Road 1265: a nice car trip in the Pai area

If you are in the area Pay, the lively tourist town in the north of Mae Hong Son province or somewhere close to it holiday you know, the roads there can be quite busy with car traffic. Highway 1095, which connects Chiang Mai and Pai, is a good example of this.

Travel Route

If you want to take a quiet and beautiful car ride, turn off about 18 kilometers southeast of the city of Pai and take road 1265. You will then arrive on the probably loneliest road of Thailand, which takes you to Galyani Vadhana district.

The road winds along a winding river, goes over some pretty steep hills and through dense forests. The road is of moderate quality, often with potholes, forcing you to drive on the wrong side of the road at times. Not really a problem as there is hardly any other traffic. The road to the Galyani Vadhana district is about 60 kilometers long, for which you need an hour and a half.

You'll feel like you're alone in the world during the ride, but it's well worth it for the occasional scenic vistas of the mountains and lush rice paddies. For a long time you drive parallel to a crystal clear river.

The new precinct

Galyani Vadhana is the newest district of Chiang Mai province, established about four years ago with the aim of promoting responsible and sustainable tourism. The district is named after the late HRH Princess Galyani Vadhana, the elder sister of HM the King.

This part was previously called Wat Chan and was part of the larger Mae Chaem district. On the northern edge, scattered Karen communities lived quite a distance from the city center. The road connection between Wat Chan and Mae Chaem was so poor that residents of Wat Chan, who wanted to visit local government offices, preferred to detour 200 kilometers via Chiang Mai, rather than take the direct link, which was only half as long in distance .

Development

It is still quiet there now, but that will not last long, because the plans are to further develop the district. Investors hope that the district will become popular with tourists and land prices will already be ten times what they were a few years ago. Already there are supermarkets, furniture stores, restaurants and the like, all set up by people from outside the district.

There is also a lot of construction on roads and office complexes and here and there you see new companies. However, the plan for tourism still needs to be fleshed out and for now it's a good thing, so that people don't end up in mass tourism yet.

“Business is not going well yet, actually pretty quiet,” says Vrapan Yod-ying, owner of the recently opened Chan Chao restaurant in the center. She is from Phrae and together with her husband they ran a business in Pattaya. They closed that and moved to Wat Chan in the hope of taking advantage of the influx of tourists that is yet to come.

Ban Wat Chan

Karen hill tribes

The district is located at an altitude of 1000-1500 meters above sea level, the weather is cooler than elsewhere in Thailand, thanks to the pine forests of more than 100.000 rai. The forest has survived Thailand's deforestation catastrophe, as the majority of the population in the district belong to the Karen hill tribes. They have always considered the forest, probably the largest in Thailand, to be part of their existence. In the dialect of the Karen, the district is called “mu je key”, which means “the origin of the river”. That river is then the Mae Chaem, one of the main tributaries of the Ping River. The locals also call the place “kor thor ti”, the village at the foot of the pagoda. It is a reference to the first pagoda ever built in Ban Wat Chan, the nerve center of the local community for three centuries.

Each morning, a mist hangs over the district as if it wants to remain separate from the world beyond. Each day passes slowly and quietly, the villagers seem in no rush to work on the farms, the carpenters renovating the temple and the children playing in the village square.

Go there and enjoy it for a day, you hope that everything will stay as it was, but before you know it, you will have to navigate between the many tourist buses in a while, because the money is luring and the development of the district is going but by.

Adapted from an article in the Bangkok Post.