Hot. That’s the first real fact, the one no one writes up in shiny travel articles. Chiang Mai’s mountains are indifferent to your itinerary, and the valley air will slap you awake handsy and loud. But if you want to see where it all takes place, then you can do worse than go and explore the area by something that has a throttle: motorbike rental in Chiang Mai is not an optional extra, it’s the way out of postcard hell.
Not the postcard
The Old City is clean and curated, a square moat that soothes travelers suspicious of new experiences. Alone, it has temples and cafés and a night market that smells of incense and fried dough; but that’s not the city, it’s the lobby. Real life begins where the asphalt ends and the road tilts upward, where the GPS emits a quizzical shrug and you must stop to inquire of a woman selling bananas which way to go; she nods her head with a thumb that smells of fish sauce pointing into the distance. You can walk there, yes, if you like your shirt to adhere to your skin more closely than a recent Botox treatment and enjoy sidewalks that terminate in a rice paddy. Most people don’t. Many people rent scooters and declare they are adventurous.
Water that argues with gravity
Ride off toward Mae Sa and the falls will remind you that nature has no time for tourists. Mae Sa is so many falls that gets louder the further you walk in, families splayed on tarps, children howling, smoke a-billowing everywhere outside of the grills. Go early, before the buses arrive, and it’s a different animal; the water is honest then, not just a backdrop for selfies. Bua Thong, the so-called Sticky Waterfall, is like a prank: limestone that allows you to climb on it, as if the rock had decided once in its life to cooperate. You will laugh; you will slip; you will curse and remember the exact sound of the sandal hitting against pool. That’s a memory worth the ride.
Roads that teach humility
The Samoeng Loop is popular for a reason, and overrated in the way things become overrated when everybody puts up the same picture. It’s a hundred kilometers of bends, small towns, coffee stalls and the odd truck with more chickens than it seems can be legal. Hire a 125cc scooter and you will quickly understand the difference between what you hope for at the bottom of the hill, and what actually happens by the time it turns into remorse; your motorbike will gasp for breath, you will grumble oaths, and someone on an ’89 Honda with mismatched panels will quietly roll past as though there is nothing to it. Get a machine with a little bit of grunt, or accept that rather than the story, you’re really just the scenery.
Traveling down the roads, you also learn to read people. Drivers here don’t adhere to lanes so much as negotiate space with a look, a nudge, the slightest of gestures saying, I see you, I will make room. It’s a language; you receive it by listening with your tires. And beware of sand, those little sinkholes in the city that will leave you racing to a clinic where a nurse will pluck gravel from your knee while gossiping about the soap opera on TV. That’s embarrassing, and then it’s a story.
Villages that do not want to be pretty
Get off the main road, and the villages sing a different song. There are wooden houses on stilts, dogs that rest in the shade of banana trees, and people who live by a rhythm that couldn’t care less about check-in times. You’ll find a market where the fish are still breathing, where the vendor will slap down a skewer and expect you to eat it standing, on one foot squeezed onto the footpeg of your motorbike You’ll pass a temple that bears no plaque, and a monk will nod at you or extend an arm and keep on sweeping or looking lost as dread;also: the chapel miles behind frozen in rurality three feet of red https://3monthsutfsm.
These places are not curated. They are flawed messy, occasionally impolite, frequently beautiful in ways that make you uncomfortable because they do not exist to be liked. That’s the point. The solution is simple: If you want a postcard, get one. If you want a bruise of memory, ride until the road has forgotten your name.
Coffee and the small rebellions
There’s a coffee culture here that is both part religion and part rebellion. In the downtown of my city, it’s all minimalism and latte art; people are photographing foam as if it were a sunset. Out on the back roads, coffee is a functional thing based on one converted popcorn machine to roast it every so often, poured into a plastic cup and tasting of earth. I once drank a cup so dark and honest that it felt like a dare; when I asked the beans? from where? the barista shrugged: “Up the road,” he said, and that was sufficient. No menu, no Wi-Fi, only a generator humming and a rooster that had strong opinions about everything.
The weather is a character
Rain here is not drizzle; rain is punctuation. One minute the road is dusty, the next it’s as if God has opened a shower and is washing the hell out the world, rivers where there were none again, and that smell of wet soil so strong you want to throw up. Riding in that first heavy rain is a lesson in humility: your visor fogs, your gloves are soaked and you laugh because what else can you do? Then the sun returns and the road steams, and you feel you’ve experienced something in common with the landscape.
Practical, but not preachy
Yes, there are rules. Wear a helmet, for the sake of your knees. Like, check your brakes, check your lights and don’t be the person who believes insurance is optional because they saw a forum post at 2 a.m. Oh, and prepare for bureaucracy; checkpoints are real, and sometimes it’s a little theater of patience with the paperwork. If you have to pay the fine, keep the receipt and move on. While the goal is not to be reckless, obviously, it’s also not to simply live in fear and avoid such tests.
The people who make the ride
You’ll encounter mechanics who can make anything run with wire and a prayer, women who sell sticky rice from a cooler and will scold you if you try to haggle, 16-year-olds in pickup trucks who will race you because it looks fun and give thumbs-ups when you don’t crash. These are the sorts of characters you would not otherwise meet on this particular puncheon road, who will make you feel less like an intruder and more like a temporary citizens in a place that owes you nothing.
A small confession
I once dropped a cheap wristwatch into the river near some village I can’t pronounce, and I still think about that watch sometimes not because it was worth anything, but because remember exactly how the water felt on my fingers as it slipped away. There’s no routes or cafes associated with that memory, but it’s in the ledger of being on the road and I like that.
If you go
Just get there early, not because of the hordes but because the light is better and the heat hasn’t yet nestled into your shirt like a second skin. Bring water, a basic tool kit, and an ability to be wrong about directions. Ask for help when you need it; people will point and they may laugh, just as they’ll offer a cigarette or a cup of tea. Don’t expect luxury; expect honesty.
On the map and off it
Maps are handy until they’re not. You always find the best routes by accident, those dirt roads that seem to be leading nowhere until they suddenly open into a valley with a temple and an old lady selling mangoes. These are the reasons the ride is worth it, the puny but pigheaded discoveries no guidebook could ever convey.
What to remember
A motorbike isn’t a prop. It’s the tool that you use to redo your day, the one with which you choose detours; it’s how you embrace the fact that sometimes when things go wrong is when they go right on a trip.
So are you going to stand here next to the moat, snapping pictures of carved doors, or are you going to turn the key and feel the engine cough into life and go see what’s up there, atop those hills? The road is a patient one, but not infinitely so.
