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Published: March 23rd 2008
Home for 10 days
the riverside huts where we spent our time in Pai. You had to cross this rickety old bridge to get across. Funny at night after 8 Singapore Slings!Pai, Northern Thailand - Local Brew : Leo beer (Smooth & Great taste!)
Landing back in Bangkok after our flight from Vietnam, we didn’t really want to hang around too long. We love Bangkok but this, our 3rd visit in 2 months was just overkill. We booked a 12 hour overnight bus for that same night to take us up to the far North of Thailand to Chiang Mai which is a well known base for getting into the jungle mountains and doing some trekking.
Chiang Mai is a pretty cool place. It is a kind of walled city with a canal type moat running around it. I believe this was used to guard the city from invaders in yesteryear. We had a couple of nights in Chiang Mai seeing the sights including tons of Buddhist schools and temples. I picked up a leaflet in one temple for a ‘free’ (we like free) 3 day meditation course with the monks where you live with them and spend all day chanting and meditating. I was all up for booking us on the course when Kel was quick in convincing me that the food would be minimal and terrible, we would
Quality Gas station
This petrol station was on themountain road to Pai. It had hand winding petrol pumps. Class. sleep on wooden floors surrounded by strangers, I wouldn’t be able to have a beer, and she wouldn’t be able to sunbathe….. so that idea soon went out of the window!
That afternoon we were mooching round one of the temples when we bumped into a young Buddhist Monk called ‘Uddon’. We started off chatting about Karma, Buddhism and the meaning of life. An hour later we were still sat there discussing the Champions League qualifiers and whether Benitez was still the man for the job at Liverpool. Funny. Uddon was a mad Scouse fan and told us how him and his monk pals sneak into the TV room in the middle of the night to watch footie games. I’m not sure what the Dalai Lama would have to say about that! He told me he had some great books on Buddhism and ‘Good Karma for the traveller’ at his temple on the other side of town so I arranged to meet him there at 6pm and pick up the books (when in Rome!). Arriving at the temple at 6pm I waited around for about 45 minutes and there was no sign of my new buddy. I headed back to
Pai.
What a quality, chilled out little place our hotel only to realize that I had been to the wrong temple!!!! What a numpty! I felt pretty bad for letting him down, he was probably stood around for an hour waiting for me. Bad Karma!
So, all templed out we booked a minibus to a small mountain village called ‘Pai’ near the Burmese border which apparently doubles as a kind of Western Hippie retirement village and has some excellent jungle treks. We’d heard really good things about this little place and were looking forward to it.
“136Km from Chiang Mai to Pai - 796 bends!” is the message printed on all the T-shirts in Pai. The road here from Chiang Mai is ridiculously long and winding. It takes you 3 hours of sharp left and right turns up and over steep mountain passes to reach the village of Pai. Kelly got bad motion sickness and was desperately close to painting the ‘full’ minibus a lovely breakfast colour! Thankfully she managed to hold out. We passed through the police mountain roadblock with ease. Its purpose is to halt the trafficking of opium and marijuana which the mountain hill tribes mass produce as they have no other real source
My kind of Buddha
The lovely Kelly Robinson with a chilled out reclining gold Buddha. of income.
So, into Pai. What a cool little town. With a river running through it and surrounded by mountain peaks, the temperature is notably cooler and less humid than in Southern Thailand and the mountain air is crisp and fresh. We fumbled our way over the rickety bamboo footbridge that crosses the river and booked into a riverside coco-hut just by the waterfront. We chilled in our hammock the rest of the day with a few cold beers. That night we took a walk into town. We only managed to walk about 25 yards at the other side of the river as a cocktail bar’s magnetic force pulled us both in and plonked us both on a stool. We stayed here the rest of the night, mixing most of our own cocktails ourselves under the guidance of ‘Cor’ the owner. We met up with 2 English girls Francine & Andrea and after 8 or 9 Singapore Slings we had all arranged to book a 2 day jungle trek together in a few days time.
We chilled out the next few days and hired out some motor bikes so we could have a little tour around and check
Big Fella
Me n the Buddha who ate all the pies out the famous waterfalls, elephants and mountain roads. Anyone that’s ever seen Kelly on a motorbike before will tell you it is both an amusing and nerve racking sight. However, she almost managed to stay on it all day this time, only falling off slightly as we rode back into town at the end of the day, no major damage done! Funniest part of the day by far was riding up a steep mountain track towards the top of a waterfall passing hill-tribe villages on the way. Without word of warning, all these old women started jumping out of the bushes at us gesturing as if they were smoking a ciggie and whispering loudly “Ganja! Ganja! You want buy Ganja!?” We just kept on riding straight on in hysterics.
