RIDE THE AWESOME – RIDE THAILAND – PART ONE OF THREE PARTS

I had never been to Thailand. Nor had I ever been on an organised motorcycle tour. So what is that then?

Well, in the case of my host, Compass Expeditions, it’s when you pay Compass some money and book a tour. The rest is even simpler. It’s on you to arrive at the appointed airport on the appointed day, and you’re a grown-up, so booking flights and remembering the date is easy.

Then when you get to your destination, just hand your luggage to a smiling man who has a van waiting to whisk you away to a superb hotel, and that’s where your tour of your nominated country will begin.

All you have to do from then on, is ride the bike you’re given, and not put it into an elephant/ravine/freedom fighter. Your meals, your petrol, your accommodation, the sights you’ll see, and the roads you’ll ride, are all the responsibility of the tour company.

Your travel companions, on the other hand, are a wondrous lottery. Unless you bring a mate or mates (which is a great idea), or a pillion (depends on how attached to them you are), there will be strangers on that tour with you.

All of this I understood. And all of this concerned me greatly. Firstly, I have never been on such a tour, because organised tours which remove the freedom to do as you please did not fit with my mindset.

Secondly, I am not now and never will be a fan of riding with people I do not know. Especially over long distances, in foreign countries, in a follow-the-leader situation.

But I am not the son of a fearful man.

And my whole life has been a dice-game where I sometimes beat the house, and sometimes the house beats me…like a red-headed step-child. But I will roll the dice, because I am also a dreadful and degenerate gambler. All motorcyclists are to some degree. Me? I’m a fucken PhD in that regard.

I have, sore and crippled, survived tattooed Magyar thieves in the wild cornfields of Hungary. I have ridden the contemptuous bitumen of Old Serbia, where tour groups fear to go. I have sung the song of my people in the LA hills where the Kardashians turn men into women, and inject their faces with juiced monkey-glands. I have discussed border crossing issues with enemies of my blood. I have bribed Bosnian cops, sped along Croatian autobahns, and ridden around villages in Germany and Austria with too many beers on board, and the quaint notion of diplomatic immunity in my fool head.

So, while I am certainly no role model, I don’t scare easy. I am resourceful, I am always aware I’m a guest in someone else’s country, and I am allergic to all jail food. And I ain’t changing. It’s worked thus far.

On this occasion, I was a guest of Compass Expeditions, which was running its first-ever MotoGP tour of Thailand. I understand it had acquired the tour route from another company, and had then upgraded the accommodation and meals to a level Compass prides itself on, and denied to all but the mega-rich; I shit thee not. This tour also included a two-day pass to the first round of the MotoGP at Chang International Circuit. So, 13 days and 2680km, of what I was told were some of the best riding roads in the world. In my case you may add another 350km to that, as I will explain, and a big dollop of doubt.

“Thailand” and “best riding roads”? Huh? That just did not seem to go together in my ignorant head. This was a poor country, right? Second World at best, and full of rice paddies, elephants, scooters, lady boys, and shit-faced Aussie tourists and creepy ex-pats with way-too-young Thai wives. The roads had to be shit. It stood to reason.

More fool me. Yes, Thailand is indeed afflicted with the above, and there are a lot of rice paddies. But that’s not what Thailand is.

You know what Thailand really is? It is splendid. Thailand is the Klingon Empire on Buddhism. It is a nation of motorcycle riders – nearly all of whom ride better than we do. Think I’m kidding? Let’s see how you go coming down off a mountain, doing 90 three-up on a bald-tyred scooter, with a 60kg bale of buffalo grass on the back, and six four-metre-long bamboo poles on your shoulder, bitch.

As a consequence, Thai drivers are hard-wired to register motorcycles. You are no longer utterly invisible, like you are pretty much everywhere in the western world.

It is also nation that understands and abides in a personal freedom we in Australia cannot even conceive of. To us, “freedom” is an alien concept we talk about all the time, but we don’t understand it because we have never really had it. But Thailand gets it. And Thailand lives it.

Its national sport is skilfully and viciously beating the crap out of each other. Muay Thai gyms are everywhere. The men know how to fight. They smile and bow, are helpful to a fault, and avoid confrontation at every opportunity. But you’d need to be some special kind of fool to rile them up.

The state religion is Buddhism, and there are 44,195 Buddhist temples, or “wats”, in Thailand. Each of these walled wonders is an overwhelming visual feast of splendidly painted dragons, lions, roosters, elephants, buffalos, tigers, monkeys, and assorted demons. These creatures are sculpted rampant and garishly fierce. They stand sentry on the steeply-rooved temple buildings, one of which, the chedi (where the holy relics of monks are kept), is surmounted by a vicious spike perfect for feeding your enemies to the vultures. And each roof-peak and roof-corner contains something that looks like an impalement prong. They are places of sublime peace that to the western eye look like the gaudy palaces of savage alien warlords.

Thailand also hums with a type of splendidly benign chaos, and, as I discovered, is criss-crossed with some of the best roads you will ever ride. Roads which are better than the roads in Australia – and much of Europe.

