a guy in pai (where i almost died!)

when we decided to leave mae hong son, we had two choices for a morning bus: 8am or 10 am. being the lazy bastards we are, we decided to go for the 10 am. babs at the guesthouse had told us that the 8am bus was another minivan, so we decided to be adventurous and go for the local bus (which takes almost twice as long). so, we showed up at the bus station, giant bags in hand (or on backs) and tried to figure out what to do. the local buses are basically big school buses painted in a charming shade of orange, with constantly open doors. there was a luggage rack on top, but no luggage on it. we walked over to the bus and tim went in the back door with the bags, thinking maybe we could leave the bags in the back and sit in the back row. as he did that, 10 little monks, all decked out in monk gear (bright orange robes) turned to look at him and he remembered that OH! the back row is monk seating. thus, we clambered onto the bus with all our gear (now totaling 5 bags--two giant backpacks, a booty bag full of presents, and two other bags just holding a variety of crap) and tried to fit it all into one seat.

HA. the seats on these buses are built for thai people (how inconsiderate!). that means that the seats are big enough for tim's skinny rear and maybe one of my giant thighs. and certainly not for two 40-pound bags. eventually the ticket guy took the giant bags and put them in the back row with the monks. and our journey began. now, let me explain about these buses. apart from the beautiful paint job and the open doors and the tiny seats, they also have no air conditioning! they have little fans nailed/glued/stapled to the ceiling and they run intermittently, in a sad attempt to cool down the bus. fortunately, we were in the north of thailand and not back in cambodia with a stinky frenchman sitting in front of us again, so it wasn't too big a hardship. what was worse was the fact that the bus only seemed to run at a maximum of about 40MPH, which meant that we lurched along the VERY twisty roads, with a lovely view of the mountains, and an even better view of the very steep, terrifyingly dangerous-looking cliffs that rested about 6 inches away from the left side of the bus. ah, there is nothing like a slow view of your potential death.

after about 4 1/2 hours, we arrived in pai and called the guesthouse where we were supposed to be staying. it's a good thing we did, because the last time our guisebook was updated was 2002, and many things have changed since then. including the location of our guesthouse. the owner of the guesthouse, a charming frenchman named guy (pronounced ghee, of course, car il est francais, bien sur!) answered and immediately came to pick us up at the bus station. sweet action! he popped us in the back of his truck and drove us a little way out of town to his little restaurant/guesthouse, made up of three little rooms, which looked like condos, all facing the mountains. when we arrived, he told us if we didn't like it, we didn't have to stay. so sweet! of course by this point, i had decided that i would stay no matter what, since he was such a nice man. and i was right. the room was immaculate, with a great big double bed, a little porch, and a giant, beautiful bathroom with hot water AND a western toilet. we had hit the mother lode. guy then drew us multiple bike routes around town, and told us the best restaurants and bars to visit, and then drove us back into town, before recommending another place to eat lunch. guy is a god. oh, and also? guy has a great big giant yellow lab named either buster or wooster. allie likes dogs she can play with!

pai is basically a sweet little town that has hit it big with dirty hippie tourists. it's a quiet little place in the middle of a little valley, with a river running through, and is full of restaurants and bars and coffee shops and internet shops. but not yet in an offensive i-want-to-get-out-of-here-before-i-am-attacked-by-a-billion-germans kind of way. more like a central american i-think-i-could-maybe-stay-here-for-a-while-and-eat-delicious-thai-food-and-do-yoga-and-be-far-away-but-still-speak-english kind of way. we had lunch at a restaurant called na's, which was absolutely delish. i had pad see ew, and tim had some kind of curry and the grand total of the meal was $4 with drinks. HOORAY THAILAND! we walked around town for a while and bought some postcards and then went back to the guesthouse, where we took HOT showers of love! o, hot water, you are so underrated in life!

for dinner, we decided to go to la terrasse, guy's restaurant at the guesthouse. it was perhaps not our most inspired decision. guy and his wife swan had owned a restaurant in pai for years, which was highly recommended in our book. of course, the book, having not been updated in almost 4 years, did not know that guy and his wife split up and the wife sold the restaurant to an englishman with a burmese cook and guy started a new restaurant, la terrasse. anyway, we went over for dinner, and i was desperate for a croque monsieur, thinking that HOORAY! it was a french restaurant--they will know how to make one! first, they brought me an omelette. when i tried to explain what i wanted, the poor girl got all confused and kept pointing at the omelette. finally, she understood that it's a SANDWICH, and she went back to the kitchen. meanwhile, tim is chomping away happily on his steak, and i am getting crustier by the second. finally, they bring me a croque--an asian croque. which means a cheese toastie. it actually wasn't bad, but i was a little unimpressed. tim thinks the restaurant (and the guesthouse) has just opened and that's why they don't know how to make everything on the menu yet. all i know is that the english-owned-french-restaurant-with-the-burmese-cook in town was sounding pretty damn good.

