A Travellerspoint blog

Northern Thailand - Pai

The day after our cooking lesson and an early night we head off to Pai for a couple of days. We drove through the mountains taking in the beautiful scenery again. Unfortunately, we ended up sitting in the front of the minibus which meant we could see all the oncoming traffic, again we decided it would be best to either sleep or read and ignore the driving!
Once we were in Pai, which is a small 'hippy' town in the middle of the mountains, we decided to rent motorbikes again so we could drive round the whole of the town and find somewhere cheap but nice to stay. After an hour of driving around and getting ourselves familiar with our new location, we found somewhere to stay and headed off to a very lovely bar we'd recently driven past. The word from other backpackers who'd been to Pai before us has told us there is nothin to do except chill out and relax, which sounded perfect! So we took our books and sat on a red leather settee in an open-air bar and read all afternoon. After a very full on afternoon, we went out for something to eat and a walk around the main street, which was lined with market stalls and tiny cocktail bars (by bars we mean a wooden hut about 1 metre in diameter or campervan with one person inside serving cocktails).
It was a lovely little town, very chilled out, as we expected. Later that night after meeting a lad from Bath, we all went to the open-air bar for some drinks and a game of pool. Very Civilised!

The next morning, we had a well earnt lie in, had brekfast and returned our motorbikes. It was then more or less time to head back so we hung around waiting for the mini bus then set off back to Chiang Mai. The driver stopped a couple of times along the way, and was on his phone a bit, but we thought nothing of it. Then we stopped at the half way point cafe and he vanished! We were then informed he wasn't feeling well and another driver was on his way to continue with our journey. So after an hour and a half we finally set off back to Chiang Mai with a new healthy driver.

That night we caught the sleeper train to Chiang Mai, another marvelous idea! By day the train appears completely normal, then at night a lovely man comes round and mkes up beds by rearranging the seats.

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The end result is a carriage full of bunk beds! Very comfortable, the journey took a total of 14 hours and we slept soundly for 10 of those!

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Then the journey had come full circle and we were back where we had started... On the good old Khao San Road. Just a couple of days to sit by the pool and do some shopping then off to Oz! An excellent consolation of having to leave the amazing south east asia!

Posted by michnrach 21:58

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