Rennie heads to Thailand to rediscover a love of off-road riding and of the Southeast Asian culture with Thailand Moto Tours.
VIDEO | Taking The Long Way With Thailand Moto Tours
“He is the richest who is content with the least, for content is the wealth of nature.” Those words belong to the Greek philosopher Socrates, a man who died 399 years before Christ’s arrival and time zero.
Socrates’ time was approximately 1300 years before Thailand became a nation, but his words eloquently describe many of the Thai people that my good friend Jasper and I have just spent a week with while participating in the Thailand Moto Tours off-road expedition.
Photography RS, Brian D’Apice, Amy D’Apice
Thailand is a land of massive contrasts—the wealth and Western-style trappings that come with it from cities like Bangkok and Chiang Mai are juxtaposed by people living in the surrounding mountains in the exact same style they have for thousands of years. Sturdy wooden structures with no electricity abound. In this part of the world, a clean water supply, a few chickens and a cow or a pig signify you’re doing okay.
But where you or I would probably whine about not having every possible whim answered by Jeff Bezos and his robot army before we’ve even got the thought out of our heads, the people of Thailand’s jungles and small towns are, for the most part, happier and more content than anyone I have met in my 10 years of living in America. Or at least that’s the way it seems.
Rushing is not a thing in Thailand. People enjoy the time they have; they enjoy each other’s company and revel in just being present. A beer with a friend is a time to be cherished, not to be completed as quickly as possible so you can rush off to the next half-assed job.
You feel this the more you stay and the deeper you go into Thailand’s lush green pastures. As Brandon Cretu and Brian D’Apice of Thailand Moto Tours guided us further and further into the jungle over our week-long expedition, we very rarely saw people with anything other than a smile on their face.
I’m sure the fact we were riding motorcycles helped our social standings. Motorcycles are the vehicle of choice in Thailand. Scooters carry everyone from businessmen to entire families, sometimes three generations at a time in baby, mom and nana, all piled onto a tiny two-wheeled contraption as they go about their day, so when they see a group of clearly foreign people enjoying their homeland on motorcycles, you can be almost guaranteed to be greeted by a happy face at the minimum.
It’s for this reason, among many more, that Brandon, a former Isle of Man TT racer, and his lifetime best mate, U.S. Army Veteran Brian D’Apice, started Thailand Moto Tours eight years ago. Brian’s knowledge of Thailand runs deep. After leaving the Armed Forces, he moved to Chiang Rai in Thailand’s northeast to teach English, quickly falling in love with the culture and the people. A few years later, he would formalize his adoration for Thailand by marrying one of its beautiful young citizens in his wife, Amy, the joke among the riding group being that Brian actually won Thailand.
My chance to experience the Thailand Moto Tour way of life was five years in the making, after Brandon Cretu and I talked about me attending way back in 2019 before the pandemic, so the overdue energy was palpable when we all met up in the Chiang Mai hotel the day before we straddled our Honda CRF300s for the first time.
We had a solid crew of nine paying riders and one very lucky journalist, the ages ranging from early 30s to mid-60s, with former high-level motocross and enduro riders mixed in with people who had only just taken up off-road riding.
Day One | Thailand Moto Tours
The first leg of the tour was the biggest day in the saddle—an 11-hour epic ride—as we rode from Chiang Mai to the small town of Mae Sariang on the western side of the country via various two-lane dirt roads and lots of perfectly paved tarmac prime for supermoto riding, but this was a mere prequel to what was to come.
The run to Mae Sariang took us through tiny villages and towns, the kids with little more than the clothes on their backs running out to greet us and giving the international symbol for “giv it a rev, mister!” with their wrists.
Mae Sariang seemed to be the stopover for lots of Thai bike tour companies, mainly on-road versions, with the hotel carpark filled with everything from BMW GSs to Honda CB street bikes and even Harley-Davidsons.
These groups were generally out-of-country tours, as Thailand’s import laws make owning such a machine prohibitively expensive for most of the population. Thailand banned the import of used motorcycles, including mopeds, electric motorcycles, and used bicycles with auxiliary motors in May 2021. The CRF300Ls we were riding on our tour were all made in Honda’s Thai production plant in Samut Prakan, just south of Bangkok. You wouldn’t want anything bigger than a 300L anyway, as some of the tracks we were about to undertake over the next two days were verging on hard enduro, so having a friendly little 300 was much more useful than an angry, stiff 450—especially one that cost nearly twice what it does in the U.S. thanks to various Thai tariffs and taxes.
