Pai

I haven't been keeping up with my blog updates as planned so today I have made 2 new updates (Pai and Chiang Mai) but unfortunately the computer I'm on doesn't let me upload photos so those will come later.

Pai is a little hippie town to the northwest of Chiang Mai and quite different to Chiang Mai. Everything here is much more relaxed and slower although it's still very touristy both with foreigners and with Thais. The biggest difference here though is that the town is located in a mountain valley so in the morning and evening it's quite a bit colder. The temperature was a nice change from the rest of Southeast Asia as I even had to put on long pants and a jacket one night, but it was pretty entertaining watching all of the Thais walking around in huge parkas and toques while I was usually in a t-shirt.

For my first couple of days in Pai I joined a 2 day trek to nearby ethnic villages in the national park. The trek was a lot of fun as it wasn't too hard but we got to see some nice scenery and all our meals were eaten in different villages (except breakfast and dinner). Meeting the locals was quite interesting and seeing how they lived was great, the most unexpected aspect of the villages was that almost each house had a solar panel for electricity but as far as I could determine the only thing that they used electricity for was a radio and large sets of speakers.

After the trek I returned to Pai where a festival was about to start called Loi Krathong. This festival started on the 12th of November and lasted for 3 days with celebrations occuring each night (not much happened in the day though). So I ended up staying in Pai for two days of the festival so that I could observe the party. The festival was in celebration of the end of the rainy season and to celebrate it the local people send flaming laterns (like small air balloons) into the night sky and float rafts made of banana trees and leaves down the river with candles lit on them. Also added to the celebration was a parade each night and a big outdoor festival. The festival wasn't all that interesting because all it seemed to be was food stalls, muay thai boxing, a game that's best described as volleyball without using hands, and lots of noise. The muay thai boxing and feet volleyball were quite interesting but with the boxing more time was spent waiting for the match than actually seeing it. The volleyball was pretty interesting but it's played everywhere here in Southeast Asia so I had seen it lots before. The biggest problem with the festival was that it seemed like everyone had large stands of speakers blaring music as loud as possible, but each one was playing something different so it just seemed like a lot of noise.

After the festival I took a 2 day white water rafting trip from Pai which ended up in Mae Hong Son. The trip turned out to be pretty fun but at first it seemed that our guide was completely crazy as he would aim for every rock in the river to make the raft swing around and get everyone as wet as possible. In the end it was a great trip and no harm was done although we did manage to flip the raft once and I fell out with our guide a second time. The rafting was a great way to travel between Pai and Mae Hong Son because the road between the two towns is extremely twisty and the river we rafted on was along the edge of the national park so the scenery was absolutely beautiful.

I spent a day in the small town of Mae Hong Son relaxing after the rafting trip. The town was quite nice a small lake in the centre but not a lot to do in town, most people make day trips to nearby villages which I didn't have time to do since I felt that I spent too much time in Pai. From Mae Hong Son I made my way down to Mae Sot stopping overnight in Mae Saring (another small and sleepy town with not much here).