up truck which I could hear coming from behind from miles away as its tyres were screeching round each corner. When I saw it in the mirrors I decided I wanted him in front of me where I could see him so I let him past.

Further thoughts? As I said I had a phone mount and the phone was showing the road in front of me. But I found it much better to switch the phone display off. `The maps are so good now that they show you exactly what is coming up, but then you don’t bother to read the road. Or you do, but not in the same way because you know what is coming. I found it much more rewarding to read the road myself without knowing what was coming up and I’m sure it improved my riding.

As I head back on the last day with an aching bum (from riding Chris - not from what you’re thinking), I decide to take a video to show the route to my fellow riders. I take the phone out of the mount and put it in a pouch hanging round my neck, press record and I just ride for about fifteen minutes, recording what I think is a great section of road. Unfortunately, it turns out that the phone was aimed such that it only records the handlebars filling the screen - not much use to anyone. But it was during that fifteen minutes that the phone mount finally unscrewed itself and fell off. So luck was with me. I would have doubtless lost the phone if I hadn’t taken it out.

I arrive back into Chiang Mai and return the bike minus the right hand side of the phone mount. They seem not to mind. If I could I would do the same thing again straight away. If Sisyphus had been a biker, being condemned to do the Mae Hong Son loop till the end of time would not be a punishment. It would be Biker Heaven.Read more