Pai I -- initial impressions

this entry is long overdue. i am writing this today, nearly four months after the actual events occurred; but the story is fresh in my mind and i wanted to get it down in cyberspace before it was too late.

i have been waiting for the proper motivation/inspiration to take on this entry. at least, that's what i've been telling myself. the truth of the matter is that i've simply been too lazy and self-indulgent to sit down for an hour or so to pound this out. pai represented an oasis of sorts for skeelow and i, so i promise that i will do my best to recount most of the things that made it such a special place for us.

we had first heard about pai in siem reap, cambodia when we encountered a couple of dudes who were biking across southeast asia on expensive road bikes like lance armstrong on acid. one of the guys was from belgium and the other was from germany; they had both been in asia for quite some time and had really hit up a lot of places on the way. somehow, and i dont know how, the two of them met up a couple of weeks previous to our encounter, had discovered that they were both doing nearly the same thing, and instantly became travelling buddies. it was interesting because since neither of them spoke the others' language, they were getting by on their nearly spotless european english. it was kind of awesome, actually. the two of them were sitting side by side, shirtless on a couch outside of our guesthouse, smoking weed and ripping on each other with cheesy jokes in accented english.

skye and i, also shirtless i believe, approached these two guys because they seemed like cool dudes who might like to smoke with us. as i had mentioned before, you can get the shittiest weed you've ever seen just about everywhere in cambodia. there are guys on motorcycles that approach just about anyone who doesnt look cambodian to hawk their stress. skeelow and i actually had the boy who worked at our guesthouse knock on our door with a sack full of schwag -- stems, sticks, and seeds mostly, with that "stomped-on" quality that we all know so well -- just because we looked like the sort of guys who would be into that shit. and you know what? we were more than happy to take it off of his hands.

anyway, i digress. so these two guys, let's call them hanz and franz, were lamenting the fact that franz had had his 2000 euro road bike stolen somewhere in siem reap. (btw, you should see the "roads" in cambodia. if theres anything that reminds me more of the phrases "desert wasteland" or "landmine city", i dont know if ive seen it. think about the last scenes in mad max or the part in tank girl when lori petty is riding with ice-t in that atv -- thats what it looks like. no infrastructure, no people, all dust and craters; "barren" would be a nice way to put it.) so without a bike, franz could no longer achieve his dream of biking from germany to australia (or something like that). he had been on the road for almost a year and was understandably bummed out. he had even made fliers with a photo of his bike and his contact information to hand out to other travellers. good luck with that one... i think we was teetering somewhere between the decision to go home or to somehow acquire another bike in cambodia to continue his journey. again, good luck with that one.

we got to talking to them about thailand. since we were going to be headed right back to thailand after cambodia (or so we thought), we wanted to ask their opinions of several places we heard were cool. we had never heard of pai before, but hanz was adamant that we go check it out. all he said was, "you guys should go to pai ... im serious. go to pai!" you dont often hear ringing endorsements of places while traveling like that and besides, hanz and franz seemed like relatively credible sources, as they were smoking ganja with us at the time. that's about all we heard of pai at that time, but those two dudes really put it in our heads -- and we were eager to check it out for ourselves.

back to the semi-present: as i mentioned in the previous entry, chiang mai was not the awesome mountain refuge that we had expected. the one good thing about it was that it was a 5 hour bus ride away from pai. after having our fill of chiang mai, we boarded a bus headed directly to pai the next morning. there was a good mix of people on our bus: mostly foreign travelers (white people) and some other random asian tourists, either chinese, korean, or rich thai.

pai is situated pretty high in the mountains in the northern part of thailand near myanmar, so our journey there from chiang mai, which could be considered to be in the mountain basin, was windy and disjointed. however, because we were basically driving through a lush rainforest, it was cooler and sunnier and more peaceful than almost anywhere else we had been on our journey to that point. halfway up the mountain, we had to switch buses at this makeshift kiosk deep in the mountains. what's so cool about places in southeast asia is that there are people who live in the most remote places you could ever imagine. you can be driving through some seemingly impenetrable wilderness on some shitty dirt road where the mountains seem to go straight up on all sides and encounter one of the locals, usually with a bundle of sticks or something on his or her back, appearing out of the jungle like moonlight graham in field of dreams, only in reverse, if that makes any sense. any normal, big westerner (me included) would never be able to negotiate that sort of severe terrain, let alone carry sticks or some dead animal on our backs or strapped to our heads while climbing. these people seemingly do it with ease, although im sure it still sucks a great deal. remember when i was telling you guys about the kid in cambodia who helped guide us through the rocks? same deal.

