Over the hills to sleepy hollow

MAE Hong Son, in the far northwest corner of Thailand, hasn’t changed much in the last 20 years. It is approximately 15 years since I last visited this small town, surrounded by forested mountains that rise a good 1,800 metres from the floor of a bowl-shaped valley.

The town has a couple of 7-Eleven stores and a KFC fast food outlet, but they are the only recognisable brands apart from the town’s gasoline stations.

“Not such a bad thing,” a local interior designer explains as he works on new room interiors at the town’s 75-unit Mountain Inn.

He describes his mock-up room and his interior designs as “classical”, noting that it is the only relevant hotel theme that works in this sleepy town.

Mountain Inn has a classical look about it. Movie producers recognised it when they took over the entire hotel for the shooting of Air America and the 1996 adventure movie, the Quest starring Roger Moore. Mel Gibson and Robert Downey Jr stayed here for two months during the shooting of the 1990 Air America action comedy. But that was 19 years ago and a hotel like the Mountain Inn now faces the tough task of reinventing itself. The same predicament faces the Imperial Thara and Rooks Holiday. They are looking tired and in need of a serious refit. But how do you spruce up cement buildings that look very similar to the town’s general hospital?

No one doubts this is an ideal time to renovate rooms. On a lucky day a hotel might have 30 rooms occupied, but the next day will not bring such good fortune. Hoteliers are more accustomed to having two or three guests.

The town has less than 350 rooms that you could say are three-star. There are not many incentives to change that if you are an investor. Mae Hong Son is the proverbial backwater; a sleepy hollow of tourism. Achieving a sustainable business year-round in this town is as difficult as driving across the hilly ridges that separate it from Chiang Mai.

It’s quite a daunting drive even for the minivans that complete the 220-km trip in slightly more than six hours. How many towns in Thailand present you with a certificate simply because you drove your car there? Mae Hong Son’s chamber of commerce does. It hands you a brightly coloured certificate congratulating you for successfully negotiating 1864 serious switchback curves on Highway 1095 to reach this remote provincial town.

But then you might surmise that a town that has to hand out a certificate if you drive there is a little short on tourism assets.

I enjoyed the chat with the manager of the Chamber of Commerce, who sits in an office in the building occupied by the Tourism Authority of Thailand.

We chatted about Mae Hong Son. “Do you think it has changed,” he asked me. My emphatic “no” seemed to surprise him. I suspect he probably wanted me to say “well yes and no.”

Like all optimists, we like to keep our cake and eat it. In the case of Mae Hong Son, for reasons I still cannot fathom, the town missed out on a decade or more of tourism success that reshaped Thailand.

I quite like that sense of missing out. All the tiny guest houses were still there, paint peeling off the wooden exteriors, the temples were just as they were, serene and unbothered by tourists or buses pumping out diesel fumes in the parking lot.

Then there was the same spectacular view of the town and airport from the courtyard of a pagoda high above the town on Doi Kong Mu peak.

Another unchanging feature of this valley is the short and sweet tourism season. It starts in late-November and ends in February. Contrary to popular opinion, most of the town’s tourists are Thais, not “farangs” who travel to this valley to experience the “winter” chill factor. As temperatures drop, the winter fashion wear is packed into suitcases for a trip far north.

This migration allows hotels to double their rates as fast as the mercury falls. It’s a two-month bonanza when hotels earn Bt2,500 a night for a room compared with Bt1,500 for the rest of the year.

Hoteliers tend to blame their troubles on airlines. THAI is a favourite whipping boy especially when it threatens to reduce services, or hand the route over to an airline using smaller aircraft. How does an airline make a profit out of a Bt800 or Bt900 fare for a 30-minute hop over the mountains to Chiang Mai?

To its credit, Mae Hong Son has some fine natural and cultural treasures to explore. The town is a great place to chill out, ride a motor bike to nearby hill tribe villages, river raft and hike in the hills.

I am quite enjoyed my late August stay in sleepy hollow. It rained in the afternoons, but the landscape was a billard table green. Day time temperatures were a pleasant 22 to 28 degrees centigrade. But this has no bearing on the fact that most visitors head for Pai, just 100 km away.

It has all the elements, Mae Hong Son residents would appreciate – a stable tourism business, lots of media hype and plenty of foreign and local tourists to keep hotel rates healthy, almost year-round.

Pai changes by the week as carpenters hammer out a new line of guest houses in the village’s already overcrowded lanes. It’s on a roll, the fashionable place to visit if you want to chill out and pay over the odds for boutique style accommodation crammed into tiny lanes next to the Pai River. Take your choice? Sleepy Mae Hong Son, an extra 100 km over steep mountain ridges, or cool Pai where the ATM card burns from over-use. Give me the mountain road to Mae Hong Son any day.