Sneaky Fellows!

Bobby asked me to go Racewerkz yesterday as he is installing the Power Commander 3 for his Fazer plus dyno run for tuning.

When I reached the workshop (after waiting for 3 hours for the weather to improve), Sam, one of the shop's mechanic, asked me for my bike key. I was like, "why you are asking me for my key when I'm only here to accompany my friends?"

When Quizesilver and Bobby insisted me to hand over the key, I began to realise that they are planning something for my bike. To my surprise, they had actually gotten me a K&N air filter as my birthday present. So Sam got it fixed up and I kept the old one in case when I wanna wash the new filter in future.

It was a pleasant surprise for me. And I later found out that it is shared by Quizesilver, Bobby, Alan, Dabitch, Bryant, AngKuGuay, Damien and Sarah. Thanks guys/gals for the timely present (my stock filter is due for replacement anyway haha). Really appreciated :)

The Road Trip of Xgrind and AngKuGuay: Epilogue

Finally.

A trip that was talked about 8 years ago in 2000 had been planned, executed and completed. This trip is a personal achievement for the both of us and we are glad that it had been fulfilled.

Now let's see the summary of this awesome trip:

Post-trip maintenance
As with all long distance trips, the main workhorse had to be serviced after a gruelling endless run on the road. For my Yamaha 2008 FZ1, the following components had been serviced:
- Tire: Changed to Pilot Power 2CT instead of the intended Dunlop Qualifier due to lack of fresh stock for the Dunlops
- Coolant: Flushed and recharged with a new bottle of Maxima Cool-aide coolant
- Engine Oil: Threw out the old black shit and poured in a new dose of Maxima Extra Fully Synthetic Oil

Equipment Used
- Forma Riding Boots: A budget riding boots with sliders. Kept my foot from flying debris and rocks. However, not water-resistant enough to stop water from flooding the internals during our ride up to Hai Yat on the first day.
- Gearsack Soft Panniers: This panniers had been with me for more than 8 years and still performing well in terms of waterproofing. Kept the stuffs in there dry and cosy. However, this pannier don't pair very well with my FZ1 as the unconventional grab rail design on the bike could not allow the panniers to secure properly. And the bottom of the panniers had been worned off by the rear tire due to abrasions during bumpy rides.


- Oxford Sports Humpback Tank Bag: AKG and I bought this for this trip as both our old tankbags are no longer waterproof. Have no problem stuffing my EeePC, electronics equipments, water bladder, maps together in this bag as its space size can be expanded. Due to the strong magnets, the tank bag secured very well on the tank and I don't see it wobbling during high speed rides. Good piece of gear


- Komine Touring Gloves: My almost decade-old gloves. Leather became hard as hell and caused a big blister on my palm. During the trip the velcro patch had torn off and I had to use the sewing kit from the hotel to temporarily secure it for the rest of the trip. Guess its time is due. TRASHED.


- Komine Back Protector: An essential gear for long trips. This gear had helped me prevent any potential backaches that may arise from the long hours of riding.


- Komine Spazzio Touring Jacket: After almost a decade of use, the jacket still performed surprisingly well and the waterproofing is still there. No complaints about it :)

- Held Touring Pants: Got this about 7-8 years back. Provided good protection on my knees but the waterproofing properties are totally screwed. Inner liner had also torn beyond repair. TRASHED.

- Power Commander 3: Thanks to the good tuning skills of Norman from Racewerkz, the bike's fuel efficiency had improved quite significantly and not to mention that overall throttle response had been smoother. The bike managed a maximum FC of 18.12km/L (highway runs) which not possible otherwise. It is also thanks to PC3 that the bike managed to survive thru Highway 105 (way southwards from Mae Hon Son) for more than 230km without a refuel.

- Nokia Maps 2: Running on my N95 8GB, this appplication enabled us to find nearby hotels and helped us pinpoint on our current location to reference with the map. However, at certain times it didn't point us to right route or direct us a longer route instead of a more straightforward one.

