Pai (4 nights)

As you can see from the location map, Pai is north west of Chiang Mai, close to the Myanmar (Burma) border. The bus journey from Chiang Mai took us around 3 hours and involved roughly 600 hairpin bends! Several of our party, me, John, Aroo, and Matt, were turning green.

We had met a couple of Ozzy girls, Rachel and Annika on the bus and when we arrived they already had friends there who could direct us toward the best accommodation. The four of us lads found ourselves 3 little bungalows my the river (I was sharing with John). It was a quiet place with a shaded hammock area nearby. The only access was across a worryingly unstable bamboo bridge, with feeble metal reinforcements. We were all pulling faces when we crossed on foot, only to be followed by a couple on a motorbike!

Pai itself is a small and chilled out place, but the main street comes alive with market stalls and street food vendors at night. There are a few bars, but everywhere closes around midnight. The main activity is exploring the local countryside and waterfalls. To this end, me, John, and Aroo hired scooters for the wonderfully cheap price of 100Baht/day. I drew the short straw and got the pink one!

The next few days were spent exploring the stunning scenery by day, and drinking by night. There were 8 of us in total, so quite a nice group. Unfortunately, Aroo, on just a 9 day vacation, had to leave in the afternoon of the 8th and everybody else headed to Laos the same evening, leaving me on my own ('Aww'). However, with only a couple of days left to go before my flight to India, I was not to dissamayed. I left for Chiang Mai again the next day.