Here is a brief report on the trip.
I set off on the Forza on Friday 10 October 2014 after breakfast.
Ready to go
to spend a couple of days with a friend of mine who had just arived on holiday from the UK.
He tends to base himself in Pattaya, I have no idea why :lol:
It was just an excuse for a ride really. Here is a picture of the route I ended up taking following the input from Fanz;
The google map link is
https://www.google.co.th/maps/ms?msid=212646794397075373373.00050594008dafdffbad3&msa=0&ll=15.829251,99.854736&spn=6.412736,11.969604
The blue line was day 1, about 600km, mostly on highway 11.
I like highway 11 at least until Phitsanulok, it is interesting and the road surface is very good.
South of Phitsanulok however, when it becomes a single carriageway what I hoped would be a really nice ride through the countryside was seriously marred by the terrible road surface.
You couldn’t really spend time looking around or the chances were you would disappear into a crater. The road surface was reminiscent of the clints and grykes I used to go to at the top of Malham cove.
The road improved before the junction with highway 1 which would have been great except it started to rain, not too much but for about 50 km I was getting wet.
Once it stopped though I soon dried out and I only had about 50km more to go. One of the great thing about riding a Forza is the amount of weather protection you get which In my case meant only getting wet from the sternum upwards.
Finding the hotel took a little time but not that much of a problem. I stayed at a bit of a weird place, the Lopburi Inn Resort. The place has a thing about monkeys and there are statues everywhere including outside of my room.
They also are supposed to sell monkey beer, but they didn't have it whilst I was there.
As you may know it wasn't that unusual for people to want to take pictures with the Harley when I had it but this was the first time I had a bunch of Indian tourists posing for pictures with the Forza.
Dinner at the resort was poor
but breakfast was passable.
Day 1 made me feel it is better to break journeys up into smaller stints especially if you don’t know the road conditions etc. of where you are going.
Day 2 in red on the map was about 310 km I think, down highway 1 and take the bypass of Saraburi, There are road works by the junction of highway 33. Some shitty road surfaces in patched but liveable to be honest, the main problem is truck dodging.
Highway 33 is a great road, I really like it. I went further on it than we had done before and then down the 319 to the 304. I should then have just joined up with the 331 but I missed the junction and ended up taking another link road, the 3121. Not a bad road as it happens plus at the junction with the 331, a dual carriageway a Thai driver decided to cut the corner in his car. He screeched to a halt as he found himself pointing the wrong way on the 331 carriageway. I just laughed I am afraid.
Highway 331 southbound is a bummer of a road, the surface is shot to bits and it is full of trucks as it is the direct route to Laem Chabang the deep water port. I didn't enjoy that bit of the ride really.
I also did not take the spur towards Laem Chabang and highway 7 and continued to highway 36 which needed a u turn to get pointing south on. Neither the road signs nor my nav took me off the 36 onto highway 7, the direct way into town but onto highway 3, the old way, still not a big problem. I was at the hotel, the Sabai Wing by 2pm.
The route back was planned to be a 2 day. Originally I had thought to go the same way but in reverse. The main difference being that the 1st day as usual would be the longer ride so my stop would be Phitsanulok. However, I was fed up with the road surface on that route so I was thinking, in my mind, to change to highway 1, the way historically I would normally go. The actual route is in purple.
I took the 7 from Pattaya to the junction with 331 at Laem Chabang where to go north a u turn on a make shift path between the carriageways was performed, possibly not quite legal but I was not the only one so…
Here in comes an observation whilst going north on highway 331, although the road surface was far from perfect, it was a billion times better than the southbound carriageway. My conclusion, the fully laden trucks go down the road to the port but the laden trucks for import take a different route, probably to Bangkok. The trip to highway 304 was really quite nice and so was the trip all the way to highway 33.
Before lunch I turned off highway 1 onto the road that bypasses the south of Lopburi and apart from stopping for a pee and getting a little blood back in the cheeks of my **** I was pretty soon at Singburi on highway 32.
I had thought that I would stop maybe at Nakhon Sawan but it wasn’t even 1pm when I got to Singburi and Nakhon Sawan was less than 150km away. I figured that if I got to the Kamphaeng phet /Tak area later than 5pm I would find some where to stop otherwise.
I was in Tak before 4.30pm. This included being stopped by the cops for riding too much in the outside lane. Yes I had been using that lane a lot. The left lane was often deeply rutted by the trucks that don’t give a shit and they will cross with no regard to anyone else to the bike lane to, having ****ed the road, mess that up too. The far right is at times the only safe place to be.
Thankfully, the nice cop agreed, told me how dangerous Thai drivers can be (which came as a shock) and apart from discussing how many cc the bike was and how many hp, sent me on my way.
Having got to Tak I was but 270km from home, I am riding alone so there is no social “let’s stop and enjoy Tak” to think of so I thought just keep going, so I did.
So that was the trip to Pattaya and back. The Forza did well I think, for sure bigger wheels would help on some of the shitty road surfaces but 900km in a day without a blip, that’s not too bad.
Next it is the Issan ride...
Al