Should you choose to ride there, and you really must, do keep your wits about you, and your head on a swivel. The Klingon Empire will always surprise you. There were roads that left me dry-mouthed and panting with awe – literally hundreds of kilometres of corners, fast, slow, and in-between, in an almost never-ending and overwhelming amount. The surfaces were mainly either good or great, and the roads ranged from six-lanes wide to the usual two-lane twist-fest we get in small chunks here in Australia.

Yes, there are occasional potholes. Yes, there is sometimes dust and gravel on corners. And yes, the Thais do have this habit of peppering the centreline with small steel feely-knobs, which will put you off your game a touch if you’re hard-cutting a right-hander bang on the lane-dividing line. Ride better and it won’t be a problem. Likewise, in the villages. You’re not gonna get the finest four-lane bitumen hot-mix running through a village. Which is a sign you shouldn’t be doing 140km/h through that village, right?

Of course there are also scooters riding along in the breakdown lanes, and sometimes the odd ute going the wrong way in those same breakdown lanes. Now and again, you may encounter a pink-bellied buffalo or an elephant. Or a traffic cone. In the middle of your exit from a corner. But if the local dogs can adapt, so can you.

Always and everywhere, you will encounter Asian dogs who look a lot like our dingos. They basically live and sleep where they please. The traffic is their bitch, and passes around them as they doze on the road, or saunter casually across it. They are as indifferent to vehicles as only multiple generations of breeding and accustoming can make these amazing creatures. I’m sure the dumb ones were slaughtered ages ago. The dogs there now are pretty special. No, do not pat them. You are not of their people, fool.

My people, on this tour, were a varied bunch, much as you’d expect. Nearly all were men in their late sixties and early seventies, with two younger bucks, and four ladies. There were 18 of us all up, which is quite a sizeable group to be shepherding around anywhere, let alone the Klingon Empire.

We also had a mix of nationalities, with two Americans, one Canadian, one gent from Belfast, two blokes from France, and two ladies from Japan. The rest were all Australians, and the remaining two ladies were pillions for their husbands. It was a wonderfully eclectic mix.

As you’d imagine, riding abilities varied from: “Oh, you came to Thailand to learn to ride? Cool!” to “He just came around me on the outside and he’s not really trying, I think…” But for the most part they were relatively experienced riders, and seemingly content to just plod along. I don’t do “plod”, but I liked the company of some of them very much. The rest I was good with, and there was really only one bloke who gave the impression he’d come to Thailand to be dissatisfied with everything, and to constantly inform the Thais of this ongoing displeasure. His sad private school education was clearly on display.

We had to stop a few times because the corner-man system will invariably confuse people no matter how many times it’s explained or demonstrated. That is not so much a problem with the system as it is with people to whom it is entrusted. He complained about that a lot. Mainly to George, our intrepid Thai guide (and next to Tommy, our indefatigable Thai back-up-van driver, supplier of cold towels and water, and keeper of the ice-cold beer esky), the nicest bloke you’d ever meet. Like every Thai I met, George was perpetually polite and accommodating, and would try and explain why we needed to wait for lost people or people with flat tyres. Old mate was not having it. He was being inconvenienced and that was all that was important. My interactions with him were very few. I think the last thing he yelled at me as I was corner-marking, was he was about to run out of petrol and someone should be immediately informed about this. Perhaps the uncaring shrug I replied with had something to do with our relationship not blossoming.

Still, you get all kinds of egos and characters on any ride where strangers are tribalised for two weeks in a foreign land. I’m fairly certain not everyone thought the sun shone from my bum either. But I did my best not to carve anyone up, and remained polite and cheerful throughout the trip. I was, after all, a guest. And my mother taught me manners. Were there times when I felt humanity’s needs might best be served selling someone to the remaining headhunters in the Thai jungles? Sure. I’m fairly certain I’d have got a nice buffalo for old mate in any of the village Muay Thai gyms where he would have performed brief, but sterling duty, as a teary kicking sack.

But truly, it was all water off a duck’s back, from where I was sitting. I had vowed to embrace the come-what-may sine wave of chaos-joy-chaos-joy from Day One. Thailand was a new and altogether wonderful experience for me. Nothing and no-one was gonna ruin that. Had we been kidnapped, bound with jungle vines, and hauled off to the snake-fighting pits of Myanmar, I would have easily rolled with that as well.

Our tour leader, and a man I would follow into battle without hesitation, was Pete Vorst. Pete and I have known each other for a long time. He is a superbly skilled rider, very easy-going, largely unflappable, and perfectly suited to guiding folks through alien landscapes. It was only thanks to him, George, and Tommy, I’m not in some submerged bamboo cage in the waters of the Mekong being tenderised for the village feast. They brought everyone home hale and hearty.

And while I feel I could have talked Pete into taking me to a rural cockfight so I could gamble my holiday money, plane tickets, and motorcycle, away in frenzy of betting, blood and feathers, George proved to be less malleable. And I tried. To his credit, he did jump on the brakes at one point, and let me ride beside him as he waved and pointed off the road to a big group of cars and people. “Cockfight! Cockfight!” he laughed, then accelerated away.

