Relaxing in Pai

Pai is a pretty small town in the mountains. It has one main highway that runs through it and a couple roads that branch off from the highway to make up the town. We found a cute place to stay that had bungalows right on the river (ours had a waterwheel in front) and a huge deck for hanging out. We were able to relax and hang out on our first day there before booking our ticket to get another 15 days on our Visa. That turned out to be a hell of a day. We thought that because Pai was closer to the Burma border it would take less time than going from Chaing Mai - WRONG! We had to wake up at 4 am to drive 3 hours to Chaing Mai, pick up other people that needed to go to Burma, head north again for another 3 hours to get to the border, leave Thailand, pay for a Burmese visa, leave Burma, re-enter Thailand for another 15 day visa, drive 3 hours back to Chaing Mai and then another 3 hours to Pai. We didn´t get back until 8 pm.; had dinner and crashed. We had a relaxing day after that of sleeping in, just eating, drinking on the deck and reading our books all day. It was lovely! At night our place has a campfire that people hangout at which was nice for us just to walk out of our room to a bar next to a fire.

Around the town there are a bunch of waterfalls and a hot springs you can check out. We rented a moto to go see the waterfalls and hot springs. The hot springs had a place that got to 80ºC and little kids were boiling eggs in it - not sure hot sanitary that is, but funny to see. We hung around the hot springs for a while, but it was just too hot outside to really enjoy it. So we left to see a waterfall that had big boulders in the middle of the stream you could walk out onto. It looked like a great place to just spend a day so we parked it until it is was close to sunset. Most of the rest of our days consisted of our first relaxing day: eating at different restaurants, listening to bands, drinking on the deck or next to the camp fire, and reading books. The people at our place were friendly and we met some pretty cool other travelers - some were not so cool though. One woman was bashing America and Ben asked her if she had ever been there. When she said no, he basically told her that she had no room to judge. We heard a lot of those type of comments where people would generalize America in really stupid ways and have no real basis for their argument. Another guy tried to tell me that all American companies had each employee complete a blood test for drug screening. I tried to explain that was not normal because most companies would not want to pay that much for drug screenings. He was not buying it but I didn´t feel like arguing. We could see why a company might single him out for additional drug screenings by the way he looked. A lot of the other folks around the campfire were super nice and we got along with most of them, hanging out until the early hours of the morning.

We stayed in Pai for 6 days and loved every minute (aside from the visa run episode). We would have stayed longer but we decided we wanted to spend some time on the beach before we headed to NYC. It is supposed to be freezing in NYC, so we have to live up this heat while we can!