Handmade Hmong

Handmade Hmong

2 Day Mountain Biking Chiang Mai Tour

Cycling from Chiang Mai to Chiang Dao
There is no greater way to acquire an accurate accurate cultural insight of a destination than on a bike.

Bicycling from Chiang Mai to Chiang Dao, Norhtern Thailand and back with its rugged environment, unspoiled forests, and colourful hill tribe settlements is the ultimate off-road cycle tour experience. Off-the-beaten-path bicycle trails allow for painless biking so that you can really appreciate it all. Although the biking is undemanding, you do want to have some cycling proficiency as you don't want to be learning how to cycle just before this trip.

After a nourishing breakfast and swift pick-up from your Chiang Mai hotel, cyclists are given durable and well-maintained mountain bikes. Your bike gear such as helmets, bike shorts, and shoes should be a good fit because they will be yours, the ones that you bought or brought out with you for the Chiang Mai cycling tour!

A titillation for all the senses with exotic scenery, distinctive encounters and a concoction of natural aromas, this 2 Day Mountain Bike Adventure drags you from your customary normality and puts you squarly in a rural setting, light years away from your own. Cyclists have commented that it is like being on the film set of a surreal movie in which fantasy flora and fauna rock to the tropical beat with iridescent butterflies fluttering and flitting against a multicolored scene.

A multitude of songs supply the background music as birds serenade you. All this happens as the bike tour group bicycle through harsh forest once in a while glimpsing a peek at Thailand's third highest peak. This experience is so good that you'll constantly feel, "Wow! Oh wow! Wow!". Put on a small helmet camcorder and video all the action as you become your own motion picture producer.

Chiang Dao Elephants
Remote, expansive and hill-studded, Chiang Dao is home to Thailand's first elephant camp in a region where in bygone times elephants toilled in logging camps. While logging has long since been made illegal, tourists represent a real lifeline for Asian Elephants and the Chiang Dao Elephant Camp gets you up-close and personal with these gentle giants in their genuinely natural surroundings. See working elephant displays, intermingle with the elephants and observe them bathing in the Ping River.

Elephants are engaging, creatures with their protruding, multi-functional trunks used for lifting heavy objects, stretching for food high up in the trees, and even as a power shower to give themselves and each other a washing down. Elephants can alter the shower pressure accordingly as well! Want a tropical rain shower? No problem. Just spray less. Want a powerful fire-hydrant style sluice down? No worries, just blast away! But beware. When it comes to an elephant power shower, staying dry as an innocent looker-on is not surefire!

Mother elephants and baby elephants have a exceptional rapport. It's just way too cute to see them relate with each other as the mother elephants try to sluice their infants and the baby elephants just want to play. Well, it's virtually the same as humans except that their bathtub is rather larger than ours. Everyone loves elephants and to be able to gawk at them in their environment is not only a photo opportuntiy but an experience that you'll be recalling for the rest of your life.

Hmong Pha Mieng, Lahu, Lisu and Akkha Villages
Hugging extreme ridges and bragging spectacular mountain views is the tiny, isolated Hmong Pha Mieng village. Follow the trail a little further and the Lahu village Kup Kap appears. Swimming, embroidery, watching and maybe even assisting with some organic gardening, are just among some of the day by day life activities that you'll most likely get to experience as you hang out with the hill tribes people. Trade your bike for a buffalo ride or an elephant ride and journey local style.

Ethnic Tribes and their Villages in Northern Thailand
In the west, we have grown accustomed to expecting a particular standard of comfort from our houses; natural light, appliances and several conveniences. Whilst you go along the mountain biking trails of Northern Thailand you see in the Hill Tribes people an alternative way of life; a pastoral lifestyle governed by old traditions and customs which is far less complicated than our own.

Erected on wooden stilts, plain verandahs spill into one main communal area with a wood stove generally situated at the back of the room that has Bamboo walls, a rattan floor, thatched roof and handmade interior decorations and curios. There is no architectural cloning nor prefabricating up here and no two villages are the same. Instead each hill tribe village has a certain uniqueness inspired and inherited through generations of customs and heritage.

For the majority of the hill tribes people of Northern Thailand survival is at a subsistence level; they cultivate what they eat with little surplus to sell. They are opportunisits though and only a few years ago poppies were a popular cash crop! These little horrors have now been replaced by flower cultivation of a less toxic kind, tea, coffee and other products as a result of a project inspired by the King of Thailand. Hill Tribes people also utilise long-established skills to produce cultural handicrafts which for sale. While some Thailand tours unsympathetically descend on select hill tribes villages in their droves, the mountain biking Chiang Mai tour wins again by being able to follow remote mountain bike trails in our quest for authenticity and responsible travel.

The mountain biking Chiang Mai tour is an incredible experience in itself yet to meet the villagers and to connect with them in real life just underlines this awesome two-day bike trip. Images dont do justice. Words cannot do justice. The lives of the Hill Tribes people of Northern Thailand are not only detached geographically but so far removed from our world.

The 2 Day Mountain Biking Chiang Mai Tour
This bike tour from Chiang Mai to Chiang Dao in the North of Thailand is an ideal family adventure with easy biking down off-road mountain bike trails. To really grasp the incredible mountain biking, the mountainous landscape, the untainted rural life and the overall cultural experience a sufficientlevel of fitness and Mountain Biking experience is recommended for this active 2 day mountain biking Chiang Mai tour.

Highlights of this adventure Bicycling experience include being a guest at a hill tribe lodge with the Padang, exploring the Chiangdao caves, watching elephants and, of course, the beautiful scenery. The cycling tour is perfectly suitable for family adventure and a support vehicle follows the bicycle tour at all times. On the whole if you are planning on including Chiang Mai on your holiday and are looking for inspired short adventures from Chiang Mai, this 2 day mountain bike family adventure certainly is certainly one to consider.

About the Author

Find more Asia Adventure Travel Ideas, Exotic Retreats, Holiday Packages and Tours on ZiZ Inspire. Get in touch with us and lets begin to create your Asia Tailor Made Holidays today.

TRAVEL VIETNAM - Eric put on Hmong native outfit in Sapa, Vietnam.