It’s been nearly three weeks now since we were in Pai. It seems I have finally settled into a travel routine, and photo and video editing have not been on top of my priority list… I think that Pai itself had a lot to do with slowing my pace down and teaching me again how to do sweet nothing. In short, it was absolutely worth the bus ride from hell. I think Pai may appear a little raucous at first if you’re not 22 and in party mode, but walking 10 minutes just outside of the city, we found a little slice of paradise called Yawning Fields where we settled for a week.
We did very little in Pai and it was amazing. Yoga, reading in the hammocks, eating a lot of deliciously spicy food. One day we rented a scooter and drove up to the hot springs, the canyon and the weirdly amusing little town of Ban Santichon. On the way back we fed bananas to some elephants. God, I love elephants.
Pai was just wonderful, my favourite so far. But at some point, we had to get going and we made our way to the next place of interest, Mae Hong Song, a little town in the Shan Hills, near the border with Myanmar.
Mae Hong Song had a great market and we were able to sample a Burmese breakfast made of noodles and Chinese cabbage swimming in rich and creamy chickpea porridge topped with caramelized garlic, sugar, peanuts, chopped cilantro, hot pepper and deep friend Burmese tofu (they make their tofu with chickpea flour instead of soy). It’s not often that you encounter a vegan Asian breakfast, so we jumped on the occasion! We loved it so much that we went back for seconds the following day!
After a few days in Mae Hong Song, we took a bus down to Mae Sariang where we only stayed overnight, after which we hopped on the back of a pickup truck for another one of those rides from hell, a six hours journey down to Mae Sot, where we needed to renew our Thai visa by briefly crossing into Myawaddy, the Burmese town across the border.
That’s about it for this leg of the trip! Next up, we will be in Bangkok and Kanchanhaburi, where there may or may not be many elephants involved 😉