Gotta stay Pai all the time

January, 2015

It was a mission and a half to get to our next destination, Pai, but the journey was worth it.

After stopping for Lori to vomit 5 times during the windy ride, we finally made it and immediately had a good feeling about the place. Pai is very serene and outside of the hustle and bustle of the bigger cities. We dropped our oversized backpacks and hit the streets.

As Pai is a small village, there is limited public transportation and everyone rents motorcycles to get around. Everyone told us that the best part of Pai was renting a motorcycle, taking a map and seeing where the day takes you. They made it look so easy, even little babies were riding on the fronts of motorbikes, giving us the thumbs up. For some inexplicable reason I was feeling really cocky about riding my motorcycle and told the girls "it's no big deal" (all the cool kids are doing it). Two seconds after getting on my bike (going a mere 1 mile an hour) I crashed into a food stall and fell straight to the floor as all my friends glided past me. I awkwardly returned my bike within 10 minutes of renting it and avoided that area of town for the rest of our stay in Pai. Won't be joining a leather jacket motorcycle gang anytime soon.

After the traumatizing experience, we decided to ditch the bikes and rent a tuk tuk to take us to all of the Pai hot spots. This is where the loving Mr. Tetaow came into our lives. Mr. Tetaow is probably not the most ideal tuk tuk driver, with what looked like cataracts in one eye, a left foot that dragged and a hunk of junk of a car I think we could have found a safer prospect but we soon discovered how lovely Mr. Tetaow was. We ended up hiring him for three days straight and he took us to all over Pai, to hot springs, freezing water falls, mud spas and canyons in the back of his pick up truck.

We visited the long-knock village, which I am not sure how I feel about. This is a village of refugees from Myanmar who have fled from the discrimination in their country and have seeked refuge in Thailand. As a long neck is seen as a sign of beauty in their culture, women wear gold braces around their necks to elongate them. From the age of 14 until they pass away, they wear the gold braces, even when they sleep. It was a long journey but we were able to drive past many rural areas, farms, rivers, markets and towns and see a more local life of the people here.

Every night in Pai the streets turn into an outdoor market, selling cheap clothes, jewelry and interesting edibles. The first night at the markets we were like little girls in a candy store, trying out all of the different vendors and double fisting with bamboo tea in one hand, rice patties in another and five spring rolls hiding in my pockets. At one point Eve even flung her corn on the cob across the market in excitement. We were pretty much "girls gone wild" food edition which already downgrades It from hot to not, but we were loving life.

On our way back down to Chiang Mai we encountered what the group calls, "the night of hell" or more dramatically, "the fateful night when absolutely everything possible went wrong and then we had to stay in a shostel". To make the story short, Gabi got a stomach bug and continued to throw up about every 10 minutes on our three hour ride back down the mountain. We finally get to Chiang Mai and NOONE knows where our hostel is so we wander the streets aimlessly for an hour as Gabi continues to throw up in potted plants, garbage cans and anything she can get her hands on. We finally find the hostel (hallelujah!!) which was the ultimate shostel, they then try to over charge us (Gabi began talking about her "legal rights") and when we finally got into our room there was an infestation of ants carrying dead bugs up the wall and into a whole in the ceiling.

Good times y'all, but got to share the good, the bad and the ugly. Overall Thailand was amazing, but of course it wouldn't be an adventure if everything went smoothly.