Anita and John next board a tiny public bus for the journey from Mae Hong Son to the hippie village of Pai. Suffering from seats that are designed for someone who is 5'4", our duos knees by the end are a little chaffed. However, as they get off the bus, they wonder if they have found their own little hippie haven in this once quiet little community nestled on the Pai river.
HE SAID:
Another place where you can just sit back, relax, and sigh... Pai, the hippie capital of Thailand... a town associated with opium smoking, has now become a little tourist destination. The town felt like it had more Westerners than Thais... and the Thais who were there seemed to have been hippieafied as well.
In a way, there isn't too much to report about Pai... this is a place where people come to "chill out". Our guest house was a compound of 15 or so bamboo bungalows that were very cute... but very rustic (just a mosquito net and mattress on the bamboo mat floor). However, there were hammock in the common areas, cheap beer, lots of books, and beautiful countryside to explore. We found and relaxed around a pool the first day. The weather was surprisingly hot in the sun, so this was super refreshing. As for the next few days, we did some exploring... and Anita did some spa-ing. Other than that... nothing much else to report, other than hours of pure fresh unadulterated relaxation. This is the life...
SHE SAID:
Wow, what a bohemian place to be. We were "chilling out" here, as was spelled out as a thing to do on a lot of the restaurant signs here, their recommendation. We saw more tourists than locals though, and if we felt out of place, it was because we didn't have dreadlocks.
We rented bikes here too, spent a day at a local swimming pool filled with a bunch of other tourists, saw the Pai Canyon and WW2 Memorial Bridge, I got a wonderful body scrub/hot spring hot tub experience, and then a lotion application (which follows the scrub, it seems that's common here) and had the smoothest skin I've had as long as I can remember while John roughened his up a bit more.
There were lots of dogs fighting in the distance through the night, (barking), but the dogs were usually unfriendly only to other dogs not belonging to the area, it seemed.
We relaxed so much that by the end I craved something more to do. Nevertheless, we did have a TV with a DVD player and some movies in our little outdoor communal hut at our guest house area, so that was nice. Plus we met some lovely people...a Londoner "Gavin" who on the last day, brought worms and fishing gear so him and I (John didn't seem so interested) tried to fish on the tiny and not promising river beside us, but of course had no luck. We met a French girl who was very warm, and hugged and kissed me (and blew a few kisses at me again) when we left. Teehee, that was cute.
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