Slice of Pai

So for the delay in writing this, raft of things have happened in the past few weeks and I’ve not felt up to it until now. Last I wrote we were taking the treacherously coiling road up to Pai from Chiang Mai.

According to our Lonely Planet, Pai is one of the last spots along the old hippy backpacker route through this region and we found that assessment to be pretty accurate – this is of note because the book’s accuracy has been less and less reliable throughout our trip. We arrived and found a dusty town with dirt roads choked with internet cafes, guided tour agencies, hip clothing shops and restaurants, a surprising number of which offering middle-eastern fair from baba ganouj to hummus and falafel. The town its self was populated with old ‘60s hangers-on and Thai men dressed and living as if it were still the summer of love, wearing bellbottom jeans and mesh tank-tops, long hair or dreadlocks flowing down their backs, stoned to the gills.

We headed toward Pai River and found a pleasant little bungalow, reasonably priced and on the water with indoor plumbing and a nice deck. We spent 3 nights there and didn’t do much in between them, just relaxed and explored town. We did take a daylong yoga class, my first, which we enjoyed but apparently was more advanced than most beginners’ classes. One of the draws for us was that the package included lunch and dinner, both of which were supposed to consist of Indian food cooked by a genuine Indian woman, this is a paraphrase of the flying that drew us there. In actuality the food turned out to be sub-par Thai-tourist fare. We were unimpressed. Mama, the name the teacher insisted we call her, was easy going enough and a decent enough teacher, but that didn’t make up for the disappointment in the food.

The rest of the time was divided between milling around, reading, shopping at over-priced bookstores, eating and checking e-mail (this is where we learned that our friend Annie was getting married to her boyfriend Tim – if you two read this, CONGRATULATIONS! We’re so happy for you.) The food was incredibly cheap and on our last night in town I had the best curry I ate all trip. It was yellow curry with eggplant. Delicious. (To all the food blog readers, I’m sorry about the lack of attention it has gotten. I’ll write more on it soon. Don’t worry, I haven’t stopped eating.)

We’d read that you can take a rafting trip on to the next town, Mae Hong Son, so we investigated and eventually signed up at one of the numerous tourism agencies. We left early in the morning and as it turned out, we had an even more nauseating drive ahead of us than the one in to Pai. The road was even more twisted and cutback riddled and this time we were riding on benches in the back of a pickup. I was thoroughly sick by the time we arrived at the drop. Only the mint gum I chewed furiously the entire time saved me from divulging the contents of my stomach all over the 5 other people we were riding with. For future reference to anyone who might be daring to take a similar route, an entire pack of gum is about right, no less than 5 pieces, but be sure to spread them out so that you take them at intervals and build up a tolerance for that much gum in your mouth at once.

In our group were a pair from England who’d been traveling for three years spending time working all along the way, a father and daughter combo from England (they had rented a car and drove themselves to the drop) and a Canadian couple that had just finished teaching English in Korea. Hilary took care of the questioning for me while I did battle with my inner ear.

Once at the river we got all suited up, life jackets, helmets and paddles, aumnd pushed off, the British father/daughter team in our boat. I immediately snapped my aluminum paddle. The paddle just peeled right off. Hilary, being the generous person she is, offered up her paddle and sat back to enjoy the ride until we reached the lunch stop where we could pick up another. The trip was billed as intermediate and supposedly had at least two class 4 rapids. The danger was heightened by our guide’s continuous attempts to high-side us sideways on any rocks he could find in the river, thus dumping one or another unlucky person. Mostly it was the father who was sent sprawling into the water or grappling with the edge of the boat to hang on. It was fun and in the end we all got it as we got a little too squirrely in the class 4 and flipped the boat. Hilary took a pretty good bump on the leg and I had the father come down on top of me, also I wrapped my ankle on a rock and had to ride out the rest of the rapid floating on my back. It mellowed out considerably after that and gently floated down river through a giant wildlife preserve spotting a pack of monkeys and several king fishers. All-in-all, it was a fun trip and we felt good at the end of the day. Plus we got to ask the Canadians lot more questions about living in Korea.

Mae Hong Son was an entirely different sort of town than Pai. It did not pander to tourists what so ever. In fact, we had a bit of trouble finding a guest house. It is a regular small town, the same as you might find in the U.S. There is of course a market, but it wasn’t any different from the rest. Near to the town are several Long Neck Karen villages. They are considered refugees from Burma though many of the villages they live in are pretty old. Hilary and I decided that we would rent a motobike and check out a village then look for the biggest waterfall in the area. We had a map we got from our guest house, but weren’t sure of our competency on the roads on our own. I drove and Hilary rode on the back with the map. She got us to both places successfully.

The Karen village was not at all what we’d hoped for. There were several on the map and we chose one of the smaller ones because we figured that was our best shot and seeing one that wasn’t thronged by tourists and constructed around the accompanying trade. It didn’t matter. We paid 500 bhat a piece for entrance – the money supposedly goes to supporting the villagers as they cannot work in Thailand due to their refugee status. The village was little more than several little stalls where villagers were selling postcards of Long Neck Karen (in one case a woman was selling postcards of herself), little trinkets and cheap art pieces. The understanding was that you’d buy an item in exchange for taking a picture. We did this once. We don’t mind contributing to a village, especially when it’s so little, but it just seemed tawdry in this manner.

The waterfall was beautiful.

In the end, we did something like 100kms on the bike that day. It was great. We even got the bike up to 80km/hr.

The next day we left for Mae Sariang, but when we pulled into town, we decided we were ready to get back to Bangkok, and the fastest way to do that was to go back to Chiang Mai and catch the train the next day. That is what we did.


More Pictures later.