When we stepped out of our bungalow this morning, we saw John was about to take the dogs for a "walk". Well, what he does is puts the 3 dogs in the sidecar of the bike and takes them up the road!! It's hilarious to see because there's 2 Labradors and a Great Dane in this little sidecar, with John flying along in it. I got a few pictures and Therese got a video of me driving them up the driveway.

We went for a nice long walk today. We walked from Quinlins up to Pai canyon. It's only about 1.5km and it's a nice walk up a hill on a dirt track. There's some lovely views back down over the valley too. As we got closer to the top, there were little walkways that had formed with quite steep drops on either side which are the canyons. We're not talking the Grand Canyon here, but it's still a nice sight.
We made it to the top (not that it's mount everest or anything) and sat on a bench that has a brilliant view of the other side of the hill down into the valley, with lots more hills in the distance. We could have sat there for ages - shame we didn't bring a pick-nik!

I wanted to venture a bit further across the top, so we set off walking. There was a nice view for a picture so I went to get the camera out and unzipped the camera bag. Then I decided to put the strap around my neck and as I did that, the camera fell out and started rolling down the hill!!! It was getting caked in dust, but fortunately it wasn't about to roll off the side of a cliff, it just rolled down this sort of walkway that has formed in the stone. I had this stupid bag in my hand that had a bottle of water in it, so obviously it was the bags fault so I threw that on the floor and gave it a boot, then that damn thing started rolling down the flipping hill!! Grabbed the camera anyway which was just full of dust, but still in working order fortunately.

It took us just short of two hours to walk there and back. Was a nice bit of exercise for the day.
It was baking hot again (no sign of snow) so the first thing I did when we got back was dive into the pool. We had a good couple of hours just relaxing by the pool and catching some rays. Really caught the sun as well today, got a few red parts!

We got into town a bit earlier today, at about 4pm, as we needed to get up to date with uploading some photos onto Facebook. It's a bit annoying spending time on a computer, but we need to do it not only to update friends and family back home, but also to have a back up of some of our photos in case we lose our camera or it gets stolen. We have to get our pictures backed up to DVD too. We'd hate to lose all our photos!!

Later on we met John and Gaynor in a restaurant called Charlie & Lok's for our final meal in Pai. The food is really good and is all organic, bit still very cheap. 70 Baht (£1.40) for a Red Curry with chicken which I had, and Therese had Sweet and Sour chicken at about the same price.
After that we had a drink in a bar called Almost Famous, which is quite a cool little place. Cheap for drink too.

We got back to Quinlins and I didn't really want another beer. I'd already had a couple of drinks of coke and sprite today, and I didn't want any water. Therese is being careful with the stomach and isn't drinking alcohol either. It's still nippy on a night too. So...we had a cup of tea! Go on, laugh it up. It's PG Tips which is pretty good but ain't no Yorkshire Tea like. Apart from tomorrow morning, this could be our last cup of tea for a while.

We've really enjoyed Pai and definitely feel it's somewhere we could come back to. It's so cheap, it makes sense. Pick up a flight from the UK for about £500 to Bangkok, then a connection to Chiang Mai for £50. Stay in Chiang Mai for a couple of nights at £16 or less a night, then get the 3 hour mini van up to Pai for £4. Or hire a bike at £3 a day and drive up there yourself! And it's a nice drive too. Stay at Quinlins for £17 a night for 10 nights, so that's £170. You're talking £650 to £700 max for a 14 night holiday, and then everything here is incredibly cheap, whether it's food, drink, activities or accommodation. A main meal can easily be less than a pound, and a large bottle of beer is £1.50. It's cheap. And if you work out the full cost of a holiday to Spain compared to a holiday in Pai, I would bet they're pretty much the same. In fact I reckon Pai would come out cheaper! Go on, live a little and visit somewhere different. I'm not being paid by Pai Tourist Board either.

Oooh, somewhere new tomorrow...

(make sure you're all changing the date in the top left hand corner of this blog post too, to see blog posts from different days for the same place)