Pai – Rraine Drops

Our hotel has this very annoying wakeup call system. They put the dining room on top of some of the hotel rooms including ours. So around 7:00am you are awake, ready or not, because all the early birds are scraping their heavy wooden chairs across the floor above you. There seems to be nothing except cheap plastic furniture in Thailand except in our hotel where the dining room chairs are made of such heavy wood, you couldn’t pick them up if you wanted to.

The tour we booked for yesterday went to a lot of places. The tour started off with going to an overlook off the side of the highway. It was overcast so the pictures aren’t the greatest, but the view was wonderful. It was 23 year olds tour day for sure. Our van seemed to be on the same circuit of tourist sites as a 5-10 others as everyone we saw at the overlook we also saw at every other stop for the day.

The next stop was Lod Cave where we were supposed to do bamboo rafting also. I think they invented a new sport. I’d call it speed caving. They put me and Andy with two girls that could barely walk. They were so out of breath they couldn’t keep up with the guide who had the only light. So, then going through the cave became even more difficult for them since they kept falling behind. Speed caving was not the sport for them. It was basically a long line of tourists and guides winding it’s way through a very impressively sized cave. We had to move so fast and keep in the line that there was no time to really enjoy looking at the cave. A river runs through the cave and they put us on rafts and we went about 2 minutes to another part of the cave. We did some more speed caving, came back to the rafts and then back out the way we came in. Overall, this could have been the highlight of the tour, but it turned out to be my least favorite part of the tour.

Next was lunch. It was ok. After lunch was a hot springs. It was a luke warm river. It was very beautiful and I got in for a minute or two, but then it was jam packed with 25 year olds and became way less relaxing for me. After that was a waterfall. It was the kind where it’s a series of smaller falls. You can climb the rocks and wander from pool to pool. It was very beautiful. The same vans of people were there too. The final stop was Pai Canyon. It looked so big in the pictures, but was less so in person. Still, it was my favorite part of the tour. It was a series of rock fins in the middle of the Pai canyon. You could see all the way around, the canyon floor stretching out in all directions to then be met by large mountains all around. It reminded me so much of Colorado. It was very beautiful.

After we got dropped off in town we went to the cake place. They had at least 20 different types of cake, a coffee shop and PIE! So, my mission of taking a picture of pie in Pai was complete. We also added the symbol pi just to round out the mission. This made me very satisfied. And the pie was delicious too. Dinner, wandering around the walking street, and an unimpressive foot massage finished out the evening.

Today we got a taxi driver to take us to an elephant camp and a waterfall. It cost as much as the tour we did yesterday. But, it was nice to go at our own speed and not have the crowds of people. After lunch we got on van and came back to Chiang Mai.

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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.

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	eaglegenuinec87d1476… on Going Home
	delicately4f6d967f14 on Going Home
	delicately4f6d967f14 on Icebergs
	delicately4f6d967f14 on ATV Tour
	eaglegenuinec87d1476… on Kluane

Rraine Drops

Tag: Pai

Pie in Pai with Pi

Pai Day 1