Frome [URL]http://umgweb.com[/URL] Roads to Ruin A slow sashay from Korat to Chiang Mai, two-up on a step-thru! Getting the girlfriend's step-thru from Korat to Chiang Mai, about 500 miles, just about covered by any excuse for a ride... the Yamaha a machine I'd reluctantly piloted for short trips and treated with a certain amount of disdain, which included going the wrong way through the box (it was four down for up and clutchless). Top speed about 75mph but 60mph more realistic as the rear inner-tube tended to explode when subjected to excessive speed, not to mention the girlfriend throwing a fit every time I wound the OHC thumper up to 70mph. Built to accommodate whole Thai families rather than a mere couple of lost souls with a combined mass of 260lbs, the Yam was actually quite spacious and could reasonably accommodate my 5'10" height. The seat, though, was definitely designed for short haul trips, half an hour enough to get my backside complaining. A new seat the obvious solution, a few shops in Korat that would rework the existing item into a more supportive design but there was no time for that. That's how I ended up taping a folded towel atop the existing saddle, much to the amusement of the locals. Never a fan of the basic step-thru design, although at least it sported seventeen inch wheels rather than the silly little things found on scooters, I am at least appreciative of the storage capacity between seat and down-tube, although the idiot who designed the seat so it hinges forward needs a good kicking - as in having to remove my carefully bungee-corded bag every time the bike needed fuel. Nevertheless, the Yam benefited from carrying its luggage near its centre of gravity and didn't even seem to mind another pile of junk thrown in the cute front shopping basket, dearie (I can see all the ancient mariners out there mouths agape at the state I've come to, but my nights are much more interesting than the bike, so like I give a shit...) The cost of fuel for the trip turned out to be dead on six quid (at 40p a litre) - or around 125mpg - even throwing in a hotel stop-over at the halfway mark for a fiver, it worked out cheaper than taking any of the available public transport options, though not easier! A new chain and sprocket set fitted before departure at the ludicrously cheap cost of five quid (including labour) and for the first time in its existence, the tyre pressures were set by an actual gauge rather than some macho youth wielding an air-hose. The mileometer read 15,600 miles (actually nearly dead on 25000 kilometres) which probably explained the totally clapped out, almost seized solid chain. I woke up after a night of fitful sleep, feeling like opting out and going on the bus. But once I actually bounced out of bed into a cold water shower, I though f..k it, a good a way to go out as any - mowed down by mad, amphetamine crazed, lorry drivers in the midst of a tropical storm; Bangkok, a couple of hundred miles south, being lashed by the edge of a typhoon as we were leaving Korat. I'd promised the babe a leisurely saunter up north, with the odd bout of sightseeing and plenty of food stops. But having departed three hours later than planned and being a proper biker at heart, such sanity was soon jettisoned in favour of a 65-70mph cruise through the Korat heartland in the general direction of Chaiyapoon as that particular road artery began just next to where we were staying. Most major roads leading into Bangkok are hell on earth, total death-zones for a small motorcycle, but once away from the industrial heartland, the highways are generally well maintained and not too busy with cages. In fact, most highways have a half lane to the left which is just for motorcycles - which completely disappears when the road narrows to accommodate a bridge; potentially lethal in the night. Throw in blue skies, about thirty degrees C mitigated by our self produced gale, and I was soon into the buzz of riding a bike. Hardly any cars and all the plod sensibly asleep in their air-conditioned roadside huts. Mostly countryside dotted with small towns that slowed us down a bit. About fifty miles, and an hour, down the road, I pulled over for some bum relief, buy some gas (no idea how frequent were the stations) and to check the map to see where we were supposed to turn off. It was at this point I discovered that I'd thoughtlessly brought along a map of Bangkok rather than of Thailand - bloody useful, that, and got the babe going, doubtless fearful of ending up in Laos or somewhere. I knew that even if we missed the turning, we could still turn left at Chaiyapoon instead, at the price of extending the journey by about twenty miles or so. No great hassle I laughingly reassured she-who-must-be-obeyed, who muttered something about advanced senility setting in. The gas boy found the towel and the need to dismantle my luggage hilarious, especially as it needed less than half a gallon of fuel. Better safe than sorry, I didn't fancy pushing the bike in the late morning heat. The Yamaha generally comported itself quite well, although the angle of the handlebars in relation to my body caused a minor soreness in my right wrist; clutchless, it was easy enough to relieve any tension in the other hand and if I was doing this as a regular chore I would opt for a cruise control (as ridiculous as that sounds on such a slow bike) and might even be tempted to bodge one on myself. I could just imagine myself zooming across the Thai landscape with both hands free to give the locals a regal wave. Constant cruising did churn up a lot of wind noise, allowing cars to creep alongside without any aural warning; the right-hand mirror not much use at speed. Even flat out, stability was oddly good, given the rather wimpy front forks - though thankfully not those godawful trailing link things Honda C90's used to sprout - almost worn out tyres and the way it would sometimes amble off to the left on take-off. With my luggage giving me something to grip with my knees, as per a proper motorcycle, I even found I could fling the thing around the odd patch of pot-holes. But the seat, even with the added padding from the towel, was getting to me as the first hundred miles were clocked up. Incidentally, the turn off was well indicated and even a drunken fool couldn't have taken the wrong route. I'd had a quick five minute stop in the middle of nowhere after the woman started wriggling around. She also complaining about a stiff neck - she likes to peer around my shoulder, convinced that I am going to throw the Yam down some deep crater or mow down an innocent pedestrian (too expensive but I do play chicken with stray dogs, you have to face them down...). By the time we rolled into a minor town, clueless as to which turning to take to fast exit the place, we were both in a little pain. It took a few seconds for my joints to creak back into place whilst my erstwhile passenger did a passable imitation of a John Wayne walk as she shuffled off to the toilet; how to age a babe by ten years in one easy lesson. In such circumstances there's only one thing to do, buy some food; Thais love to eat! The restaurant looked a bit dirty to my taste so an ice cold bottle of Vitamilk (soya milk) sufficed; apart from two cups of coffee for breakfast the first thing I'd had all day. Whilst the lady was drowning her sorrows with a couple of plates of Thai food, I ambled off around the town in search of a book shop. 30 baht sufficed for a map of Thailand; the print was so small I couldn't read the road numbers but the babe could, much to her amusement; god knows how I will be treated when I relive my second childhood with a woman thirty years my junior rather than a mere twenty. Be fun to find out, though. So far we'd been lucky - good roads, minimal traffic and not a cloud in the sky. I should've known better, having previously experienced the joys of sun exposure whilst ambling along atop a motorcycle in the Thai countryside. I had factor 40 suncream which I religiously applied to my nose but not having a lot left I was a bit parsimonious on the rest of my face; my forehead already bright red and feeling painful; whilst the back of my hands looked almost diseased - too hot for gloves but I did run to some heavy-duty boots, worn as a matter of course to fend off rabid dogs and mad tourists both, and a denim jacket to keep the sun off my neck and arms. Loaded up with more fuel, though there was no need to be religious about it as there were plenty of stations, ambled off into the afternoon heat under strict instructions to keep the speed down as she was absolutely convinced that the tyres would explode when subjected to the combination of forty degrees of heat and high speed. Let's just say that the back tyre was too hot to touch after a fast fifty miles (and I'd noticed that the spoked wheels didn't have any tape inside the rims when we'd had past punctures!). Unfortunately, keeping the speed under 60mph meant that the self produced gale was of insufficient proportions to keep me cool and my right hand kept opening her up a little - after all, this was Thailand where you're supposed to live for the moment rather than worry about the future - and occasionally blasting along at all of 75mph over the flat landscape, the motor thrumming away contentedly, until the passenger threw a wobbly and started digging me in the ribs. It has to be said that the miles (it's all kilo's in Thailand but I think in miles, so there) clicked off a hell of a lot faster at 70mph than they did at 60mph, a dynamic dislocation that offered no sane resolution. All through this journey I thought in 50 mile segments - it made no sense to tick off distance done in the context of more than 250 miles; okay, give me a large, comfortable cruiser and I could get my mind around it. But fifty miles was something simply achievable on a step-thru and easy to feel accomplishment as each ten miles was completed, trying to time it in under ten minutes, Sounds easy but there were often towns slowing us down, as well as the odd agricultural vehicle meandering all over the shop, and the odd five minute stop for bum relief. That said, there was plenty of good, sweeping tarmac that would've been a blast on a 100mph motorcycle but too dangerous to go faster than that; never quite sure what the radical shadows cast by the trees might hide - in Korat they seemed to take a real delight in aligning the road humps to slow traffic so that they looked almost identical to shadows cast by the trees - one of the reasons the babe was a bit edgy about my eyesight as I wouldn't notice them to the last possible moment; though it