Day Two | Thailand Moto Tours
Day two had us leaving Mae Sariang City and going straight into the Salawin National Park, and at this point, if you didn’t like water crossings, you might as well head back to Chiang Mai. During the next six hours, we traversed well over 100 of these crossings, every rider soaked to the skin but with smiles so wide cheeks genuinely started to hurt. The riding wasn’t overly technical, but when crossing water on motorized, handlebar’d machinery, one must exercise a large degree of caution and concentration. The water crossings were interspersed with massive sections of soaked red clay tracks, meaning you really had to be on your toes lest you go flying over your handlebars with a wedged front wheel, as Jasper gracefully did.
Brian had a treat for us on day two. As we gently rode into another tiny jungle town, we took a sharp right under a gate and rode right into a school, where the kids were all standing there waiting for us.
If ever you need to perk up your faith in mankind, a visit to a remote school such as this will make even the most stone-hearted of riders blush. With big curiosity and even bigger smiles, the kids surrounded the bikes, and although we couldn’t understand them, sign language about the different parts of the bikes and what they did seemed to suffice.
An hour later, we were back on the bikes, the kids all waving and cheering us goodbye like some kind of dirt bike rockstars, and we headed northwest to the gorgeous rural city of Mae Hong Son that borders Myanmar. Mae Hong Son is a throwback to old Thailand, a land of farmers and markets and religious purity, and is home to the Shan and Hmong tribes.
Mae Hong Son is an extremely mountainous region, and we got a perfect view of the city the following day by getting up at dawn and riding to the stunning Wat Phrathat Doi Kong Mu temple. Completed in 1872, the temple pays homage to the Theravada sect of Buddhism and was registered as an archaeological site of Mae Hong Son province in 1979. If your cultural cup needs filling, this is the place to do it as you sip a sunrise coffee from the onsite café.
Day Three | Thailand Moto Tours
The peace and tranquility of Wat Phrathat Doi Kong Mu was firmly decimated about two hours later, for this day was the toughest of the lot. I’m a fairly proficient off-road rider, but this was about as hard as I’d want to go with questionable health insurance.
This was hard enduro, Thai style. We rode northwest towards the tourist mecca of Pai, charging through some uber-tight single-track climbs, over boulders, over and under trees, dodging fallen branches, all while marveling at just how tough our little 300Ls really are. Put simply, we beat the absolute crap out of these bikes on day three. Such was the level of gnarly-ness that half the group decided to take the short route into Pai, which, in hindsight, was certainly the right choice.
It was a day where teamwork made the dream work, with nearly everyone getting stuck at some point and requiring their buddies to pull them out. Suffering together is far more fun than suffering on your own. At times all you could do was laugh at the absurdity of it all. But all the time, everyone’s admiration for just where a relatively cheap Thai-made Honda could take you grew exponentially.
It’s always good to be humbled, which happened to all of us just after lunchtime. We’d just finished a particularly brutal climb, all of us grouping at the top to catch our breath, then a local on a nondescript scooter came trundling past with a smile on his face that clearly signaled he thought we were all amateurs. Off he went, back into the same handlebar-wide, helmet-high wet clay single track we’d just hit in his flip-flops without ever missing a beat. To say we felt small would be an understatement.
From that embarrassment it was wide open through the jungle, bouncing off little berms with the endorphins racing so hard it’s a wonder no one’s helmet flew off. As said in On Any Sunday, “the best fun you can have is to go riding with your buddies,” and this was never truer than in the second half of day three. Up and up and up we rode, higher and higher, until we got as close as we could to the Myanmar border. From where we stood, the Burmese soldiers in their guard towers would be able to reach us with their .50 caliber sniper rifles, so it was perhaps a little risky to hoist the drone, but whatever, you only live once.
Having survived all that, we cruised into the divine tourist town of Pai, with its charming city center off-limits to motorized traffic. This is southeast Asia at its best: tiny shops, street food vendors, bars for days and a general good-time vibe put the perfect full stop on what was an exceptionally gnarly day’s riding. And the fact we all had a hammock in our little private bungalow on the river to chill out in made it all the nicer.