- Nokia Sports Tracker: I had been using this application since day one of the trip to keep track of the routes we have actually taken. After uploading to the website, we are able to see the overall routes taken throughout the trip. Alas, the phone crashed during the route from Krabi to Hat Yai and that part of the route is only partially tracked. A great piece of software nevertheless.

- Brembo Master Cylinder 19x20 + Venhill Brakelines: This combo is a life-saver. We ran into situations where we needed hard braking and it gives me total control on the braking pressure and stopped in time without mishaps. Definitely a good investment.

- Maxima Chain Wax: As I don't use Scotoiler for this bike, I relied on this product to lubricate the chain every 500km to maintain the chain performance. After 6000km, the chain was not even stretched a single bit.

- Lonely Planet's Thai Phrase Book: Oh yeah, had to borrow from AKG for the communication in Thailand. While I had learnt a couple of Thai words from there, I still have difficulties applying them on normal conversations LOL.

My Thoughts on This Trip

Well, this trip served a couple of purposes for me:
1) To go for the longest trip ever attempted by me
2) To see and experience the culture of another country
3) To use this chance to straighten out some personal thoughts
4) To experience an ironbutt rider's life

I would say that all the purposes had been served thru this trip. I had learnt a great deal about people, culture, biking, and many other things. I generally felt welcomed by the Thais' friendliness, their smiles, their generosity, their food and their lifestyle.

Will I go back again? You bet I will. It is definitely a good getaway from the hectic lifestyle in Singapore. That being said.... realised that tomorrow will be my first day of work in 3 weeks haha.

Videos
Now, for the videos I didn't managed to upload during the trip. Enjoy.


Loading up the Busa

Lighting up the Fire Balloon in Chiang Mai

Lighting up the fireworks

The fireworks and Fire balloons in the night sky of Chiang Mai

At the Mae Sai Boundary Post (North Thailand/Myanmar border)

Riding without helmets.....

The Road Trip of Xgrind and AngKuGuay: Day 16-17

Finally.

Today will be our last morning in Thailand and we are heading back to Singapore in 2 days' time, staying a night in Kuala Lumpur. It had been a fulfilling and eye opening trip so far and been kinda reluctant to go back to the urban jungle of Singapore. What to do, reality....

We pumped our last tank of Gasohol 95 at the last PTT petrol kiosk at the outskirts of Hat Yai as well as having our breakfast there. We enjoyed our last cold towels available at the Thailand 7-11 outlets while AKG enjoyed his last Espresso DIY coffee (kinda his fav coffee from Thai 7-11). AKG had a short chat with a local who happened to be a military officer before we move on to the border.



Once we reached the border post, we returned our vehicle declaration forms (a MUST when you leave Thailand by your own vehicle), got our passports stamped and rode over to the Malaysian Customs. From there, we saw familiar wordings (melayu/english) on the signboards and we proceed down to the North-South highway for Kuala Lumpur. Just a short distance from the Customs, we encountered a roadblock, a first since the beginning of our trip. I could more or less guess that these people will be stopping us for speeding or something similiar and slap us with a fine. But when we told them that we came from North Thailand, the guys seems impressed and let us off. Guess they figured that we are tired and broke, lucky us LOL.

The road down is just.... road down. Nothing spectacular about the scenery along the road except the mountain highway at Ipoh. However, weather is not really that good as we get on-off rain several times before we rest at the first R&R in Malaysia. Despite the lousy weather, our riding pace is fantastic and we cleared half the journey in shorter time than we anticipated.

As we closed in to KL, we stopped by the Toll Plaza and told AKG that I will use the GPS on my N95 to guide us to the hotel we usually stay, Hotal Nova. This time, Nokia Maps failed me. It directed me to a wrong turn on the highway, causing us to split into wrong entrances, as AKG realised that signboard on the other entrance showed the correct direction. I had to make a U-turn, ride into the right entrance, waited for AKG in case he U-turn back to look for me. Waited for a considerable amount of time until I received a call from him that he had reached the hotel. With a sigh of relief, I slowly rode towards the city centre and found the hotel. Learnt a new malay word which will guide me to my regular hotel in future: Pusat Bandaraya, which means City Center.

