Long readsHow old is this ride

People have moved along this line for centuries and have been riding it for pleasure for under thirty years. Both halves of that are worth knowing.

The southern road is old. Thai Wikipedia's article on Route 108 describes it as an ancient route, because it linked Chiang Mai — the centre of the Lanna kingdom — with Mawlamyine, the port on the Andaman Sea in Mon State, crossing the border at the Salween in what is now Mae Sariang district. That is a trade road to the Indian Ocean, and it was walked long before it was driven.

Then the dates. The Highways Department built it up from a rough track into a gravel road between 1957 and 1963, about five metres wide. Asphalt came much later: a surfacing programme ran from 1987 to 1990 in named sections — Hot to Mae Sariang, Mae La Noi to Khun Yuam, Khun Yuam to Ban Huai Pong, Ban Huai Pong to Mae Hong Son, Mae Sariang to Mae La Noi — and the whole road was finished in 1998.

The northern road is younger still. Work on the Chiang Mai–Pai–Mae Hong Son road, today's Route 1095, started in 1967 and the paving was not finished until the early-to-mid 1990s.

Inference — put those together and the circuit as a thing you would ride for fun, on a road sealed the whole way, is about thirty years old. Anyone who did it in the 1980s was doing something else entirely: gravel, five metres wide, on a road that took a day and a half.

How many people do it now? Not on this disk — nobody publishes a count for the loop. What is published is a symptom: the Wikipedia article on Pai records that in the November-to-March high season, visitor numbers swell to the point that the town has traffic jams and runs short of electricity, water and petrol. Pai was a quiet Shan market village before this road was sealed.