Pai

After a rest day in Chiang Mai we took a minivan to Pai - a small hippy village located in a valley about 3 hours west of Chiang Mai. To get there you have to go over a rather windy hill which makes for a hard trip.

The positive aspect of the hill is that it has kept the town really small and chilled out. When you arrive you actually feel like you're on holiday - no suit salesmen and not even any tuk tuk guys, amazing!

We stayed in a bungalow next to the river for a very reasonable price. To get to our accommodation you had to cross a rather rickety little foot bridge

I guarantee that people have fallen off of this after returning from a night out!

During the day we hired scooters and explored the town and area. We started out to see a waterfall but found out that it was a two hour walk (each way) so went and played in the rice fields instead.


That night we met up with some friends we'd made in Chiang Mai. The night scene in Pai was rather quiet (probably because there was a three day festival starting in Chiang Mai) but still good fun. Worth noting was the bar 'Ting Tong' (rough translation is 'crazy but in a good way') which had some fire artists and some rather relaxed staff - oh, and Andre from Outkast was working there...

The following day we went and checked out another waterfall which was pretty cool. While we were out near the waterfall we spent time at a couple of little villages observing the happenings.


Random Fact: The hill between Chiang Mai and Pai has 762 curves

Highlights:
- Fook, a friendly local gay guy with a South African boyfriend and some fluffy earmuffs
- Pie clothing, bucking the Thailand trend of selling imitation clothing etc. Pie has it's own labels and it's own sense of style influenced by reggae and rusta's.
- Pie countryside: no traffic, slow speeds, beautiful weather and windy roads. Exploring was great fun, you could easily spend a few days driving around looking at nothing in particular.
- Eight young westerners on 125cc mopeds which can go over 100km/hr. Does that constitute a biker gang?

Lessons Learned:
- You can sometimes tell if a local is lying to you by observing the reactions of other locals. This doesn't always work but can be of use.
- Pie is very cold at night. The jeans and thermals we had been lugging around finally got some action.