Once we checked into the hotel, we went to Times Square to check out the stores (nothing much actually, much like the shopping centres in Singapore) then proceed to have our dinner.

The next day, we check out at noon, knowing that we can cover the remaining distance to home in less than 4 hours. As we moved out, we intended to have our lunch at Ayer Keroh. As I have not eaten/drank anything while AKG had not eaten, we rode like we are rushing for time LOL. When we reached Ayer Keroh R&R, we realised that the place is closed and we have no choice but to go to another R&R for our lunch. The next available R&R with food will be at Pagoh. Again, I was riding as fast as we can and AKG commented that we covered 180km in less than 90 mins LOL.

Stopover at Pagoh R&R

Once we are done with the lunch, we move on straight to Gelang Petah R&R for our last refuel before heading home.

Total distance travelled:



That concludes the Road Trip of Xgrind and AngKuGuay. Thanks to those who had sent us off and sent us well wishes.

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

The Road Trip of Xgrind and AngKuguay: Day 8

After 7 days of "wake-ride-sleep" routine, and considering that we had arrived at our intended destination, we decided to switch from rider mode to tourist mode for today so we can explore more of Mae Hon Son area.

After having our breakfast, we headed for the Tourism Authority of Thailand office to have our "conquest" certificate and stickers. The certificate basically writes that we have completed 1864 curves on Highway 1095 to the town. And of course we also bought some stickers from the office to paste them on the bike keke. All these for less than 100 bahts.

After that we went on accommodation hunting since the hotel, while comfortable, is still a bit on the high side in terms of price. While on the hotel hunt, we dropped by a T-shirt shop which sell their own Mae Hon Son designs. So we both picked up some of them, made a little chat with the boss and took some photos together. He gave us some directions to a row of guesthouses which suit our kind of budget and we heeded his advise and in no time we found one with a nice view of the lake behind it. So we rushed back to the hotel, packed our stuffs and moved to the new guesthouse accommodation.

An Emo Shot of AKG at our Guesthouse Balcony

Once we dropped our luggage into the room, we rode off to explore the waterfall and cave around the area. First we went to Mae Sua cave, had our lunch there and took a walk in the area. It is only a small cave with small river stream and a pond with a lot of big fishes. So we took some shots over there and then we went on for the waterfall.

We had prepared ourselves to go swim in the waterfall but when we arrived at the PuaSha waterfall, it was a pretty disappointing sight. The place is very rocky and there is no spot we can dip ourselves into the water as the waterfall is not really that spectacular also. It could be due to the dry season in North Thailand I guess. Nevertheless, we took some photos and moved on to explore another place where we happened to see the signboard on our way to the waterfall: Pang Tong Palace.

To see more photos, just go to my flickr account.

The Pang Tong Palace is about a couple of clicks away from the waterfall but we didn't expect to be riding up steep mountain road, not when we are riding with only sunglasses and casual wear. Since we had gone thru countless mountain road curves for the whole day yesterday, today's road don't look so bad after all. There is one part of the road which do not allow us to screw up have an elevation angle of at least 60deg at a 180deg turn. As I just learnt the word from Hilary and decide to use it to describe that road....shu jio makh makh!

One of the many shots I took while riding back to Mae Hon Son.

The Pang Tong Palace is basically a plot of land where the locals planted various vegetations and reared deers or animals of similar family. Interesting animals, they just stared at us with a querying look. We took a couple of shots at them and we headed back.

