Tuesday, December 14, 2021
6:20 a.m. Room 21
Tha Song Yang Hill Resort Hotel
Tha Song Yan, Thailand
I should clearly leave Tha Song Yang and head north today. At this rate, I’ll never even make it to Mae Hong Son. However, I’m not going to. And that is because I really like the countryside in this area, and I want to do another loop. I love loops because it means that you can go out exploring and return to the place where you started. You don’t have to pack up all your gear in the morning. And you don’t have to worry about finding a new place to stay in the evening. Nor do you have to unpack and organize your new home. You simply leave with what you need for the day, knowing exactly where you will end up at the end of the day. More importantly, the loop can take you anywhere, and that anywhere is generally more interesting than where the main road will take you in a straight line.
I was thinking about this in very clear terms yesterday, because I started watching the latest videos from Itchy Boots. I haven’t had the time to watch all of her videos from Africa (which she calls Season 5), but she is at the beginning of Season 6, which restarts her journey from the southern tip of South America to Alaska. She was in the middle of that journey, in Peru, when the pandemic hit. I watched all her Peru videos because I found that period of time in her life quite interesting. She eventually left Peru to return to the Netherlands, and she left her motorcycle in Lima. I believe the idea was to wait until the pandemic was over and then she would simply fly back to Lima and pick up her journey where she left. But, of course, the pandemic has gone on much longer than anyone anticipated. I can’t remember now what happened with her motorcycle. I assume she arranged to have it shipped to the Netherlands, but I don’t remember watching a video about that.
While waiting in the Netherlands, she continued to make videos, but she switched the subject matter from journey videos to more topic-based videos, though all of them related to motorcycles in one way or another. And then she decided that enough borders were opening up that she could restart her journey. She wanted to start in Peru, of course, so that her journey would at least be unbroken geographically, but Peru was still largely closed. She decided the next best thing was to jump one country to the north and start in Ecuador.
And she decided to start with a brand new motorcycle. The video about that is the first video in Season 6, and it has over a million views already. I liked her ideas in that first video. She bought a motorcycle in South Africa for her Africa trip, and she decided that that bike was too heavy and unnecessarily powerful. While in the Netherlands, she bought a much smaller bike, and she found that she enjoyed how light and nimble it was. And she began to prefer that feeling, and she made up her mind to go with a lighter and less powerful motorcycle for the rest of the journey to Alaska. She bought a brande new Honda CRF 300 Rally.
I like that idea because whenever I watch these long-distance motorcycle videos or documentaries, the motorcycles themselves often seem to cause a lot of problems. In planning their journeys, people like Ewan McGregor will choose very large and powerful motorcycles. And by the time they load them down with all their gear, they are so heavy that they can barely handle them. And they fall over and break down and are simply too much motorcycle for the trip. There is one key moment in the very first video series from Ewan McGregor when someone on his team simply gave up on the big, fancy motorbike he started the journey with and bought some local lightweight piece of junk. And he was much happier.
Personally, I’m not a big fan of the look of the motorbike she chose. The Honda CRF 300 Rally is, of course, a rally bike. It has the styling and appearance of a large dirt bike. And all of that is good for rough roads. I guess the rally category of bike has a larger gas tank, longer maintenance intervals, and other features that make it good for covering a lot of distance. But it also looks gaudy. It’s bright and aggressive. It will look severely out of place wherever she goes in South and Central America. It will stand out. And that’s not a terrible thing. Just being a foreigner, she will stand out anyway. But with such a high-tech beast of a motorcycle and all her state-of-the-art clothing and gear, she will not exactly blend in to the local environment anywhere. I’d prefer something much less technical and more low key.
While watching her videos is when I started to think about this tendency to go on journeys that are marked by long straight lines. This is something that I’ve often thought about. And it’s normal and natural. I’ve seen it a thousand times. When people think about going on a trip, they will naturally start where they are and then they will draw a line that goes around the entire world. The idea is that they want to see as much as possible, and this line around the world goes through the most countries. It’s very romantic and exciting to draw that line and think about it. And Itchy Boots drew her line from the tip of South America to Alaska. That is a very common trip to plan and to execute. And it appeals to our human sense of accomplishment. The trip starts at the most southerly point on the planet and ends at one of the most northerly. And this point is always emphasized when the official start of the journey, as filmed, is always right at the edge of the water down south. Cyclists do this as well when they ride across North America. They will dip the wheel of their bicycle in the ocean on one coast and then ride to the other side and dip their wheel into the ocean on the other side. And a straight line connects to the two points. People do the same thing with train rides. People get very excited about taking the train all the way from Europe to the far end of Asia.
The trip I am on falls into the same category. People will draw a line starting in Bangkok that takes them in a line to Chiang Mai. I met a group of people here in Tha Song Yang the other day that were travelling through the north in a convoy of four fully outfitted pickup trucks. And they had driven all the way from Bangkok to here in one day. And they were going to drive the hundreds of kilometers to their final destination the next day.
But journeys like that don’t really see everything. They certainly don’t see as much as the plan seemed to promise. The thing is that if you follow a straight line down a highway for four thousand miles, all you see is whatever is in your field of view to the left and right of that highway. And today, I really should ride my scooter to Mae Sariang. That would get me farther down the road in terms of completely my journey. But I would see only highway 105 the entire time. And the loop I want to do today takes me off highway 105 and into the countryside, which, arguably is more interesting.
I’m not entirely sure I will be able to complete this loop today. It takes me around the Mae Moei National Park. And I first became interested in it when I noticed that a smooth paved road wound its way up into the mountains of the park. And there were many senic lookout points marked on the map. But when follow that road as far as is natural, it has actually doubled back on itself. And then it is heading south again and back towards Tha Song Yang. And that gave me the idea to keep going on that same road and turn it into a loop that comes right back here. But that could mean that half the journey will be on dirt roads. I can’t be sure about the condition of the road after a certain point. And I can’t even be sure that the road will continue all the way here. I did a bit of scouting yesterday, and that left me with some confidence. But the loop itself is 128 kilometers long. And that is a lot of ground to cover if half the road is really rough.
A shorter loop to the south is also a possibility. This is the loop I was considering initially. It would take me back to the road that I was on when I came up to Tha Song Yang. I could take the countryside roads from here back to where the waterfall is located and then loop down to 105 and back. I want to do that just so I can see exactly what I missed by making my wrong turn on the trip here. But I think it would be better to do something brand new. And this Mae Moei Loop will take me into new territory.
I think I’ve made up my mind. I will do the Mae Moei Loop. But I haven’t decided which direction to complete the loop in. I can begin on rough roads here and then loop counterclockwise. The idea is that the rough road will eventually link up with the smooth paved road. Or I can head northwest from here for 29 kilometers on smooth highway 105 and then turn west into the countryside on paved road. And then the day will end with rough road. I’ve been assuming that I would go clockwise and begin with the smooth pavement. But now I’m thinking that it would be more interesting to start the day with rougher more remote terrain when my energy levels are higher. And then I can end the day with smooth riding down the pavement. I like that idea better the more I think about it.