Thailand: Ban Pha Weng Part 1- training wheels required

Honda CRF300L a pair of Muppets we certainly didn’t stay clean for long

A meanderthal has to get around and this my friends is the real reason I came to Thailand.
I wanted to refresh very dormant motorbike riding skills. Many moons ago I rode a trail bike from Alice Springs to Byron Bay for a family event. It was the best 14 days of my life and the craziest. I literally walked into a bike shop with next to no experience bought a KLR250, spent a week learning how to ride it before setting off to tackle Australia’s toughest desert race track the Finke track and the Simpson desert

Young and dumb I somehow conquered it and to this day don’t know how I didn’t kill myself. An older and wiser (debateable) man today, I wanted to partake in another epic adventure of similar complexities but of biblical proportions. I mean where do you start when planning a long round the world adventure - it was so convoluted and complex. Moreover, I seriously lacked riding skills and experiences for an off road adventure of this magnitude. So I set about trying to achieve both without killing myself in the process.

Prabably be about all we should be allowed to ride safely, kid's posing with a kids go-cart on top of the mountain at our coffee shop

Enter HiVolt Moto Tours. I reached out to these guys and they stepped up. It’s run by P’Lah who a Thai local and Grace an Aussie expat is who make a great team. What these guys don’t know about enduro riding probably isn’t worth knowing. Grace has spent Five years riding around southeast Asia and is a wealth of knowledge on the topic, and P’Lah’s off road riding skills on a bike are second to none. So I knew I was in good hands

Initially this style of trail scared the shit out of me, because unlike this bit of trail they generally had steep drainage drains on one side, washed out in the middle and a mountain drop off on the outside.

Day one of our “impromptu” riding course saw us undertaking familiarisation riding on our Honda CRF300L bikes. P’Lah set out a course for us in an area where we weren’t going to harm ourselves and we undertook a couple of hours riding circuits. The man just stood there quietly observing our abilities, interjecting titbits of information as required and gently encouraging us. Not once did I get the impression he was like “look at these Muppets they can’t even get out of second gear”. Red was on his bike like a pro, scooting around and making me eat his dust. I was left with the feeling this was going to be a steep learning curve.

Taking a breather on the trail the scenery and diversity was stunning at every turn of the trail there was something different

Just before lunch this became evident when I took my first dirt dive or in this case I went for a little bath in a puddle. Coming up to this puddle I looked at it and went ‘ooh that looks a little deep’ so tried to go around it like I should. But alas the going around it was the interesting part.  My line was not perfect and when riding on slippery trails if you fall off your line well then you tend to fall off period and that is just what I did. My front wheel began Slipping off my line so I put out my left boot to steady myself only to find air and not solid ground, hey presto over went the bike into the puddle depositing my arse right beside it, drenching me. I sat there stunned for a second before jumping up, water dripping off me, to rescue the bike from its bath. I was more concerned about it than my damaged pride. Jumping back on, off I went a little livid at myself for making a rudimentary error.  It wasn’t long after this Red took his first dirt dive for the day,  I have to confess unashamedly that Reds little dirt nap made me feel better about my incompetence.

Breaking in the riding boots, a muddy trail was a bit of an understatement but a hell of a lot of fun even if we were clueless
Between us on this day we dirt dived 11 times. we definitely needed training wheels

After lunch we hit the trails again, this time headed to a local national park called Doi Suthep–Pui National Park and on top of the mountain for a coffee at Chong Wa Coffee Shop.  After a short 5-10 minute ride on bitumen we hit a trail, this was a relatively easy two track trail with some hairy bits. Unfortunately, said hairy bits were straight up in the form of washed-out trail. Red tackled it first, got about 50m into it before doing a dirt dive, then he did another about 50m up. To me it looked bloody scary. P’Lah sensed or smelled the fear and encouraged me on “just keep moving and don’t stop” and off I went. I just motored up it shitting bricks as I went, miraculously I made it. My feeling of accomplishment was relatively short lived, as we proceeded on up the mountain we came across a different kind of trail. Concrete two lane paths in very steep parts. You had to navigate them and stay on the concrete strip or you ran the risk of slipping off the mountain or into the ditch beside them. I found them shit scary with little room for error. Needless to say I dirt dived on the first one of them I encountered and so the afternoon proceeded - ride a little, dirt dive occasionally.  What should have taken us probably 40 minutes to ride up took us a good solid 3 hours, we were hopeless but in the end we got there all muddied up, pride dented but happy we achieved it. Some spectacular views and a beer later and we had to go down the same way we came up. But I’m happy to say the mountain yielded this time and I was done with dirt diving for the day. Tired, a little sore and aching from muscles I didn’t know I had we’d achieved our first day of riding and more importantly we hadn’t killed ourselves or damaged anything more than our pride. Mission accomplished.

My trusty steed, Honda CFR300L, gives you enough power to get into trouble and enough to get out of it. tough and versatile an ideal bike for all skill levels and extremely popular one on the trails of Thailand