There is a bus between Chiang Rai and Chiang Mai. It takes about three hours, it runs several times a day, and almost everyone who travels between the two cities takes it or flies.
Three hours, or six days
What they pass through, without seeing it, is some of the best riding in Southeast Asia. The Mekong at the top of the country, where Thailand, Laos and Myanmar meet. River valleys running west. Hill country around Tha Ton. Then the long approach to Chiang Mai and, if you want it, the climb that finishes the whole thing.
Six riding days, 525 km, 3,225 m of climbing. Not enormous numbers. The distance averages 88 km a day, which is more than most weeks of riding but not punishing, and the climbing is moderate almost all the way until it isn't.
The corridor
Northern Thailand rewards riding in a way that is hard to explain to someone who has only seen the country from a beach or a night market.
The far north is the interesting part. The Golden Triangle sits where the Mekong divides three countries, and it carries a reputation built on the opium trade that ran through these hills for much of the twentieth century. What is there now is quieter and more ordinary than the name suggests, which is its own kind of interesting.
West of the river the country turns to valleys and hill roads. This is the section that makes the route, and it is largely empty of traffic, which is the reason a road bike week here works at all.
The road that a monk built
The tour finishes with Doi Suthep, the mountain that stands over Chiang Mai, and the temple near its summit. The climb has a history that most riders grinding up it never hear.
Until the mid-1930s there was no proper road. Reaching Wat Phra That Doi Suthep meant walking up the mountain, a trek of several hours that only the devoted and the able attempted. A monk named Kruba Srivichai, known across the north as the engineer monk and later as the patron saint of Lanna, decided that should change. The authorities in Bangkok, with whom he had a long-running quarrel, would not fund it.
So he raised the money from his followers, ten metres of road at a time, and asked them to build it themselves. As many as four thousand people came, many of them working on the road after finishing their own day's work, cutting eleven kilometres of switchbacks up the mountain by hand with farm tools. The first hoe went into the ground on 9 November 1934, swung by Chao Kaew Nawarat, the last ruler of Lanna.
It had been estimated to take three years. It opened on 30 April 1935, a little under six months later. The first vehicle up was a 1925 Ford Model T belonging to one of his followers, a Chiang Mai trader who had also been carrying food and water to the workers.
Riders stop at the monument at the bottom of the climb without always knowing what it commemorates. It is customary for locals and travellers to leave flowers or incense there and ask for a safe journey up. Worth doing, and worth knowing why.
What sort of week it is
Six riding days across nine, from Chiang Rai to Chiang Mai, fully supported with a van and a mechanic. Groups of eight to fifteen.
At 88 km a day the distance is among the longest we run, and at 538 m of climbing a day this is the gentlest week on our list, lower than anything else we do. That combination makes it the most accessible of our tours for a rider stepping up to a multi-day week abroad for the first time: the days are long, the gradients rarely bite, and the support vehicle is never far away. How it compares with everything else we run is set out on the difficulty grades page.
It is not a hard tour in the way that Mae Hong Son or Vietnam's mountain days are hard. It is a long, warm, steady week with one proper climb at the end of it.
When it runs
We run this route twice each cool season, in December and in January. Both departures cover the same route. Full dates, pricing and the day-by-day are on the Tour of Northern Thailand page.
Riders flying from India ask the same questions each time: what the bike costs to fly, how many connections it has to survive, whether to rent instead. Bangkok is the easiest of our destinations to reach with a bike, with direct flights from several Indian cities. That, and the rest of it, is covered on our page for riders flying out of India.
If the week sounds like yours, the Tour of Northern Thailand page has the full itinerary, what is included and when the next departure runs.
Written by Krish.
