Pai - The place to do nothing!

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Pai is a lovely little town, set in the middle of beautiful mountains, about 4 hours North West of Chiang Mai. Its not actually that far but the buses are so bad at getting over the mountains it takes forever! It is amazingly high up, with steep bends and no crash barriers.

The general rule seemed to be that the bigger bus has right of way and was ok simply to take each corner as fast as possible on the wrong side of the road, as long as you sound your horn of course! If I had a quid for every time a motorbike had to veer out of our path at the last second I'd be very rich!

It was a very chilled out town, set on a river, full of hippies and backpackers and famous for being the best place to do nothing! Alot of the guest houses seemed to be very expensive so we traipsed round with our bags for about an hour looking for a nice place to stay. We eventually found the cutest little bamboo bungalows right by the side of the river, just over a bridge out of town. For 3 quid we got an "ensuite" bungalow with hot shower, balcony and a river view! Amazing weather so we took the opportunity to recover from the eventful bus trip and had a few beers on the balcony as the sun went down.

We had heard that Pai was good for White water rafting but we couldnt get a straight answer out of any of the tour companies about how the rapids actually were at the moment. By chatting to a few people we found out that they were only level 1 so would be a bit of a waste of time rafting without the white water!

Instead we decided to hire bicycles and see Pai using a bit of peddle power. It took me most of the day to get to the famous waterfalls, as i didnt realise it was uphill ALL THE WAY! 😞 Saw lots of great stuff on the way though, small villages, temples, all very chinese influenced as we are so near the border. The way back down from the waterfalls was much more fun as it was all downhill so we freewheeled at about 100 miles an hour down the mountain, great fun!

The bamboo huts werent the most comfortable nights sleep though, and wasnt alot else to do there but relax, eat and drink so after a great night out to finish off the day we booked bus tickets (minibus this time!) to Chiang Rai for the next morning.

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