Pai (and a little Chiang Mai)

After I finished teaching for the school year (more on that later) Tanner and I headed up to Chiang Mai to meet my brother.  The plan was to do an overnight trip to Pai.  It's a little town I had heard described as "a Thai San Francisco".  It was a fun little city and we enjoyed the trip.  

We took the night train for the first time here.  It stared in Bangkok and went all the way to Chiang Mai.  We got on when it stopped in Phichit at 1 in the morning.  The cars had AC and the bed wasn't terrible.  I got a good amount of sleep.  Around 8 in the morning the workers came in and folded the beds into a long seat.  We got to Chiang Mai around 10 and my brother met us at the train station.

We were going to be back to Chiang Mai the next night so we dropped off our luggage in the storage room and then headed to our favorite Salsa Kitchen for an early lunch.  It was tasty as usual.  At 2:00 we took a bus to Pai.  Here we are in the van:

We made a few stops along the way and it ended up taking about 4 hours to get there.  It's up in the mountains and the road is incredibly windy.  There were more than 700 turns on the 50 mile ride!  I was really grateful for my Dramamine and the front window seat!

We got in around 6:00 and wandered around the town.  There avocados are rare over here and when you can find them they are expensive (about $3 each) and not very tasty.  I was really surprised at all the avocados they had here.

Thailand excels at making fruit smoothies.  I had a mango smoothie and a passion fruit one.  Tanner got avacado/coconut milk.

The streets were full of little shops and vendors. 

Little quail eggs

That night we rented scooters and after a few wrong turns found out hotel.  It was a delightful little place.

The next morning we were up early.  It was a slightly chilly and I got to wear a sweater!  We spent the day adventuring in our scooters.  As you can see Tanner was thrilled :)

First we went to an old memorial bridge.

Then we headed to Pai Canyon.

They had signs labeling the different types of trees and we had a great time reading them in the silliest ways possible. 

I enjoyed the sights at the beginning, but opted out of walking along all the high, skinny paths.  Brad and Tanner enjoyed a little hike while I relaxed in the safety of the wide, flat area up front.  

After the canyon we headed to a waterfall.  The water is low this time of the year, so it wasn't extremely impressive.  THe rise to the waterfall was really fun though!  It went up a mountain past small clusters of homes.  We saw an orchard of tapped trees and single gas pumps connected to gladd barrels. We didn;t stop for many pictures since we thought we would get pictures on the way down but we unintentionally ended up taking a different path down...

Small spring coming out of the mountain.

By the time we rode our scooters back to town it was close to 10am.  We went back to the hotel and showered before returning our scooters and getting lunch.  We took a 2:00 van back to Chiang Mai.  We weren't in Pai for very long, but it felt like just the right amount of time.  The ride back only took 3 hours. 

Close to the bus station there is an abandoned roller rink.  It's always intrigues me when we have driven past and this time we took a look.  

Back in Chiang Mai we went to our favorite Italian restaurant.  

After dinner we went to the night market.  We net the sassiest lady in one of the shops.  We had a great time bartering with her.  She was so spunky and kept trying to spank my brother.  He told her that she had to pay 40 baht (just over a dollar) to spank him.  She pulled out 1 baht and gave it to him before giving his booty a little smack.  We got such a kick out of that.

As we walked back to our hostel we walked past one of the foot spas.  I have wanted to give it a try since I first heard of them.  I loved and hated it.  I hated it more than I loved it, but I'm really glad I did it,  My poor feet are SO ticklish so that make it difficult.

Early the next morning we headed to the airport to fly down to Krabi for the next leg of our adventure.