75 km

We started the day with a thousand-meter climb up a mostly 5% grade, so it was slow and steady for a while. Then it was up and down for several kilometers following the ridge line. We rode straight through Muang Phu Khun, another usual stop on this route, because a cyclist we met this morning called it a “hole” and a pair of cyclists whose touring account we read called it the worst guest house in Southeast Asia. This was only possible (for me, at least) because we got a good head start by continuing past Kasi yesterday to stay at the hot springs.

While these high-altitude, extremely steep mountains are beautiful to ride through, we have been shocked to see the extent of the slash-and-burn farming that has scarred much of the mountainside visible in all directions from the highway. There is little original forest left. Farmers clear and burn large patches of forest, farm the land for a couple of years until it is no longer fertile and then they abandon it to burn new patches. All along the ride each day we have seen scooters parked on the side of the road and farmers hacking away at crops and tiling soil above and below the highway. We wonder how much of the clear-cut we see has been done for logging and how much for farming, because we don’t see any access roads for bringing out the timber.

The dark patches are only the most recently cleared areas. The smoother green patches are abandoned farm patches that have grown in with scrub. There is little forest left to be seen.

There were two guest houses in Kiewkacham, both offering rooms with shared bath (squat toilet & bucket shower stalls). One was clearly a brothel for the many truck drivers stopping here (on the left), and the other was a little better. It was terribly dirty, but we were glad we were still carrying our own sheet. There was no fan, but the night was cool enough at that altitude that we didn’t need it, especially since it had rained.