Back in town, we parked our bikes and took a rest at the guesthouse balcony. There, with AngKuGuay's highly sociable personality, we got to know an American named Brad who happened to be travelling around Thailand and the nearby regions later on. So we just sat there, chatting away and watching the sun setting behind the mountains, taking photos of that beautiful scenery, and ended up having dinner at the night market nearby. We shared views on world politics, history of Singapore, and many other subjects. Great chatty guy.

The Sunset of Mae Hon Son

So now we get everything packed up so that we can load up the bike immediately. We will be leaving the town at 7am (earliest move off time so far) to travel all the way to the border town of Mae Sot or Tak if time allows. That will be a long ride tomorrow.

In general, Mae Hon Son is a very peaceful town untainted by nightspots. The scenery and the people there are simply wonderful. Definitely a good place just to get away from the busy city life and just lay back to enjoy the serenity of this wonderful town.

The Road Trip of Xgrind and AngKuguay: Day 7

Total Distance Ridden on Road: 2610km

Today is the day where the route we taking is the one that initiate this trip: Highway 1095 to Mae Hon Son. We have been anticipating this day since the day we arrived in Thailand. Why this route, most might ask. Cos this highway consist a total of 1864 curves that pose great challenges even to veteran riders/drivers. Once these turns are conquered, a sticker indicating the completion of these curves is obtainable at the Mae Hon Son Tourist Office.

The route that inspired this trip

So we moved out from Chiang Mai Railway Station area and headed off to highway 1095 via Highway 107. After filling up our tanks and taking a short break (including taking Vitamin B pills), we start off with the ride of the day.

The "Miracle" Pills LOL

How will I describe the ride on Highway 1095? Exciting, Fun, Crazy, Balls-Dropping, Breathtaking, and more feelings that can't be described with just words. Try imagine negotiating 180deg corners with 45deg elevation angle with 1st gear, with the occasional vehicles going opposite direction eating into our lane at unsafe speed. That's the kind of close encounters we have at the beginning of the journey. Halfway to Pai (about 1/4 of distance to Mae Hon Son), we stopped by to take a break and also to take some shots as the scenery is simply beautiful.

Stopping By For Break and Photo Shooting

Nice Right?

We continued on and negotiate corners after corners, quite a challenge on our concentration and our wrists as well.. with me and AKG had to relak them during straights haha. After 2 hours plus of corner negotiating, we arrived on the outskirts of Pai where we stopped for refuel. The petrol kiosk happened to be situated on a very good spot where we took some excellent scenery shots.

At the Petrol Kiosk

Then we moved on to Pai where we take our lunch break to get more energy to carry on with the rest of the journey. At Pai, we have conquered 762 corners so there's 1102 more to go. In the town of Pai, while I was having my stomach full, I'm also having my eyes full as I see pretty Thai girls riding past us LOL.

The Town of Pai

Once we are done, we continued on and we stopped again at one of the high points along the highway to take some scenic shots again. When you see AKG's flickr photostream when he had uploaded them, you will know why we chose to stop and take photos. Nothing compares to being there to see the real deal, it IS SIMPLY BREATHTAKING!

You really have to be there to really "feel" the scenery

After this we continued on to the last part of the route to our final destination: Mae Hon Son. This part of the journey is not easy, not that the road condition is bad or traffic is heavy, it's the setting sun that blinded us on certain part of the route. The road after Pai had uber beautiful scenery and almost zero traffic, but when we are blinded, literally blinded, by the sun, we can't see shit ahead of us and we have to jam our brakes whenever that happen just to make sure we don't go off course or go off the edge of the road and down the mountain.

Before long, we finally saw a big structure saying "Welcome to Mae Hon Son, Thailand" and we knew we had made it! Once we reached the town, first thing we did is to locate the Tourism Authority Office so that we can go get our conquest stickers on the following day.

We are finally here!

We've checked in a reasonably priced hotel with good and free internet access and AKG suggested that since we had spent so many days travel around the country and now we had reached our inspired location, we should go into "tourist mode" and stay for another day just to tour around the area haha.