Day Four | Thailand Moto Tours
After the intensity of day three, day four dawned thankfully a little later, and as we rode out of the bungalow digs in Pai, we had a rather sedate ride ahead of us. Day four was more a transport stage than a flat-out blast, one where we could take in the scenery at a sedate pace on easy dirt and tarmac roads as we wound our way south, skating the outskirts of Chiang Mai into lunch at Samung.
We were all pretty knackered by this point. Four days of almost dawn-to-dusk riding, much of it technical off-roading that takes it out of both your body and brain, had taken its toll, but as we rode into our digs in Mae Win for the night, there was a little surprise in store.
Within 10 minutes of ditching our bags at the resort, we were in the back of a truck tray and driven to the Mae Win Elephant Sanctuary, where we were greeted by the head of the sanctuary, Kikki Bee, and a 17-day-old baby elephant named Hug Koon (which is Thai for Hug You), who spent the first 15 minutes hiding behind her 40-year-old mom, Mae Wong (Mother Wong), before coming out to play with the riders for a good half hour.
I had never been up close to an elephant before, and the experience was genuinely moving. These gentle giants, graceful in their movements but with pure love in their hearts, were absolutely incredible to be around. Hug Koon soon got used to us, bashing into our legs and running around just like a human toddler would. He had no control over his trunk, which made him all the more adorable as he tried to pick things up and failed, requiring Kikki to hand-feed him.
Two more elephants came to join us, 12-year-old Kai Mook and five-year-old Lala; these two were slightly more adept at trunk work but still just as beautiful to be around. Kikki would go on to tell us a grown Asian elephant consumes an incredible 300 kilograms of food and 100 liters of water, and each elephant always—always—has a keeper with them to help protect them against any predators. What predators, you ask? Try gigantic pythons and cobras, for starters. These snakes only succeed in the rarest of circumstances, but it’s not worth the risk of not having a guide by the elephant’s side. Out of the many cool experiences of this trip, meeting four elephants—including a 17-day-old baby—was one of the absolute best.
Day Five | Thailand Moto Tours
Our final day included one last blast through the early morning jungle, this time just me, Jasper, Brandon and Brian, so the pace was fast and the riding exceptional. We climbed further and met back up with the group, where we cruised together to the glorious Buddhist Dragon Temple on the outskirts of Mae Win.
Located in Don Pao Subdistrict, the 700-year-old temple features traditional Lanna-style wooden architecture, massive Buddha statues, and a pagoda enshrining the hair relics of the Lord Buddha. Its remote location makes access to electricity difficult, with solar energy serving as the primary power source. The challenging journey to reach the temple ensures it remains relatively untouched and hidden from the masses. Good thing we had dirt bikes.
Within a couple of hours, after a nice lunch at a little corner store restaurant, we were back in the hustle and bustle of Chiang Mai. After a couple of minutes, I was already sick of the traffic and asked Brandon if we could go back into the serenity of the jungle, to which I was met with an, “I know, right?”
We got back to the depot; everyone was exhilarated by such an incredible adventure in which no injuries were suffered, no flat tires, no bike problems, and even no rain. It was as close to the perfect week of Thai riding as you could imagine.
The final night of our tour was capped off with a gigantic (and I really do mean gigantic) feast at the riverside Good View Restaurant in Chiang Mai. Far too many plates of food landed on the tables, and I’ll admit we really did look like gluttonous Americans at this point. Whatever.
Those five days with the crew at Thailand Moto Tours were genuinely some of the best I’ve ever had on a bike. The team of Brian, Brandon, Amy, and the local sweep riders, James and Nicky, put on an exceptional event that catered to everyone, whether pro-level off-road riders or relatively new riders.
The tour has reignited my love of Asia, of the incredible food, hospitality, and general warmth we experienced. It also reminded me to be thankful for what I have because seeing some people with so little but still with a genuine smile on their faces made me realize how vain I can truly be. Travel has a way of humbling you, and I’m glad my humbling came from behind a set of handlebars. CN
Click here to read the Thailand Moto Tours Travel Feature in the Cycle News Digital Edition Magazine.
