So, whatcha doin’?

In short, Thailand. Otherwise known as The Land of Smiles due to the welcoming nature and friendliness of its people, Thailand brings the best of many worlds together: great weather, low-cost beachside resorts, a variety of great food, and everything from alcohol-fuelled beach parties in Pattaya and Phuket, and rain-forest-style retorts in the south, through to mountains, national parks stretching for miles, and great roads in the north.

Reaching middle age, and having ridden bikes since a teenager – with a short pause whilst I got married, had kids, and general other adult-type responsibilities like mortgages, I got back into biking in 2014. Since then, I’ve ridden all across the UK (the NC500 was awesome, although I can’t say the same for the midges), the sout-west coast of Ireland, the Swiss Alps, and large parts of France, the Netherlands, Germany, Belgium. But nothing further.

And this changes now. Because I’m taking myself off to Chiang Mai for a small-group tour (4-5 bikes) on an 8-day trip around Northern Thailand, on an event run by Let’s Ride, a long-established motorcycle training and tour company based in the city.

Starting at Chiang Mai, which is right where the little blue icons are in the middle, the rout heads clockwise for about 950 miles (just over 1000km) with a maximum altitude of about 1440m around Phu Chi Fah.

Stick with me over the coming weeks as I prepare for this trip, and then watch my journey.

Permanent link to this article: https://www.moab.co.uk/preparation/so-whatcha-doin/

Driving licences

So, confession time. I have two driving licences in the UK. There’s actually a very good reason for this: my original UK driving licence, which is still in date, is badly cracked, from spending years in my wallet. So, being a responsibile citizen, I applied for a replacement. All good.

However, the replacement has a newer ‘date of issue’ – which in a way, makes sense. But many car rental companies take this to mean ‘date you passed your test’ – and hiring a car when you’ve ‘passed your test’ mere weeks or months previously, is a challenge, to say the least. So, I use the old, broken, licence when hiring cars, and then have the newer pristine one in the event I ever need to produce it. Not entirely sure this is legal, but you do what you do, right?

Anyway, to ride or drive in many parts of the world, you’ll need an International Driving Permit. Which all sounds very official and organised, until you find out there are three variations, witht the very oldest first established in 1926.

IDPs originated from three international conventions: the 1926 Paris International Convention relative to Motor Traffic, the 1949 Geneva Convention on Road Traffic, and the 1968 Vienna Convention on Road Traffic. And which one you need depends on where you’re travelling.

They’re cheap enough: £5.50, and Thailand requires the 1968 version, and all have translations of the English language into French, Russian and Spanish inside. You no longer obtain these from Post Offices, but any local newsagent who has the PayPoint scheme, so long as yo ucan present a passport-sized photo and your UK driving licence.

The entire process is manual: your details will be hand-written onto the IDP, your photo will be stuck with glue in the appropriate place, and then the person behind the counter will stamp the relevant boxes after looking at your entitlements on your exsiting licence. The whole process took some ten minutes, and felt very much like I’d lurched back to the 1970s, as there was absolutely nothing done on-line, no computer screen – 100% manual from start to finish, and – oddly – no record of me having been issued one.

Permanent link to this article: https://www.moab.co.uk/preparation/driving-licences/