Life of Pai
Trip Start
Oct 17, 2007
1
5
19
Trip End
Mar 14, 2008
Pai,
Thailand
Sunday, November 4, 2007
The day after the cooking course we finally made it out of Chiang Mai after spending 10 days there and got to the nice little mountain town of Pai. The vibe of the town is pretty hard to describe. Just think wreck beach, but without the ocean and with paved roads and tons of restaurants and little bars and scooters everywhere. I liked it as soon as I got off the bus. Everywhere you go here, there's live music and people with dreadlocks and those yoga style fishermen's pants. I tried on a pair that someone else had and they were really comfortable, but I don't think I smell enough like hemp and incense to actually pull off the hippy look. Maybe in a couple of months...
After our first night we rented a couple of scooters and made our way about 10km out of town to a pretty nice waterfall. I've gotta say that riding a scooter has been one of the highlights of the trip so far. I had the stupidest grin on my face for the first hour or so of just riding around on it... Awesome. Good way of seeing the amazing countryside.
Anyways, that morning (before getting the scooters) was where the chain of coincidences started. Since we started travelling, I've gotten used to the idea that you always seem to run into other travellers that you've met before. It's already happened a bunch of times and it's great, but it's understandable since people tend to usually do similar circuits of countries they visit. What I wasn't expecting was to run into a girl I went to high school with and had only seen a couple of times since. We were eating breakfast on a patio and I saw her and after a shocked few seconds I called out "Megan!" thinking that there's no way it could actually be her. Sure enough she turned around and it was her. After some introductions and some awkward conversation (I was still pretty mind-boggled... and I'm awkward at the best of times) her and her boyfriend left and we said we'd probably run into each other later. Pretty huge coincidence, but it gets crazier...
That night we went to a few local places for some great live music, some food and of course a couple of drinks. Sure enough, we ran into them again and since we had both had a couple of drinks we managed to catch up and have a pretty solid conversation. After going over what we'd been up to the last five years I told her that I'd been pretty involved in a fraternity and she says "Sigma Chi, right?" So I say yeah and she says that her boyfriend's brother is a Sig... Turns out that her boyfriend is Andrew Lunka's brother!!! How crazy is that!!! It still blows my mind, but I've gotten over it. They're travelling along the same route as Karl and I so I'm sure we'll run into them again. Pretty cool.
Pai's a beautiful place and it's been great so far, but we're both starting to feel a bit restless and it's been raining so we're off to Laos the day after tomorrow. I'm really looking forward to it, I've heard great things about the place from a lot of different people. We're going to be taking a slow boat from the Thailand/Laos border to the town of Luang Prabang. I've heard the slow boat is quite the trip (it takes two days), so I'll tell you all about it when we get over there.