So the day of the trek came. We had booked our tek with a local company called ‘Pai Nature Trek’ and the owner, our guide called ‘Somsak’ served us all breakfast and coffee before we set off. We were to spend the first day trekking 8 hours through the jungle to our destination and home for the night which was a hill tribe village near the Thailand/Burma border. Day 2
Nellie fancies a pint
this fella came stomping onto the pavement outside the bar we were at. was basically trekking back home.
There were 6 in our group. Me, Kelly, Francine, and 3 Swiss kids and also our guide Somsak. The trek was hard work but a good laugh. We hiked up mountains with amazing viewpoints into Burma, hacked through bamboo overgrowth, waded through rivers and streams, passed trees crawling with thousands of giant spiders and trudged over rice and paddy fields, bloody hard work (oh yeah, Me and Kel were the only ones without proper hiking boots, again!). As the sun started to set we still hadn’t reached the tribes village and there were a few worried looks on peoples faces. Somsak then turned to us and admitted the path had been blocked by masses of felled trees. No way through. Our guide was just walking in circles, hands on hips shouting “Shit, shit, shit, this is not good!” Just what we needed! The sun had almost gone and we were in the middle of the jungle surrounded by snakes and mosquitos with no shelter! Luckily, good old Somsak pulled himself together, kicked into action and rushed us downstream of the river and to the bottom of one of the steepest hillsides I’ve ever seen. Apparently
this was the only other way to make it to the village before sundown. And make it we did. Soaking with sweat and all absolutely knackered (especially those of us smoking 20 a day!)
The village was just a working farm (err, not sure what crops they were growing) and our quarters for the night was a small barn type building on a wooden floor. Luckily the villagers had a box full of Chang beers! Overpriced and warm but we didn’t care and proceeded to empty the box. That night we played games with the tribe kids, had dinner made for us in our barn and then were entertained by the village elders who had us all dancing round a bonfire while they played crazy music on some obscure bamboo wind instruments they had made themselves. The kids were amazed by our digital cameras and so spent hours playing with them and taking photos.
That night, in the pitch black darkness, Kelly decided to go and use the toilet which was a hole in the floor inside an incredibly dilapidated old shed. She was just about to do the business when she spotted a crack in the wall panel
and a pair of beady eyes spying on her from the outside. So that’s how the locals keep themselves amused without any television!? Westerners beware of this cheeky invasion of privacy if you are also visiting these hill tribes. All you voyeurs out there, go for it. It’s right up your street!
More trekking the next day and back to Pai. We booked into a nice hotel this time with hot showers and cable TV, Aaaah just what we needed. I watched the Carling Cup final that night and then we found a place called the Curry Shack which probably does the best Thai curries we tasted in Thailand and also the cheapest at 80 pence each including rice. The next few days we chilled out in some of the hippie bars around town just relaxing amongst some of the local resident hippies who look like they’ve been stuck in Pai since the 70’s and been partying hard every day since. There are some funny sights. Pai is nice though because there are no beggars or street kids and nobody hassles you at all, unlike the busier parts of Thailand.
On our last night in Pai we were
in a br talking about getting a tattoo. Then we had a pen and paper, sketching some designs. Next thing you know we are both walking out of a tattoo shop with a new tattoo each! (photos attached)
So, both content that we’d had ourselves a nice big slice of Pai (we had been here for 9 days) we had to get another 12 hour bus back to Bangkok (for the 4th time!) where we hopefully had our Visa’s waiting for us to allow us entry into India. Luckily the shiny brand new Visa’s were there. We boarded a flight the next morning to Singapore where we had to wait around for 6 hours before catching another flight to Cochin in the south of India! Bloody hell, looking back at the amount of traveling we’ve done, it’s been mental! Hopefully we will get some time in India to just kick back and relax so the wife can indulge in some top tanning! Mmmm, that wasn’t to be. We’re in India now and lets just say it has taken a long time for us to acclimatize. But I’m sure we’ll manage…..
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Linda CH.
non-member comment
hello
Hi ya, the pair of you - just been down to see ya Mam and Gran this aft, Kelly your Mam was there too. Sue showed me your last message on facebook, sounds like you are really chilling, after all that travelling you deserve a well earned rest!!! Great blog as usual, you're both amazing, what a terrific trip, and amazing places you have seen, thank you both so much for sharing your experience thro your blog, look forward to seeing you both soon. How quickly time goes when your having fun!!!! Love Linda x