I got to the bus station in Chiang Mai and had a little trouble finding Andy.  He said he was at the ticket desk for the van company.  I couldn’t find the ticket desk.  He said it was in the parking lot across from platform 12 so I went to platform 12 and looked across the parking lot.  There was no van company, but I did see another bus station.  Huh.  Two bus stations next to each other.  I’ve been there several times and never noticed there were two bus stations.  We managed to exchange our tickets for an earlier van ride, grabbed lunch.

A few hours later we are in Pai.  It’s up in the mountains and so beautiful. It reminds me of Colorado, not up close, but as you look off into the distance it looks similar.  Makes me homesick.  It’s a bit cooler too, not cool, but cooler, which is a nice relief.  Our hotel was beautiful with farm land and mountain views in the back.  We asked about tours and they told us to go into town.  One of the reasons I booked at that hotel was because they had a tour desk.  They also gave us a much smaller room than I paid for.  But when I asked about that, they just said “sorry, all rooms full”.  Then when I asked about a refund, of course, her English couldn’t handle that.  We gave up and went into town and were able to book a tour of the area for the next day.  We wandered around the walking street and a few other streets checking out street sales, had some dinner, and had a drink.  We went in search of pie because I wanted a picture of having pie in Pai.  No luck on the pie mission.  But we did find a closed cake shop so the mission will continue tomorrow.  I’d heard that Pai is popular with Thais because of a movie.  I had heard the rest of the tourists are backpackers.  From our short survey of the area I’m pretty sure that all the tourists except us are backpackers in their 20’s.  And it appears there are more tourists than locals.

(c) All rights reserved Kimberly Fiore