Pai (pronounced Bai)

Well Pai was an experience to say the least. The journey there involved an amazing 762 curves in the road. Grace, Tori and Alex all get travel sick. So I spent my time praying that nobody throws up.

Thankfully they didn't.

Our guesthouse was super cute - we had the family room (awww) which was amazing! The room had AC, a fan, WiFi, coloured stones in the bathroom and duvets! Literal luxury.

On the 19th we went to see the White Buddha, the canyon, a Chinese village and a waterfall. We asked the guy who owned the guesthouse how best to get around Pai and he recommended that we all hire motorbikes. Pfffffff. Like that's a good idea! In the end we finally persuaded him to tell us that there is in fact a taxi company that we could use to drive us around for the day. This seemed much safer + the car was air conditioned!

We all thought that we had to cover up to go see the Buddha but people were just wearing whatever. There we were wearing trousers and a t-shirt to cover our shoulders feeling like absolute mugs cos we were dying of heat! Anyway, it was amazing even if we did have to climb about a million steps.

Steps up to the White Buddha

Our next stop was the canyon - great. More steps. The view was pretty good though.

The Chinese village was next. I say village, I mean a village that completely relies on tourists to survive as all they seem to sell is souvenirs and tea related items. It was really cute though. Best part was I got to do some archery + the views were great.

Our final stop of the day was a waterfall which was along some very narrow roads. You knew as soon as you got there - there were bikini clad farang everywhere. We wandered up to the waterfall but weren't sure if we could get in the water, so we had to make do with sitting on a rock listening to some European guy play the guitar - he was actually quite good.

For lunch/dinner we went back into the main streets of Pai and started looking for some Thai food - which was surprisingly difficult to find considering we were in Thailand. The area seemed dominated by western restaurants, motorbike hire places and bars. Eventually we did find somewhere though.

That evening we went out to a couple of bars and quite a few bartenders seemed pleasantly surprised that we could speak any Thai at all. I guess they're used to twenty-something backpacker who come to Thailand to 'find themselves' and end up getting drunk with a bunch of other farang.

We actually ran into a 50-something guy who had lived in Thailand for 10 years yet he couldn't speak a word of Thai!

It seemed Pai is a very hyped up tourist destination for American (and European) backpackers to congregate and get drunk together. Not that great.

But I did have fun, honest. The girls I was with made it so!