Oh oh beautiful Pai! How we loved our days camping in our wonderful boutique style tent with views across the valleys…not to make people jealous but we really were spoilt and all for as little as 250 baht a night! We loved spending time in our tent, reading, watching the sunrise, and having the luxury of a duvet! It was very hot during the daytime when we were here sometimes reaching 38 degrees, but in the night we were nicely cooled by the 16 degree air. This felt quite cold actually, long gone are the cold nights in China.

There isn’t that much to do in Pai to be honest, but it is a very beautiful town with lots of yoga class offerings, cooking classes, walks, bike rides and so on. In the night-time the streets turn into a walking night market with local crafts and clothes many of which are made by the neighboring tribal villages. We picked up a few nicely branded Pai items which are hard to avoid, but they do tend to stand out over most tourist branded things. There are opportunities to hike and explore on kayaking tours in the wet season but we opted for some low-key adventuring in the form of hiring a motorbike for the day and exploring most of Pai’s famous sights. It is a very twee place and extremely popular with Thai holiday makers due some old films that were made there in the 90′s.

There is a pool around 1km outside of Pai in the direction of the Canyon at a place called Fluid, it’s a good sized swimming pool and they have plenty of space for sunbathing too. The food there is okay but overpriced for what you get, however it’s probably the best place in town to cool down from the heat especially when the river is at a low level.

Helen found a nice yoga class to attend which cost 200 baht for a 2 hour session, if she hadn’t had been struck by her 3rd tummy bug in 5 weeks then she would have been able to attend a few more classes!! It’s also a great way to meet people as many will do 3 classes in a row before moving on. Aside from the stomach upsets though we had a fantastic time here and would consider returning. We don’t think we’d be able to get as good a deal on accommodation in the future especially for our little set up as we knew they were a new resort.

So 5 days later and we were ready to head back to Chiang Mai. We can quite see why people end up hanging around Pai for longer than anticipated. There are great restaurants offering a variety of good Thai, western and other foods, there are places to go and drink chai, a good choice of bars, shops to poke around in,  and a nice river that flows through beautiful scenery. If you’re a little prone to travel sickness then the 764 turnings in the road to get there may cause a slight problem but getting a mini-van would help with this. We got a minivan there for 180 baht and the return journey to Chiang Mai was only 150. You can get a local bus for around 72 baht if you don’t mind being crammed into the rooftop and the journey takes around 3-4 hours.

When we got back into Chiang Mai we sorted out a few arrangements for the next few days; one was to book an elephant mahout day, another to do a one day massage course and the last to sort out our travel arrangements to Bangkok.

(Leica M9, Summicron-M 50mm f2.0 & Olympus PEN, 17mm f2.8 & 100mm f2.8, processed in Lightroom 3)