See also

Esoterica

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SHIT MY WIFE SAYS – FOOT-AND-MOUTH DISEASE

15 July 20222

Bastard, I thought. You finally bring me to a cockfight, then ride off at speed, knowing full well I’m not quite stupid enough to pull over because I have no idea where I am, and I have become addicted to Tommy giving me a cold towel and a bottle of iced water at every stop.

One final word before I begin my day-to-day recounting has to be about the bike. I was given a BMW 1250 GS HP. It was immaculate and performed flawlessly. And I can think of no better bike to do this trip on. It is simply ideal for everything – scratching, cruising, picking your way around dogs – and it’s all-day comfortable. Such GSs made up the bulk of our group bikes, though there were a few smaller-capacity variants, a few Triumph Tiger 900s, one small Africa Twin, a V-Strom, and an R3 and Honda 500 for the two Japanese ladies.

Thanks for being with me thus far. I guess I’ll now have to confess to what happened each day, tell you how hot it was, what I saw, where I rode, and how I came to the conclusion this trip was one of the greatest riding experiences I have ever had. So, if you’re seated comfortably, let us begin…

DAY ONE – CHANG MAI

“Is that a building selling hot foreskins?”

It is the largest city in northern Thailand, with 1.2 million people, and cloaked in a rich history. It was founded by King Mangrai (the 25^th king of Ngoenyang, and the first king of the Lanna) in 1296 as the new capital of the Lanna Kingdom (“Chang Mai” means “new city”). And our hotel, the superb Smile Lanna, sat directly across the moat that still encircles the old city, and right beside a Muay Thai gym where heads were being kicked and elbows were plunging into eye-sockets as I arrived.

My fourteen-hour journey, which included a lumbering sprint through the vastness of the Bat Empire’s incredible new Hong Kong airport to make my connecting flight, was vile. I was prepared for that. I was not prepared for it to be 36 degrees at seven pm in Thailand. But I had two weeks to get used to it. So I do not repeat myself, understand it was always between 36 and 38 degrees. Around midnight it would drop to 32, then make its way down to about 27 as the sun went up, and by 8am it was 38 again. Every day was a non-sexy sweat-fest. I sweated all the time and came home almost three kgs lighter, which was fabulous.

The Smile Lana Hotel dropped my jaw. It sat, a four-storey horseshoe, in the midst of a perfectly manicured tropical jungle, a metre off one of the main roads in Chang Mai. It personified the world “oasis”. The rooms were large, with balconies looking out over the pool, the linen crisp, the air-con on point, and everything immaculate. It even had an electric tennis racket for frying mosquitos who attacked you. Hell of a kick-off by Compass, I thought. If it was trying to impress me, it had succeeded.

I was also impressed by the weed shop I found 150m from the hotel, and the bar that sold cold beer for two-dollars directly opposite it. The Klingons certainly knew more about town planning than we did.

The next day, I got up early, ate a bunch of tropical fruit at the breakfast bar, said “Hello” to a few of my obviously fellow riders, and went walking. Tough gig, this walking in Chang Mai, I discovered. The footpaths were clearly installed after the roads and power-poles had been sited. In many places, this made the footpaths impassable, so you had to walk onto the road. The endless stream of scooter-riders, all helmetless, many two-, three-, and four-up, made their way calmly around me. Not a horn was beeped, and not a single insult to my mother was voiced. So very unlike the rest of the world.

Later that morning, Vorsty and I got in a Tuk Tuk, demanded the driver do wheelstands, and made him take us to the local shopping mall so issues with Vorsty’s Sim cards could be sorted. Tuk Tuks are the most splendidly deranged and unsafe forms of public transportation ever created. Maybe only a spiked carriage pulled by rabid runaway mules could come close.

After sorting the Sim card issues, Vorsty and I elected to walk back to the hotel along the same broken and shattered footpaths that had tripped me up the night before. Everything I saw was strange and wondrous. We were in a part of Chang Mai not frequented by tourists, so no matter how much you stare at the manifold Thai signs on the buildings, you really have no idea what’s inside. That was pretty much the case throughout Thailand. Major highways and roads all have signs in English, but everything else is in Thai. And it’s such alien writing. Your brain plays tricks on you as it tries to make sense out of the script you’re seeing. Words that kinda look like “VULVA” and “GROSSKNOB” do not mean that at all.

Vorsty and I came back in time to get on a bus, go get our bikes with everyone else, and ride them back to the hotel. No-one died in that first encounter with Thai traffic, so my heart sang. This might actually work, I thought.

We’d had an intro session just before that, where everyone introduced themselves, spoke of their riding experience, discussed the corner-man system we were to utilise, and we all had the co-ordinates of our destinations in our phones uploaded via a dedicated WhatsApp chat group in case anyone went rogue.

That night’s dinner was in a Michelin-hatted restaurant on the banks of the Ping River directly opposite the US Consulate. A young lady played Thai melodies on a dulcimer – and after three icy Singhas, Coleridge, damn his opium-fried brain, was speaking to me…

“A damsel with a dulcimer

   In a vision once I saw:

   It was an Abyssinian maid

   And on her dulcimer she played,

   Singing of Mount Abora.”

The next morning at 8am, we were on the road to Mae Sariang.