VOLUME ISSUE MARCH , P99
Day 01
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
Crashed bikes
and knackered
bodies were a theme
on day three.
The riding could be as hard or
as easy as you wanted.
filled with everything from BMW
GSs to Honda CB street bikes and
even Harley-Davidsons.
These groups were generally
out-of-country tours, as Thai-
land's import laws make owning
such a machine prohibitively
expensive for most of the popula-
tion. Thailand banned the import
of used motorcycles, including
mopeds, electric motorcycles,
and used bicycles with auxil-
iary 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 big-
ger 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.
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 "give 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