after four and a half hours of windy ascent followed by windy descent, we ended up in pai. skeelow and i had no idea what to expect. for one, the place seemed really small. as we headed in towards the town, there seemed to be a preponderance of these sort of "new-age" spas and hotels all around. it's kind of like the feeling you get when you just arrive in sedona, arizona or santa fe, new mexico, or aspen for the first time. you really cant believe that most of that stuff exists or that there would be people who would shell out good money to attend these places. but pai is definitely one of those places.

when we got to the bus station, which was actually this guy aya's motorbike rental/minibus chartering store, we were amazed to see so many westerners all around. it was like going to petaluma or one of those other rich hippie enclaves in northern california. most of the people there were hippie travellers, wearing their fisherman pants and working on their dreads. there were almost zero thai people there. that was the first shock. there were vendors all around selling the usual thai stuff: fresh squeezed fruit juice, smoothies, pad thai, etc -- along with some other more unique hippie stuff like knit caps, hemp jewelry, and assorted cool clothing.

the first person we talked to was aya. he was actually chinese by blood. his parents moved out to thailand from china and he was born and raised there. but aya could speak some damn good chinese, so i spent most of the time rapping with him in chinese even though his english was almost flawless. think about this: pai is such a remote, insular place that aya's policy is to allow everyone and anyone who gets off one of his buses to borrow a motorbike free of charge for a couple of hours to go look for a hotel. you literally step off the bus, and there's a bike for you. all you have to do is take the key, hop on, and drive off. they don't even take your passport as collateral. aya pretty much has pai on lockdown. his business is the only one in the whole town that offers buses to other places. his is also one of only two places in the town that offers motorcycle rentals -- and the other one is probably his as well. you can get any sort of motorcycle from aya. he's got those huge off-road, 500 cc bikes as well as manual and automatics and scooters. it's perfect, because pai is mostly inhabited by overly macho british types who really get off on buzzing around on their bikes and hippies who like to ride off into the mountains. aya must make a fortune.

skeelow and i had decided to rent the nicest place that we could find because it was the offseason there and the housing prices were relatively cheap. after driving around on rickety bridges, zig zagging the shores of the mekong, we settled on this sort of romantic place called the sun hut. it was situated about 3 km out of town, but since we had already worked out an agreement with aya to rent the bikes (for the equivalent of 6 dollars a day), we werent worried about transportation to and from the place and were kind of excited to have to drive so far off the beaten path to get home. according to our lonely planet guidebook, this place was great. it had a vegetarian restaurant, laundry service, and cabin-like huts that had attached bathrooms and soft beds. skeelow and i chose a double with a single bed for our purposes. each hut was named after a zodiac sign. i think we got virgo, but im not sure. when we were scoping out the room, we met this guy who we simply called "visnick" after one of our friends with the same name who he reminded us of. visnick was busy trying to hit on these two dutch girls who were about six inches taller than him and hot. he kind of had this whiny, know-it-all way of talking. he told us that he had come to pai every summer for the last six years and that the sun hut was a good place to stay. i think he was there to show the place to the dutch chicks, but they passed on it. in all, we were paying about 8 bucks a night between the two of us, so we couldnt complain.

the main thing about pai is that you dont really have to pay a lot to stay there. they have these bungalows all along the river that cost something like 2 dollars a night. each one has a dingy mattress, no mattress, and a loads and loads of mosquitoes. most of the travellers that we encountered had decided to stay in pai for awhile and had chosen to stay at one of these huts. we felt a bit high brow for deciding to shell out the extra six bucks a night.

another thing about pai is that everyone (or at least every guy) has a scooter. you can park them anywhere you want, gas them up at the gas station, crash the shit out of them, and not wear a helmet. it's all up to you. as a consequence of this, we saw more incidents of nasty road rash than anywhere else we had been or would be going. it was incredible. everyone had at least one story about bailing off of a bike either because a.) they were too drunk, b.) they were too inexperienced, or c.) they had too many people onboard. i have to admit that i fell off of the bike several times, but pulled the "jump off the bike while throwing it down routine" every time to save myself from being one of those cautionary tales that we had heard so much about. still, i left thailand with some scrapes and bruises on my legs -- but it was nothing that a little natural hot spring action couldnt take care of. we'll get into that later.

