This week’s dream: a tuk-tuk tour of Thailand’s wild hills

Though it has “less grunt than some lawnmowers”, does 0-50mph in 20 seconds, and makes for “a numb bum” and sunburnt calves on the open road, a tuk-tuk is the ideal vehicle for a self-drive tour of Thailand’s northwestern mountains, says James Stewart in The Sunday Times. This is “fullbeam exotic Asia”, far from the tourist trail, and pottering around it in one of these open-sided motorised rickshaws allows you to “breathe in the aromas of the country” – “composting jungle, wood smoke, incense” – and make the most of the passing views. Go with the Tuk Tuk Club of Mae Wang and you’ll also benefit from prearranged accommodation (“including one pinch-me jungle hideaway where Brad and Angelina stayed a few years back”) and a support car to take care of your luggage.

Tuk-tuks are rarely seen outside Thailand’s big cities, so drivers attract plenty of smiles, thumbs ups and selfie requests from locals. The club has a fleet of six, specially adapted for Western tourists (with higher roofs, bigger back seats and beefier suspension), and its guests tend to drive them in convoy around a 470-mile circuit west of Chiang Mai. The route twists high into the jungled hills, past “ramshackle” teak villages, plenty of elephants, and rivers that “wind slowly between banana trees”. Arriving in the old town of Mae Sariang at dusk as “nasal chanting” drifts from its temples is “magical”. The “no-name, tin-roof” café opposite the temple in Khun Yuam serves some of the world’s best Thai food, including “sour, lemony” mushroom soup, and larb, a mix of ground pork, chilli, mint, shallots and lime. And in the villages of the Lahu hill tribe, where chickens chuckle and pigs grunt among stilted wooden houses, time itself seems to drift – making for a peaceful end to this “backcountry journey into a nation’s soul”.

The Tuk Tuk Club (+66 92 250 5182, www.thetuktukclub.com) has an 11-day self-drive tour from £1,295pp, excluding flights.