The Road Trip of Xgrind and AngKuguay: Day 9

We woke up to a chilly morning, real early as we had close to 500km of riding distance to cover today. However the town welcome us with a misty morning. Today we are supposed to head out for the town of Tak by sunset via Highway 105 southwards along the Thailand-Myanmar border.

It is very very chilly as we woke up shivering (AngKuGuay even have problem trying to smoke in the balcony) and the visibility of the town is like less than 50m. So we quickly get our gear up (this is the first time I wear the touring jacket as fast as I can without much hesitation haha), load our luggage up the bikes and ready to move off. It was 7am Thai time (8am Singapore time).

I suggested to AKG to turn at the other direction as I saw the intersection for Highway 105, the moment we turn into the road, the scene in front is akin to the scenery in the movie Silent Hill, where the mist engulfed the entire landscape. AKG took a photo of the scene as my N95 battery went flat and you can view it when he upload them up on his flickr account.

That was a bad move, although we were indeed on Highway 105, the road actually brought us around the Mae Hon Son town so we kinda wasted about 17km of fuel. After we had our breakfast outside the 7-11 store, we move on to Highway 105.

The road on the earlier part of Highway 105 is simply very cold & misty and our fingers are freezing despite us wearing leather glove and there is sunshine. On the brighter side, we don't feel hot with our gears and it's like riding in a air-con environment LOL. AKG even went all the way to wear 2 t-shirts and a thermal pack, whereas I just wore as what I usually wear for the rest of the trip. As we moved to the higher part of the mountain, we stopped by to take photos of the low clouds floating below our level.





After that, we carried on and as we moved down the mountain roads, the temperature became more bearable and the mist had cleared up. While the road is not as twisty as what we had gone thru on Highway 1095, it is still a mountain highway and some challenging twisties were still encountered, although much less. I would say this highway really trying to test my Fazer's fuel tank range as we rode for more than an hour, we kept riding on endless stretch of mountain road and no petrol kiosk in sight. Our bikes even became off-road bikes for about 10 mins as we approached a pretty long highway road under construction. We even started to wonder if we had gone hor lan again but a check on the Nokia Maps showed that we are still on course. Seeing that my bike is starting to go on fuel reserve level, we have no choice but to press on as there's no turning back. The last thing on my mind was both of us stuck with my bike out of fuel. So I kept my RPM at 4000 (said to be the most fuel efficient range) throughout the rest of the ride. Then I started to see my fuel reserve indicator blinking, oh shit I really need to go down to the next town to get petrol. However the civilisation we encountered along the way were small villages and no petrol kiosk was in sight. As my reserve mileage hit 40km, I was telling myself and my bike to hold on as the next hopeful town, Tha Song Yang, is only a few kilometres away. To our delight, we indeed found a small shop with fuel stations but they only carried petrol with 91% octane level. In this situation, you can't complain much so we fill up our tank and I added some octane booster to the petrol (91% octane level is not recommended for my bike as it required at least 92% octane content)

Now, without the worry of fuel shortage, we continued our journey to Mae Sot before we proceed to Tak. However, while having our break at another petrol station, we decided to go further, straight to Kamphaeng Phet town instead of Tak since we still have enough daylight time for the distance.

From then on it will be normal highway road and no more mountain twisties. Damn I'm gonna miss those twisties....

Once we reached the small town of Kamphaeng Phet, we get ourselves accommodation, grab some dinner and rest for the trip tomorrow. Destination: Kanchanaburi


The sunset at Kamphaeng Phet

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