First taste of Pai...

The twisting road to Pai

We set off from Chiangmai at 10am in a minibus, and 762 bends later, we arrived in Pai; the most perfect little hippy village I have ever had the pleasure of discovering. Pai is right in the north of Thailand, 4 hours by bus from Chiangmai, and it is nestled in the most stunning countryside of green hills and mountains. When we first got there, we were a bit underwhelmed. We had taken travel sickness tablets for the journey because we had heard it was a winding one, and as a consequence, when we got to Pai, in the midday sun, we were really drowsy and just wanted to sleep. We sat down at the nearest cafe and had some pizza to try and wake us up and then we got in a taxi and asked it to take us to a hostel we had been recommended: Spicy Pai. We took one look at it and decided it wasn't for us. We then drove to another, more luxurious hotel, which was in the same area (out of the town centre) and we really wanted to stay there but they were booked up. Finally, when we were too tired to look any more, the taxi driver phoned a friend and took us to some huts in the city centre that his friend owned. We walked with our big rucksacks, across a precarious bamboo bridge to the huts and checked into the first hut they showed us, for just £1 each a night! At the time I was so tired I didn't realise that the floor of the hut had massive gaps in it and the bathroom was covered in ants and other insects. 

The hut we checked into

Looking back, I think it was fate that the nicer hotels on the outside of the town were booked up, because if we'd have stayed there we wouldn't have ended up having the time we had in Pai... but before we could have an amazing time, we first had to get through the first part of the story. We put our bags down in the hut, and walked out into the town to try and book a trek or some other activity. We had come to Pai for the white water rafting but everywhere that did this was closed because it was the dry season. There was one place offering tubing (where you float down the river in a rubber ring) but I wasn't keen on this (the river looked dirty and we saw a Chinese girl who had just finished it and was far from raving over it. She said it was basically just a long ride down a dry, dirty river). As she was walking back from the river, we saw some locals scold her and tell her to 'put some clothes on, you're not on a beach!' even though she was dressed in a full swimming costume that was not revealing at all. Having ruled out tubing and rafting, we began to look at treks, but they were all more expensive than the ones in Chiang Mai, with one man even wanting £90 to take us on his 'special trek' where he would teach us to make a camp out of bamboo! I wasn't sold on this, although Jemma wanted to do it, in the end we said no. We wandered back to our hut a little subdued, and I lay on my bed under the fan (the hut was like a sauna), reading the guide book. I read about another hotel that was just down the road and cost £2.50 a night, but was a sealed concrete bungalow, with a good fan, tv and bathroom with hot water and flushing toilet. I checked it out online (even huts have wifi) and it seemed to be a popular place among backpackers, so we went down to have a look at it, and decided there and then to take it and check in, and waste the £1 we had paid for our hut. It was dark by this point, and we hauled our bags from our hut, over the bamboo bridge, to our new accommodation.

Our new 'sealed' guesthouse. Mr Jan's

On the way we met John, an Irish boy we had talked to in the minibus on the way to Pai and he was on a bike. He rode with us to our new place and then we went for dinner with him, followed by drinks in a bar called 'edible jazz', which was a bamboo hut with cushions on the floor. We agreed to meet the next day to rent bikes and cycle to Pam Bok waterfalls, which we had read in the guide book were meant to be quite good. By the end, John was quite tipsy and stumbled off back to his hut (which, coincidentally was the same place as we had checked into originally) and we went back to our lovely sealed bungalow. I was so relieved I didn't have to sleep in a hut with holes, especially as it had no lighting on the outside: it would have been a nightmare to get back into in the dark. Also, there are loads of stray dogs in Pai, and on our way back to our bungalow, a pack followed us. Luckily Jemma was able to put them off while I ran back to the room, asserting on the way that I didn't like Pai and would be leaving as soon as possible. The next day, we got up and went for breakfast in the town (our new accommodation was smack bang in the middle which was convenient) and then we met John and rented some bikes. Within the next 24 hours, Pai was to turn from just another town, into one of the highlights of our round the world trip...

Pai town centre