has to be said I never had a dodgy moment on this country trip. Riding through the Thai countryside, mostly flat but verdant nevertheless, gave an impression of beauty and relaxation but anyone who's stayed in somewhere like Petchabun - which for complex reasons I now had no intention of stopping in - will know it's really super-heated, mosquito infested swampland given a bare coating of civilization that dissipates as soon as the sun sets. Mad dogs, crazed locals and deep rooted nastiness the least of it. But zooming along on the Yam, at once a floating part of the scenery and equally (and thankfully) disparate from it, was a kind of buzz even if the highway was a touch on the big and busy side. Three years since I'd last been in that dismal zone and a huge amount of infrastructure had gone down; previously small ramshackle towns blooming into minor cities and well hidden side turnings opening up to dual carriagway type roads leading to other cities. Mind, they'll need to cut a hell of a lot of rice to pay for it all! Petchabun famed for the quality of its chicken but the bird flu epidemic seems to have put all the highway stalls out of business, much to the disgruntlement of my stomach. More gas and Vitamilk and bum respite. It was a relief to turn off on to highway 225, which brought us back sharply into the real countryside. There is no direct, straight line, route from Korat to Phinsanulok, have to hop, skip and jump along major and minor highways to do it in the shortest distance. If you have a Merc it's probably faster just to keep to the main highways and make up the extra distance in speed. The babe kept muttering it was 800 kilo's to Chiang Mai and we were still a long way off, almost having a fit when some roadside vendor told her it was 500 kilo's from our halfway stop in Phinsanulok rather than the 360 kilo's I'd guessed. As it turned out, I was right and we'd done more than half the distance in the first day. Those last thirty miles were the worst, my bum was in bitter complaint mode and my head was being done in by a fierce sun straight out of a nuclear explosion that was shining directly in my eyes. And all the locals were out and about in their cages, finally hitting on heavy traffic as we headed for the city centre as half the people in the town finished work for the day. It would've been easy to hit something as my concentration was a bit shot; decades of biking got me through on sheer survival instincts even when I was half blinded by the sun - stupidly, I complained about the sun to the babe and the gods got their revenge the next day. The first hotel we spotted (well disguised with no English signs), we rolled on in there, creaked ourselves off the bike and, I at least, felt pretty high, if a bit bum sore, at surviving so far. The first half of the trip had taken eight hours and I was determined to do better on the second half; hard going to get the babe to grasp the basic physics of the less time in the saddle, the less sore your arse gets! There wasn't a touch of blue in the sky, just dark grey, as we exited the hotel at 6.30am, dead on schedule for once. Wasn't actually raining but the lack of cloud movement meant I had no idea if we were riding into or away from heavy rain. In theory it was chasing up from the south but it was also the beginning of the rainy season and could come in any which way. Couldn't say it was cold but it was definitely cool, allowing me to wind the Yamaha up to 70-75mph, determined to do a fast first hundred miles that would allow for a saner amble later, especially if the weather got to us. More than half the journey ahead would be up and down some wild old mountain roads as we gradually ascended to the northern city of Chiang Mai. Basically, stick the bike on Route 11 and stay with it until we hit our target, although, just to confuse innocent foreigners, there were a couple of times when the road numbers changed for a short distance as it skirted large cities. Pushed the Yamaha to its maximum for an hour and half, great roads with not a lot of traffic at that time of day. The babe insisted on breakfast, some kind of noodle nonsense that would make me throw up if I ever indulged. The next stage of the journey, all hardcore curves and hills... some serious muscle went into wrestling a road out of the mountains on Route 11, an absolute determination to delineate the sovereignty of the Thai nation from south to north stamped on the route as it wound its way up and down, around and around, solid rock. Twenty, thirty mile stretches when if you had something as simple as a puncture you were seriously f..ked - it was at this point in the journey - all ancient mariners out there please be seated before you fall over in sheer astonishment - that I recalled the carefully collected but rarely used toolkit was sitting in a box in what passed for my office but would normally be classed as a spare bedroom! Clever Trevor! This winding, descending and ascending route, swept by rain and bordered by wild vegetation hiding all kinds of nastiness, also nurtured that most fantastical of beasts - bloody great lorries that pulled massive trailers loaded up to unreal heights straight out of hell. Up some of the hills they barely moved, appearing as if gravitational forces were about to flip them backwards! Their drivers were