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Mae Hong Son Loop EN ไทย

RoadsRoute 1263

ทางหลวงแผ่นดินหมายเลข 1263

Sixty-three kilometres, no town, and more curves per kilometre than the famous road.

38.1km
230curves
25hairpins

The route

↻ Clockwise

Taken eastward off Route 108 after Mae Hong Son: a long climb, then a long drop to Mae Chaem.

↺ Counter-clockwise

Taken westward from Mae Chaem: climbs first, and puts you on Route 108 with Mae Hong Son still to come.

The circuitBan Rak ThaiDoi InthanonHuai Nam DangThe Japanese memorial at Khun YuamMae Sam Laep and the SalweenMae Surin WaterfallOp LuangPa Bong Piang rice terracesPai CanyonThe evening in PaiPang UngSu Tong Pae bridgeTham LotTham Pla, the fish caveWat Chong Kham and Wat Chong KlangWat Phra That Doi Kong MuWat Hua WiangWat Jong SoongWat Phra That Mae YenPha Bong hot springsTha Pai hot springsChiang MaiChiang MaiHotHotKhun YuamKhun YuamMae ChaemMae ChaemMae Hong SonMae Hong SonMae SariangMae SariangPaiPaiSoppongSoppong10810810810810951095109510881263109610750 km
Highlighted: Route 1263 · The circuit is drawn from OpenStreetMap ways tagged Route 107, 1095 and 108: 598.0 km, of which 6.5% is bridged in a straight line where the route number is not tagged. © OpenStreetMap contributors · relief Open-Meteo / Copernicus DEM
Route 1263

7.3curves per kilometre — its hardest two kilometres

153.3° — hairpin19.8°6.9°35.6°25.7°12°7.4°20.4°41.6°81.8°60°14.1°22.3°40.2°23.7°1263500 m
2.06 km of Route 1263, drawn to its own bounding box. Every mark is a direction reversal the counter scored; the big one is the hairpin. · © OpenStreetMap contributors

What it is

Khun Yuam east to Mae Chaem. The shortcut that halves the loop, and the hardest riding in this network.

The long version

Inference — the OpenStreetMap trace of this road comes back incomplete: 38.1 kilometres of it stitched, against the roughly 64 the road runs. Over the part that is mapped it carries 159 curves at a 25-degree threshold with 25 hairpins — 4.25 a kilometre, denser than Route 1095's 5.71 — on a third of 1095's length, with a fraction of the traffic. The rest of the road is not on this disk; treat the total as a floor.

What the numbers do not carry is the character: no town in between, long stretches with no fuel and no phone signal, gradients steeper than anything on 1095, and sections where the seal has broken up. It is the most rewarding road here and the one with the least margin.

Inference — in the rains it comes off most plans. Steep, broken seal, and nobody coming past for a while is a combination that stops being fun when it is also wet.

Runs with

Named here by

Where each claim comes from
FieldTierSourceNote
defaultharvestedOpenStreetMap — OpenStreetMap contributors
text.storyinferencethe curve figures are measured; the character description is this project's and is not sourced to a road survey
text_thinferencewritten in Thai by this project, not machine-translated

Sources

cited Cited — a named source, linked · harvested Harvested — fetched from an open dataset, with its licence · tradition Tradition — general knowledge of the tradition, hedged · inference Inference — this project's own reasoning from the above · field Field — someone stood there