the next morning, we decided we would be ACTIVE TRAVELERS and rent bikes to ride around. the whole trip, we have been wanting to rent bikes, and something has always happened (usually rain) to stop us. guy had given us two bike routes, and since tim didn't want to rent a motorbike, we decided on bikes. old-school raleighs instead of the shiny new mountain bikes for rent, because mountain bike rental man was nowhere to be found. so, off we went on our 20K journey to the hot springs and the canyon. no problem, said guy, it's very flat. GUY LIED. about a half mile into the trip, i was remembering that I HATE BIKES. about a mile in, i hated bikes, the people who made them, the freeks who ride them actively, and everyone who ever thought about riding one. oh, and tim, for not just renting a motorbike like everyone else in thailand. i had visions of us riding along, through the valley, laughing and stopping to look at the view. instead, it was me grunting and trying to get up the hills, and then stopping to yell at tim.

eventually, we reached the hot springs, which was about halfway. at this point, i was walking like a cowboy and sweating like a hog (no one ever said this trip was romantic). we stopped for a while and played with a little thai girl in the water (she was about 6 and was splashing around like a little fish). and then, i made my colossal mistake: i listened to tim. he said we could either go back the way we came, or keep going. then he spewed forth some math theory designed to confuse my liberal arts brain about how we would be going down more than up, blah blah. TIM LIED. we knew there was a big hill just after the hot springs, so we walked up that. then, there was some beautific downhill cruising, but then, when i was hoping we would just keep rolling on downhill...A GIANT HILL! i think maybe bigger than the first one. at this point, thai people in trucks are driving by and waving (and laughing?) at us and i am ready to throw the bike in front of a truck and get a ride back into town. i think i walked part way up the second hill, having grunted my way up the first one, and by the end of the second hill, divorce was calling my name.

finally, we got to pai canyon, which meant we could get off the stinking bikes and look at pretty things. of course, it's hard to look at pretty things when sweat is pouring down your brow and obscuring your vision, but ssh. tim offered to take a picture of me and was almost pushed into the canyon, and then it was time again to get on the bikes. fortunately, from this point, it WAS all downhill (at which point old hill was triumphant, despite the fact that his theory was completely flawed). we swept downhill, and rode through the quiet part of town (which was quite lovely) and finally made it back to pai. in pai, we ate at another guy-recommended restaurant baan banjaran. OHMYGOD. it almost made up for the hellish torture that was the bike ride. we had a banana leaf salad and beautiful crispy gourds and it was absolutely delicious. of course, it then meant we had to ride our bikes back through town in the darkness, but it was completely worth it.

that night, we slept (well) and in the morning, we got a bus back to chiang mai, and i was crippled for days. people, take note. i have now voluntarily arisen before sunrise and ridden a bike for 20K. do you know what this means? get ready, kids--the end is near!

sweet garlic love

by the time we left chiang mai, i was getting pretty fed up with thailand. sure, the food was great and the country was pretty, but where was the action? where was the adventure? where were the hundreds of people trying to thieve from us, giving us great blog entries? WHERE WERE THE ADORING FANS?

thus, at the chiang mai bus station, i was unimpressed. we booked our ticket to go to mae hong son (after some confusion--the woman pointed us in another direction, and when we started to walk over there, she called us back and booked the tickets), and then we went where the woman had pointed. tim tried to distract me from my extreme grumpiness by pointing to the newstand, with what looked like english magazines. standing in the newstand, glaring at the thai version of OK! magazine (who knew?), i was hating thailand. suddenly, the girl at the cashier called out to me and we started talking. she is a university student who speaks 7 languages. she works at the newstand to make money for school, and she eventually wants to travel the world. i LOVED her. i loved her so much that she is going to be my new pen pal! suddenly, thailand didn't seem so bad. there WERE nice people, hiding out in newstands, wanting to be my friend! i gave her my address and as i was walking away, she called out, 'allie! have a good trip!' oh, new friend, how i love you!

thus, i was in a pretty good mood as we tried to find our bus to mae hong son. it seemed we were in the wrong place, and we were eventually directed back to the original ticket counter, where the woman pointed us to a minivan. A MINIVAN. say goodbye to the good mood! we climbed into the back (after watching some poor tiny thai man try to strap our 5436284552-pound bags onto the roof) and prepared for a long ride. as it turns out, the ride was about 2 hours shorter than it should have been! our driver careened (hurtled?) around the twisty, curvy roads of the northern thai mountains so fast we could barely see the scenery. we stopped for a break halfway through, and tim bought some food at the local store. when he said thank you in thai to the salesman, the man gave him a thumbs up and said 'number one!' tim was so happy, he called himself 'number one' for days. (okay, weeks. he STILL calls himself number one. i am going to hunt down that cashier and kill him!)