renown for 24 hour shifts, fed on heightened awareness thanks to the twin demons of rice whisky and readily available amphetamines. These chaps, when sane, tended to drive within a millimetre of the white line that divided the left lane from the metre or so wide far left lane that was alloted to motorcycles - and it was kind of surreal to sneak up on their bumpers, apply maximum acceleration for the unlikely length of their vehicles and hope - bloody pray - that none of the twitchiness resultant from their various and multiple addictions would go down just at the moment when you were sweeping past. There was nothing but death and destruction if you ran out of luck at that particular moment in time - either thrown half a mile down a valley or crushed against a metre or two high concrete embankment. The babe tended to clamp her body all the way around me in total fright at such moments but we somehow ran with our combined luck and survived the day. The roads were wet but not awash; mostly the cagers had their windscreen wipers off - I kept clocking the oncoming vehicles for signs that we were heading into a disaster area. Our luck mostly held. 60mph was about right, enough air velocity to keep the rain off but not so fast that if things turned evil I couldn't used the brakes to pull out of danger - the air whipped the rain off my trousers and actually kept me dry; weird but wonderful: the babe ended up with soaked jeans from inadequate rear mudguarding. A larger motorcycle, at this point in time, would've been a waste of space. The gods tried us a little with a taste of a tropical storm, the kind of rain that soaks you in seconds - before I could even think about pulling off the road my trousers were water-logged and I thought, sod it, slow down to 40mph but ride on through it, even though I couldn't really suss the texture of the concrete road surface submerged beneath the blackness of a god-made river. The grey sky gave no hint if we were running from or into the storm but five minutes later, as we ascended through sweeping curves, the rain was back to its previous level and I maxed out the Yamaha to burn the water off my person. Not once - not once, mind - did the Yam, on worn out Thai-lop tyres, even give a hint of a twitch or slide and I really don't understand why! But I ain't complaining. I'd adapted to the Yam's ways by taking off in second gear (even two-up, the slight lack of acceleration more than made up by the omission of one gear change) and getting it into fourth as quickly as possible; the only gear in which it normally felt happy. However, some of the vertical ascents really threw the dynamics of the little thumper engine - at one point it was doing 40mph in top gear and when I went to open the throttle a touch more I'd found it was already fully open! On the flat and up minor hills it would pull 65mph with the throttle barely open. Through those wild hills, less than half a dozen times, I'd actually had to downchange to third gear to hold 50mph and once or twice I thought I might actually have to rev it out in second gear but we got to the top of the hill before it became necessary. Give the Yamaha the benefit of the doubt, throw in the scarcity of oxygen as we ascended to ever greater heights, and give the little thumper the thumbs up, It would surely be churlish to do anything else. Deep into the ride it occurred to me that gas stations were becoming rare sights. The Yam's fuel gauge was pessimistic, even dead agaisnt the stop, ten miles were left - and the milestones said there was a town 30 miles ahead. It was a fine calculation whether we would hit the rare bit of civilization before the fuel ran out. Usually, when there were no gas stations, small shops sold petrol by the litre bottle but I had yet to see any evidence of that in this particular province! I knew that Lampang was totally modern in its surfeit of gas stations but there wasn't enough fuel to get there! So as wove down into a valley, I thought about turning off the main highway to follow the road into a minor town to search for fuel but such digressions went against the grain; running against whatever luck you were granted. Five miles later we rolled into a little town on the main road with the only shop selling fuel out of the bottle for many miles around, and fed the frugal Yamaha some much needed red juice. The babe, always a reluctant passenger, was however full of herself in telling how far we'd come so far (and every phone conversation for the next week or two began with the retelling of the motorcycle adventure). Smiles all round. At some point the disdain (for step-thru's) dissipated - I was, after all, still alive - even if my arse wasn't! There was something a little surreal about this reluctant journey though not without some relief as we finally exited the mountains and rolled on down towards the modernity of Lampang city, where a food stop soon restored our energy. The last part of the journey a fast troll along major roads only notable for the bum-ache that set in some fifty kilo's from our destination. We had beaten the weather, rolled with the step-thru's mannerisms and limitations, and reached our base in one piece; the Yamaha still in fine fettle! And the second half of the trip had taken less than five hours... from [URL]http://www.umgweb.com[/URL]