So tomorrow we will be riding around the area, visiting the caves and waterfalls on our bikes, without helmets as usual LOL.

The Road Trip of Xgrind and AngKuGuay: Day 6

Today, we have the biggest "hor lan" adventure since we touched down on Thailand. However, it is also thanks to this hor lan adventure that we saw some of the most beautiful scenery I've encountered so far.

The path we took today

We are supposed to go to Mae Taeng by the end of the day for accommodation to prepare for our 1864 turns to Mae Hon Son on the following day and in worst case scenario, we will stay over at Chiang Mai (which we are doing now) and head off for Highway 1095 the next day.

Weather is fine, traffic is minimal, and the ride is very smooth. So we had planned to go to Mae Taeng via Highway 1089 by going to Mae Chan and turn towards the highway. Highway 1089 is not the typical big highway but rather more like a 2-way single lane highway. However, traffic is scarce so we don't really have a hard time riding thru. Just about 5 mins into the highway, AKG indicated a hot spring nearby and we decided to dropped by to take some shots.

One of the shots taken at the Hot Spring

After that we moved on towards our destination and about 150 km later, we stopped at a petrol kiosk for fill up. However, it is a different kind of fuel pump, something more primitive and it's something I've never seen in my biking life before. And it just happened that the boss of the petrol kiosk know how to speak in mandarin and he is very hospitable to invite us for a short chat, treating us with tea and mandarin fruit, which is very sweet and nice.

Very primitive way of filling up your fuel tank

After that, with the boss giving some directions, we decided to change our course to go on straight to Pai, halfway village to Mae Hon Son. so we pressed on and while at the town of Fang, we came into a cross junction. According to the map, we should just keep going straight without turning so we will eventually hit Highway 107 that will lead us southwards towards Mae Taeng, where the intersection to Highway 1095 lies.

Unfortunately, we WERE wrong.

As we kept going straight, the road got narrower and less of a highway type but we thought that may be one of the lesser highway, hence the narrow road. So we kept going and going and going...until we found ourselves in front of a military outpost. We thought that it may be some security outpost so we asked for some directions from the soldiers and we moved on, as we moved on, we got some of the most beautiful mountain sights I've ever seen while riding and of course, we stopped by the roadside and took some shots. Envy right? keke...

Shots taken at the mountain area

As we moved on we started to find ourselves riding along the mountain road, which is only a car width wide. The words to describe this road are: exciting, tiring, cold, dangerous, balls dropping, breathtaking, fun, shiok. According to my N95 GPS, we have climbed a maximum altitude of 1975m above sea level! We bumped into another military outpost and after some direction asking, we continued on. As we go higher and higher under we found ourselves reaching another military outpost. This time I knew we were already way off course. We began to realise that we are at the Pha Hom Phak mountain which partly separates Thailand from Myanmar. In short, yeah, we are at the Thailand/Myanmar border again... by chance. Nevertheless, according to the map, we will revert back to Highway 107 if we continue to ride on round the mountain. However when we reached the third outpost which is the highest point, AKG suddenly stopped. In front of us, the mountain road had collapsed and there is a VERY narrow path for motorcycle (a kup bike size to be precise). We had thought of trying to go through it but in the end we decided that it is not worth the risk to take that kind of chance as in our mind we know we cannot afford to screw up this attempt, meaning either we will ride through or we fall in the depths of the mountains with the bike. Considering the odds, and we want to go back Singapore in one piece, we abandon that thought and U-turn back to Fang and find the right way into Highway 107.

The collapsed mountain road at Mount Pha Hom Phak

Overlooking the Myanmar mountains

When we reached the intersection at Fang, we made a right turn and stopped by the side to check our bearings. However as I stopped on the sandy side of the road, my front tire lost grip and I dropped the bike. Damn. Luckily it was only a stationary drop so only the slider, handlebar end and end can shield were scratched. No major damage is caused from the fall. Well guess this kind of incident is inevitable in this kind of crazy trip....

