After about four hours or so on a mini bus and me feeling terrible due to the windy roads (beautiful scenery though!) we arrived in Pai. 
 
Pai is found up in the mountains in the North West corner of Thailand. It's quite a small town that you can walk around in about half an hour. Lots of bars, cafes, guest houses and market stalls. When we arrived it was super busy and completely full of backpackers on the main street. There seemed to be more backpackers in the town than there were Thai people!
 
Tom left me with the bags as I was feeling pretty rough and went and found us a lovely cheap guest house. 
 
The scenery around Pai is incredible and the best way to go see it is by hiring a motorbike or scooter and driving through the countryside. Eeek! I hadn't ridden a bike before so this was going to be interesting! We went to the rental place which happened to be on the main road where there seemed to be hundreds of bikes and people in the road walking or driving past. The lady asked us if we'd ridden before and we said no (we weren't sure that Tom's afternoon in The Andamans really counted). She looked worried but carried on getting the forms ready. She asked us a further couple of times if we'd ridden before as it can be very dangerous “with many accidents”. Hmmm so we may have suggested at this point that we had ridden before or we thought she wouldn't let us have the bikes. She came out to the main road to show us our bikes and confirm how to use the controls and wanted to see me ride up the road a little. Uh oh. Yep, the road with many many people and bikes in the way making it impossible to actually go in a straight line. Absolutely crapping my pants I somehow managed to kind of drive in a straight line. The controls were so sensitive that it only took a slight movement and you'd find yourself accelerating at top speed. Not good! It's also very easy to panic and try and brake but end up accelerating by mistake. Scary! Tom had a go too and we managed to satisfy the lady enough for her to think we'd be ok.
 
After a couple of minutes we were riding out of town into the beautiful countryside. It didn't take too long to get used to the controls and it was AMAZING!! Lush green hills and fields all around us. Just stunning. Out of town there was hardly any traffic on the road so this was a great opportunity to ride bikes for the first time. 
 
We headed off to the Tha Pai Hot Springs. There were a few bathing pools but the water was so warm we decided we couldn't face it considering it was a very hot day anyway. There were also some even hotter pools higher up where people were boiling eggs in baskets. The water was very hot with lots of steam coming off the pools. We didn't stick around long as it was too hot! 
 
We then visited Wat Phra That Mae Yen. This is a temple high up on a hill with fantastic views out across the valley and Pai. We also visited another temple on the way back to town but we can't remember the name of it! Very pretty and ornate. 
 
One of my favourite days so far. So much fun riding the bikes. A gloriously sunny day with the freedom to go anywhere we liked. Something we haven't had in a long time. You get so used to having to catch a bus, taxi or tuk tuk in order to visit places this was such a novelty for us. We'll definitely be hiring bikes again at some point if we can :). Thumbs up for Pai!