Mae Hong Son: the steepest road.

[DavidFL]

Is it the Meo Microwave Road?

Pottering round the loop today I ambled on up to Meo Microwave for a look see, after not going there for many years.
The road is amazing - incredibly steep & very narrow with lots of blind corners.
The steepest sections are probably at the start near the highway R108, but it's not easy to stop, get off, take photos & get on again on the steepest sections; or to find a safe parking spot "on the road."

Anyway a few happy snaps..

Just another blind Meo Microwave corner.

The Hmong village "Meo Microwave" is at the end of the road & not terribly enthralling anymore.

If Meo Microwave is not the steepest asphalt road in MHS province, then I think it must be the switchbacks on R5001, the Rak Thai road, & just after the Pha Sua waterfall heading North.

Any other ideas?

 

[monoplex]

Yeah, I agree it's a great diversion from the main MHS loop. I visited the Microwave Station two up, with luggage in November 2011. Mostly, the road surface is pretty good with an E ticket ride. The biggest problem is really the fear that somebody is coming the other way.

The day started off going south from MHS and finally stopping at Mae Cheam for the night. We took the bike right to the Station and then a little more just to get a better view. This was the best weather I had experienced on the loop.

After that, it was the fun ride down to continue heading south then hanging a left at Khun Yuam. Although it was a week or so late, we wanted to see the sunflower fields at Mae U-Khor.

We had missed the best of the sunflowers but along the way others were in bloom.

It was getting dark with some way to go and pitch black in Mae Cheam when we arrived.

I love the R1263 and have been along it east few times now. Next time will be west bound.

Jim

 

[Changnoi1]

Nice shots, how do you make that animation-shot of that mountain track? Looks like one I HAVE to do!

Potentially all corners in Thailand are blind corners as there could as well be a som-tam cart selling som-tam just around the corner.

Chang Noi

 

[TonyBKK]

Love the animated gif of the road! How did you do that?

Happy Trails!

Tony :happy1:

 

[monoplex]

Thanks. The gif was fairly straightforward to make. As usual it was finding the right free software that took up most of the time.

The lanscape is, of course, Google Earth with our GPS track and a sky dome added to give the sky and clouds. It's a great and simple idea and is just a 50Km hemisphere model with a wrapped sky photo texture. You can make it with Google Sketchup or, like me, download one from:

http://www.barnabu.co.uk/google-earth-sky/

A bit like the Truman Show...

Finding a good free screen capture program was tricky. It appears this feature is much desired and many free programs are often useless vehicles for malware. They install ok and have the right controls etc but do nothing except change your home page and deliver ads. Caveat emptor.

I ended up using Microsoft Essential Encoder 4 SP1 which has a free and limited version but ideal for making a gif. The screen capture tool is excellent, easy to use and has lots of features to frame the captured area, set frame rate and video bit rate.

You have to pull the captured file into the main package to transcode it to a wmv file but no big deal.

http://www.microsoft.com/download/en/details.aspx?id=24601

To build a gif from the wmv video I used 'Free Video to Gif Covertor'. This allows you to choose the graphic size, top and tail the ends and also edit the video stream to delete individual frames. I cropped all frames that didn't show change of movement, just to keep the animation going.

http://www.video-gif-converter.com

Everything ran on my little Samsung N110 netbook so easy peasy, lemon squeezy.

Jim

 

[DavidFL]

Here's how the road looks in google earth

Straight up at the start

 

[DavidFL]

Here's another road to compare - The Nong Khiew road
Why We Must Ride The 4009!

 

[George HuaHin]

great view from the peak

rough gravel track after the radio station