So when we are on the right track, we rode as fast and safely as possible to Chiang Mai before sunset as we do not want to travel in the night. So just nice, when the sky just turned dark, we managed to find a hotel near the Chiang Mai Railway station which is reasonably priced and comes with internet access (abeit a bit on the slow side)

In general, while we had gone off course way too much today, but it had brought us to somewhere so beautiful and breathtaking where I believed my Fazer and AKG's Busa are the only Singaporean bikes ever rode there.

And tomorrow, MAE HON SON!

The Road Trip of Xgrind and AngKuGuay: Day 5

Today is the day, where we will cross the Northern Thailand border and into Myanmar and back again, one sole purpose is to extend our visa period so that we can complete our adventure without worrying about outliving our stay in Thailand.

Both of us woke up early today for 2 reasons: 1st, to enjoy the free breaskfast at the Hotel since we had paid a premium price for the room (again) and secondly, to hunt for another cheaper hotel as we had planned to stay in Chiang Rai for one more night.

The expensive Hotel we didn't have a choice to make a fuss about the room charge

So once we had our fill in the hotel, we rode out in casual wear WITHOUT helmets and roam around the city. That is one thing we will never get to do in Singapore without putting our bike license on the silver platter. As the weather is pretty cooling, riding in that fashion is damn cold on the hands and face! I was literally shivering as the cold wind blew into my body. After riding for a while, we managed to find a relatively cheap hotel (350 bahts) but have no air con. Considering the climate here to be around 23 deg C, we don't feel that is the issue at all. However, AngKuGuay now feels that the room is still overpriced considering the room condition. Typically, it like a hotel room in the 70-80s.

The 70-80s looking Hotel we are staying tonight

Once we drop off the unnecessary luggage into the hotel room, we proceed to ride off to Mae Sai, where we will cross the North Thailand border in order to extend our visa. The ride was slightly better than yesterday if not the best and along the way, we ran into a Thai touring group who happened to be on their way to Mae Sai outskirts. Bunch of friendly riders, we waved at each other and it may be some kind of bikers' thing, we automatically "joined" into their group, with me and AKG following the lead rider all the way. The way the lead rider signalled the group is impressive and it's something worth learning from when comes to future touring with groups. They were very impressed when we told them that we are from Singapore and gave us thumbs up. Until the outskirts of Mae Sai, we followed them and from there we went our separate ways. Damn, I was thinking about taking a couple of photos with them. Nevertheless, they bid us farewell and we moved on to the border.

Another 10 minutes ride brought us to a highly congested traffic, that we know that the border customs is near. We slowly rode our way to the front of the Customs post and parked at a convenient spot. Our bikes attracted quite a lot of attention as the people there don't see big bikes often and secondly these 2 bikes which belong to 2 crazy fuckers carry foreign license plates that adds to the rarity in that town. Once we had packed up our stuff, we prepare ourselves to cross the Thai border. We got into the wrong queue and wasted an hour for that which we could have immediately process our exit procedure in another queue, which is very short. Oh well, we learn from experience don't we?

My Fazer parked just outside the North Thailand Border Post

Once we had processed our passport, we walked over to the Myanmar border to get into the country. Yes, you read that right, WE WALKED. We figured that it is too much of a hassle to re-declare the vehicle again when we re-enter Thailand as we only want to extend our stay in Thailand. For foreigners, we will have to pay 500 bahts adminstrative charge to the Maynmar immigration office and our passports will be held by the authorities until we leave the country. What we have is the Entry Permit card given by the Immigration and we must hold on to it as we need to return them when we leave Myanmar.

Approaching the Myanmar Customs

So, finally we are in the City of Golden Triangle! The border town outlook was very different from what I anticipated to be. The town is buzzling with life and the whole place is crowded with Thais and Burmese. As we walked thru the market, I was surprised to see Hollywood DVDs and even Porn movies on sale in the open. I had always thought that the Myanmer government had very strict media control but what I see tells a different story.

