Not only do I have a passionate love affair with mountain biking, I also have a fetish for maps. Luckily, both seem to perfectly complement each other.
The other day as I was scanning via Google Maps the area between Tak's Tha Song Yang on the border with Myanmar and Omkoi, Chiang Mai's southernmost town, I wondered if there's a "secret" track running through the mountainous terrain linking the two places. Further search in an online community of motorcycle riders revealed not only that such a trail does indeed exist but also that it looks great for biking.
So, after work the next evening my friends and I set off from Bangkok, with our pedal-powered rigs on the back of the pick-up truck, heading for the border town of Mae Sot where we stopped to rest for a couple of hours. Hitting the road again the following morning, we soon found our target route, the side road to Pha Noh Khi Karen village, branching off from the highway just 10km or so south of Tha Song Yang.
Pha Noh Khi was just 2km down the narrow road, which, of course, did not end there. As the road continued up and down the foothills, it became even narrower. The paved surface eventually petered out and before long we found ourselves travelling on a dusty dirt track in the middle of nowhere. There was no 3G signal and the online digital map was not accessible.
About 8km from Pha Noh Khi we arrived at an intersection with a sign warning that construction work was going on somewhere up the road straight ahead. It looked like we finally found a good point to start riding. As I got off the pick-up truck and was about to walk over to the only house within sight to ask for directions, a Karen man passed by on a motorcycle so we asked him first. He told us that the area where the intersection was located was called Khun Huai Nok Kok and that further up the mountain the road was closed because workers were paving one of the steep sections. "Motorcycles are allowed to pass so your bicycles can too," he said, adding that the truck, however, would have to turn right and detour for 30km or so to get to a three-way junction at an area called Kho Pha Doh, which, for the bikers, was just 9km up the direct track.