Pattaya, Thailand—

Finally. It took some time to get my blog stack with the current platforms today given I last worked on this back in 2014. Thank you Alex M for giving me a little nudge to start up the blog again.

I’m currently in India and started taking a personal diary when I last messaged Alex. I still intend to keep my entries short, but the diary helps in narrowing down what to mention.

I had. But my motorcycle adventures start in Pattaya. Obtaining my A1 motorcycling license in London only a year earlier, I only had 3 days of actual riding experience when I arrived here. And all of those days were actually off-road, 1 day on doing Enduro style training on an extremely muddy forest in East Sussex and 2 days of adventure riding in the forest on the hefty Africa Twin. The scariest part of those 3 days was actually taking the Africa Twin on the several kilometres between the parking spot and the forest - 100km/h in gusts and torrential rain.

I digress. The main purpose of my time in Pattaya was to improve my off-road motorcycling skills. I’ve always found road riding more intuitive as I’ve ridden road bicycles and the same physics apply, as well as the barrier to getting road experience is much lower. There will be ample time to gain on-road exposure in the coming months.

Pattaya was only selected because one of their enduro training camp boasted the highest number of favourable reviews in South East Asia, according to what I could find in Google. The plan was to 3 days of training, take a rest, and then do another 3 days of training. This was to ensure that I’d properly absorb everything that I would have learnt, as well as allow the body to be able to recover. I also got private lessons as to not feel like I was holding anyone back / being held back by others.

The bike they put me on was a Honda CRF250L, very popular dual sport motorcycles because of their Japanese reliability as well as price - they are manufactured locally in Thailand. On my first training session, I rode this with one instructor mainly through sand and then up into the mountain area on some technical trails. Upon leaving the home base on the bike, I realise that it was a bit too low for me. On the technical trails, with deep ruts, when I had to walk the bike through them, my knees were nearly at chest height. The second issue was I severely underestimated my physical endurance. I opted into wearing a neck brace for added safety, but this just added an extra couple of kilograms around the upper chest, as well as reduced airflow to the body. This resulted in me having to call multiple breaks just to cool down and get a breather.

I wanted a day rest after my first day, but I had prebooked 2 more days in advance so had no choice to go. The good thing is that there was a shuttle that would take me from the hotel to the starting site and back, so no stress of having deal with transport.

I managed to stick it out for the extra 2 days. On my days rest, I didn’t get up to much as the daytime temperature was high, so I just stayed at the hotel and watched dirt biking tutorials on Youtube. When I returned to training, I was still sore . Overall, the experience was fun, and I got to practice a variety of skills, such as ascending and descending stairs, spinning the bike on the spot by losing traction and dealing with the wobbliness that is going through deep sand. Unfortunately, the guides spoke pretty poor English so it was difficult to get proper feedback on what I should be doing better. They

As for extra-cirricular activities, I really didn’t get up to much. I did meet a group of Dutch guys at the same training base and were nice to invite me out for their evening escapades. Other than dinners, the most memorable was going out to a local Muay Thai event. I was a big fan of Muay Thai back in high school in both spectating and participating. But I had never seen such high quality fights live so I very much enjoyed reliving a pastime in a spectacular manner.

After the week, I had a few days to kill before heading to my planned destination of Hanoi, Vietnam. I wanted to get some actual sightseeing done in Thailand and after looking at the possible options, I opted for the most culutrally immersive one that had the convenience of an airport, which was Chiang Mai.