Day 121-122 Mae Hong Son and back to Pai
Right, 47% of all our climbing has been done in the month of September! Any only about 15% of our kilometre. It has been a hard month, so very hard.
We snapped a chain, pushing/rolling the bicycle 17kms or so. We when up grades of 15% we rubbed all the braking material off our rear brakepads and I lost my cool many times.
It was hard, hard work. I’m a lazy bugger and I was never really looking forward to ‘the hills’. In the past tow days we did 3,000m of climbing and that is something I do not want to do again in a hurry.
We’ve got only 2 more hills to climb and we’re back in the central plains, we will have alot more traffic there, we will have a lot more long straight roads, we will have no lovely vistas but we will also have NO MORE HILLS (well pretty much).
Today we rest, we made it from Mae Taeng to Pai and from Mae Hong Son to Pai, effectively covering the whole distance by bicycle. See we are happy we’ve met the Every Province Challenge rules we set for ourselves to cycle to every Amphur Mueang.
The first 20km out of Pai are pretty much straight up, and since we’ve already cycle it once, we will be investigating a cost effective method of get our bicycle to the top of this hill without cycle and rolling down the other side into Chiang Mai.
So people might consider this cheating, we don’t really care. We could have finished the trip in Mae Hong Son and not have to cycle back, and we’ve already cycled thru the ‘province’ of Bangkok once, so we didn’t really need to go back, but we wanted to finish in Bangkok and ride with out friends.
Today we’ll take a day off, Natt crazy rash has turned into millions of blood red dots (after the injections and tablets) she’s alive. The bicycle is still rolling and I’m not killed myself or anyone else yet.
The 7,500km we’ve nearly cycled as run thru one set of brake pads, one rear cassatte and one chain, plus a front and rear tire. I think we’ve spend over 6,500 Baht on replacing just these things.. does anyone else this is not reasonable for 122 days on the road (US$1.75/day)?
I think we’ve spend more on stuff but that’s the bulk of it. I’d have to look back thru the expense book, at the end of the trip I will put the whole cost of everything up so people can see what we spend on our 150 day trip around Thailand.
The cycling in this area has been amazing beautiful, and I wouls suggest that if people are strong enouigh (or even if you’re not) they should spend a couple of weeks riding around the area. The roads have limited traffic, I would think disc brakes are a MUST and don’t bring much gear, I mean the very very minimum. Make you life easy.
I think if someone was on the road bike with small day bag and was willing to wash their cycling clothes each day it could make it pretty good fun, and some decent training.
You need to bring water, snacks, food some of the locations are long way between drink stops for me anyway to sweats like a leaky tap.
