We arrived to Pai after few bumping hours in a van.
Pai is one of those cities that you fall in love with at a first sight. Colourful, cute and with an atmosphere to make you smile with no obvious reason.
Your body automatically switches to chilling mode the moment you set your feet onto its streets. We first sat for a coffee, they had condensed milk which made Maja`s smile even wider. But coffee itself turned out to be the only bad thing about Pai.
We ran into Tyler, a yogi we met in Chiang Mai. He did some magic and managed to get all three of us and two backpacks onto a scooter. We drove a couple of minutes out of the center to the "Darling view point". Darling is a Thai lady who always has a smile on her face, and when you talk to her she would do a little dance moves every couple of minutes. She never says just "hello", it's always "heeelooo darliing!" in a singing tone. We liked our Darling a lot. We slept in a wooden lodge, surrounded with pigs, cows, dogs, chickens, and mice. There's no point in even mentioning bugs and mosquitos. We also had a roommate, a mouse whom we named Cham.
We rented a scooter and Tyler took us to the wonderful waterfall that has gooey parts of the rock that are used as water slides. Magnificent.
When the dark fell almost every street became one big street vendor. Fried bugs and lizards, waffles, deep fried sandwiches, pad tai, tom yum, smoothies, spring rolls, mango with sticky rice, fried rice...we were in a food haven. But then again, our whole trip has been a food haven, just with different kinds of deliciousness.
We said "bye bye" to Tyler who left for Chiang Mai and started our scooter adventures around Pai.
For one whole day we just drove around with no fixed plan on almost empty roads that hug the mountains, landscape made out of rice fields, houses scattered on the hills, plantations of unidentified plants, and that crazy green colour of a jungle in the rainy season.
On our second day we decided to go and see the enormous white Buddha that is "sitting" in the middle of the mountain. Impresive, really. After that we started our quest for the hidden waterfall. We were driving around for quite some time before releasing that we'll be out of gas in a matter of minutes. With some luck, talking with our hands and legs and doing a little bit of mime we found a house that sells gas. In the bottles. So we poured the gas into the tank out of a bottle of vodka and continued.
Waterfall! Hidden and small. Cute and in a middle of nowhere. We decided to walk further up the hill on some kind of a "path". It was worth it. Small lake with no people there and a rock under the waterfall, perfect for a massage. Let's not point fingers, but one of us was just a little bit more curious. Anyways, she decided to walk and climbe some rocks to see what else is out there. And she found a little waterfall with a nice spot to sit underneath the running water. But not for long. In the matter of minutes she discovered that she was covered in hundreds of tiny leeches! We called it a day and went back home for some serious scrubbing.
We spent our next day walking around Pai taking pictures, chilling, hanging out with Thai people and doing acro in the Ting Tong bar.
We met an Australian punk hippie (is that a thing?) who told us his interesting life story. And finished our night out at a hospital. The curious one got 8 stiches on her arm, like a permanent memory of our travels.
Next morning we headed back to Chiang Mai to book our tickets for Sukhothai.