The Myanmar Market

As we couldn't find any place to eat in the Myanmar town, we decide to head back to Mae Sae to take our late lunch. Once we crossed the border, I was relieved that our bikes are still safely parked. That goes to show that Mae Sae is pretty much a safe town. Of course, we must also get our conquest Tees so that we can wear them with pride back home LOL.

Once we had our fill, we get ourselves ready and moved off from the buzzling town and head back to Chiang Rai. Along the way, I had mentioned about the Friendship Bridge 2 which AKG also took noticed and we decided to take a short deviation and rode into the road to the bridge. Boy, we are glad that we took that route. The scenery is simply breathtaking and this is something you will never see in Singapore. One word to describe the view: Beautiful.

On the road to the Friendship Bridge 2

When we reached the Friendship Bridge, we found that the bridge is kinda closed so we head back towards our last destination for the day: Chiang Rai. The traffic is bad, as usual to the point I felt sleepy riding in that kind of traffic condition. Nevertheless, we have to press on as the sky is getting dark and finally we reached our hotel after another 50+km.

Now we will have to plan our route for tomorrow, based on the current budget we have and will post up the latest updates tomorrow once we find another internet access (damn we have to pay for most of the internet access in North Thailand, sucks).

The Road Trip of Xgrind & AngKuGuay: Day 2

After about 10 hours of good deep sleep (surprisingly), we finally arrived at Nakhon Pathom Railway Station where we will load down the bikes unscathed.

Both of us were hungry, smelly (yes, we haven't bathed since the beginning of the trip) but fresh from the sleep and seeing that we can continue with the riding again. While we were loading up the baggage onto the bikes, the crowd were looking at us as if we were some aliens from another planet. Guess that they don't get to see big bikes in this town much, since there are not much singaporean bikes riding around the area.

Once we are out of the station, since we are not familiar with the place, we just rode around until we hit the main highway where we slowly ride until we found a nice little coffee place called "Friendly Coffee" and had breakfast plus enjoying the free wireless internet access (hence the Day 1 blog entry). After having our fill, we moved off at Thai time 10am.

From Nakhon Pathom, we rode to Highway 321 via Highway 4. Since our arrival at Thailand, we had been using Gasohol 95 as petrol seems to be unavailable. However we had read up that it does not really affect EFI engines, so we proceed to fill our tanks with it. So far so good.

After lunch, time to move off again. We continued to ride on Highway 321 until we rode on Highway 340 at Suphan Buri. As we pump at a gasoline kiosk, we had our lunch as well to fill our stomach as well as our tanks. Once done, we moved on towards Chai Nat for Highway 1. Along the way there we met with a traffic jam on the highway. At first we thought to be some kind of riot but later found out to be their Thai King is in the vicinity hence the police blocked off the junction and caused the traffic jam. The jam set our schedule back by 45 mins and once cleared we carried on with the journey.

Jam on Highway 340

Once we reached Chai Nat, we knew that we will not be able to reach our intended destination, Lampang, in time. So, after some plotting, we fixed Tak as our newest destination where we will find a hotel and stay for the night.

When we reached Tak, timing was just nice as the sun had set and with the help of Nokia Maps on my trusty N95 8GB, we were able to find a nearby hotel with ease. So we dropped by this hotel called Suansin Hotel and managed to find a room for us to bunk in. Guess how much is the hotel room? 370 baht! Fucking cheap! And the room facilities are not rundown I assure you, really a bang for the buck :)

Finally we had our first shower since the beginning of the trip and then proceed to have our dinner. How can we not eat their Thai food when we are here? Of course we ordered the famous TomYum soup and Fried Thai Noodles, I will say the food is real nice. However, the bill that came up happened to be more paang (expensive) than our hotel room charge LOL.

The famed Tom Yum Soup

Now, we are relaxing in the room, preparing for the trip tomorrow. That's all for Day 2 :)