Thailand is a better cycling country than its road-safety reputation suggests, provided you are honest about which roads and which hours. The surfaces are good, the gradients in most of the country are gentle, food and water are never far away, and the hard shoulder on a rural highway is wide enough to feel like a lane.
What it demands is heat management and traffic sense. The heat ends more first tours here than the traffic does, and riding safely in Thai traffic is a learnable skill built on one principle: be predictable, and assume nobody has seen you.
For most visitors the riding is best in the north. Chiang Mai is the natural base, with climbs in every direction, and the Mae Hong Son loop by bicycle is one of the great rides in South-East Asia for anyone with the legs for it. In Bangkok, the Sky Lane is a genuine oddity worth a morning — a full-length circuit around an airport, closed to everything but bicycles.
The practical questions — hiring a bike, flying with your own, and getting it onto a train — are covered at the end. And yes, we deal with the dogs.