after checking into the sun hut and officially renting our bikes from aya (like everyone else, we forewent the option of paying a 3 dollar deposit for a helmet.), skeelow and i settled down at one of the open air bars on the main drag and got some beer. inside, they were broadcasting some UFC matches and skeelow and i were getting into it like good americans do. at the table next to us, there were these two chicks who were speaking english. we mostly ignored them and eventually, one of the chicks turned around and asked us if we were canadian. insulted and confused, we asked them how they could possibly mistake our accents for being canadian. they told us that they were in fact canadian from british columbia and that because we had west coast accents, we all sort of had the same accent. skeelow and i vehemently denied those charges and pointed out that BC people just wanted to be like californians, causing the possible confusion. no matter though -- one of the girls was pretty damn hot.

they had just finished a long trek in chiang mai and had just taken the bus to pai that evening, just like us. they told us that the trek sucked (big surprise) and they were looking to chill out for a day or two before moving on. we told them that we were over jumping from place to place and that we were going to probably be there for a week or so. i dont know what happened, but somehow they were taken with us and agreed to ride with us on our motorbikes to some bar in some other location. this was a great coup for us because we had always thought that the bikes would be good for picking up chicks. it worked out perfectly: skeelow had one girl holding on for dear life and i had the other. plus, since we werent all that good at riding those bikes yet (especially with another passenger aboard), the element of danger was ever present and the ride turned out to be rather exhilarating -- probably more for us than for them, but who cares? we were practically high-fiving each other the whole way there.

we went to this bar called bebop that featured a bob marley cover band (all thai hippies, by the way, with dreads, tats, and everything). after catching up with the girls and talking about traveling and teaching and canada, another singer came on who could be best described as the thai janis joplin. she had wild and crazy hair, always wore this ratty babydoll dress, and had a voice like louis armstrong. i actually thought she was a dude or a transvestite or ladyboy or whatever at first, but no, she was a chick. it was horrible and strangely captivating at the same time -- like a traffic accident you cant avert your eyes from. after janis, there was this dude who went on and played the best version of cocaine that ive ever heard. we called him the thai jimi hendrix because the only songs he would play were jimi and clapton songs -- and he was fucking good.

one more thing i need to mention about pai is sort of the white elephant in the room in the town. because the thai authorities take drugs so seriously, it is super super hard to find weed in pai. the only way you can get it is to ride up the mountain towards the waterfalls and hope that a local dude (one of the aforementioned mountain people that appear out of nowhere like a gorilla in the mist) jumps out of the bushes and flags you down. if you are brave enough to stop, he will most likely offer you some shitty weed. about half the time, though, this is a setup and there is a policeman waiting about a kilometer down the road to pull you over, search you, and haul you off to thai prison (think return to paradise or brokedown palace). we had heard horror stories from many many people about trying to score weed in pai, so we werent about to chance it. so all in all, pai is the hippiest place known to man, full of white people hippies and thai wannabe hippies, but you cant score weed unless one of the locals trusts you. so basically, no one can get any weed.

after the bar, the canadians were tired and cranky from their shitty trek. we drove them back to their hotel and made tentative plans to maybe go check out the waterfall the next day that neither party really expected to keep. (one of the canadian girls was hot. she was either full japanese or half japanese and we wanted to see her in a bathing suit. does that make us evil?) after dropping the girls off, we went to 7-11 to get some grub before going home. there, we once again encountered visnick. skeelow spent a good 15 minutes schmoozing with him and got the lowdown on all the cool places in pai. in fact, visnick broke it down in categories: if you want to go to a pool where there will be hot chicks, go to fluid. if you want to get the best crepes in town, go to ____; if you want to get some pretty good mexican food, go to apple pai; if you want to watch the sunset with a girl, go to this waterfall, etc. visnick was an attorney who lived in connecticut and he spent his two weeks' vacation every year coming to pai. he said that at first, he would go to the thai islands like kopagnon, where most backpackers go, but eventually, he decided to come exclusively to pai because he liked it so much. it was too bad we couldnt have picked his brain some more, but he was flying out the next morning. gotta make those benjamins.

after a long day, skeelow and i went to bed thinking that pai was going to be cool and that there was a lot of potential there. we wouldnt discover the real extent of it until the next day.