finally, we arrived in mae hong son, another dusty old-west-looking town. the owner of our guesthouse pulled up in a black jeep to take us to the hotel and straight away, i knew i would like it. THERE WAS A DOG IN THE JEEP! hooray! babs, the german owner of sang tong huts, is a lovely woman who has been running the place for 12 years. her husband died a few years ago, and now her boyfriend runs it with her. unfortunately, the boyfriend speaks barely any english, so our first night there was...awkward. the way it works there is that you can sign up for dinner, and the cook, muk, makes dinner for everyone. you all sit together at the table, in the yurt, next to the fire, and eat. our first night, it was just the four of us. until babs started making conversation, it was a quiet meal. the good news is that muk is the best cook on earth. dear god, the food she made was amazing! of course, it didn't hurt that she included 4637825 pounds of garlic with everything, which pleased us immensely.

our hut had a very luxurious bathroom (without hot water, sadly), with a FLUSHING EUROPEAN TOILET! we had a nice porch with pillows to sit on, and a big bed with a giant mozzie net over it. yay! and, babs has 7 dogs, so there were always dogs to play with.

our first day was spent walking around town doing errands (email, booking flights, sorting out our aussie visas), and booking a tour of the local hilltribe villages for the next day. we found a restaurant called the salween river restaurant, run by an englishman named allen, which was just like cheers! it was full of expat locals, and there was some damn fine green curry (which, i am sorry to say, was my last green curry in thailand because i am officially overloaded on green curry).

our second day, we had to get up early and go into town to find a phone because it was thanksgiving! we managed to find a phone card after about 3 tries, but then, MOST INCONVIENTLY, all the international phones were broken! argh! we ended up calling my parents from the tour office, and having them call back. then, we went on the tour. i forget our guide's name, but he was a very sweet and gentle man who spoke excellent english (we had been told he barely spoke at all and to ask back at the office if we had questions). we rode in the back of a pickup again, to see some fish caves and then to a waterfall, and then to the villages. we snaked up and down the hills by the burmese border, and stopped first at mae aw, a chinese tea village, where we sampled the merchandise. then we went to a meo (hmong) village, nicknamed 'switzerland of thailand', which was lovely--on a lake, with little huts along the shoreline. then, we went to another village, which is made up of four tribes, and then back again. and then? DINNER AT THE HOTEL! finally, some more guests had arrived--2 more germans, and 2 hilarious chinese guys, who entertained us all night. we chowed down big style on muk's delicious garlicky feast, and asked the guys all about china. (if you go to china, go to beijing and then to tibet, they say. also, be prepared for china to kick ass at the olympics--the rest of us have no chance.)

after 3 nights in mae hong son, it was finally time to leave. waaaah! the town itself is not much, but the hotel was lovely and the food (if you haven't yet noticed) is delicious, and the surrounding area is gorgeous. and so, on we went to pai.

(sorry these posts are so boring...with no one around to try and cheat us, there is not much action in thailand--everything is easy! how repulsive!)

a mountain, an elephant, and a really cold river

man, am i behind on this thing! i am almost five posts behind--please forgive me! tim and i got the schmancy overnight bus to chiang mai from bangkok--it was almost as nice as the nice bus in singapore, but this time, we had a thai movie (subtract five points for non-english filmmaking) and a back massager (add three points for traveling in lumbar-assisted comfort). we got in early early morning, and at the time, i hoped maybe it was just the sleepiness or the darkness that made chiang mai so ugly. sadly, it was neither.

we got to our guesthouse, and miss pissamon, our hostess, immediately handed us the reviews of her treks and left us to sit for a while before she took us to our room. we took this to mean that we should book a trek. feeling rather hardy (or sleep-deprived) and unimpressed with the concrete-ness of chiang mai, we agreed. a three-day trek through the mountains it was. we then went immediately to bed. when we awoke, we wandered around town a little. it was still ugly. we tried to get some delicious falafel for lunch, but it was friday, duh. israelis don't work on friday. so we went to an english-owned establishment, bought some books and ate cheese and pickle sandwiches. hurrah! that night, we were off to the night market, which is a series of stalls selling just about everything. we wandered around a little bit, and then bought some things (maybe for you!) and then went home again. oh! and, on the way to the night market, we walked down this skankatron road full of cheesy bars with hookers inside. THE HOOKERS PROPOSITIONED TIM! WITH ME STANDING RIGHT THERE! i could not believe it. chiang mai was rapidly declining in my books. listen, ladies, don't try to seduce my husband when i am standing right there! at least distract me with some chocolate or something!

the trek took off at 9 am, which was not so bad. what was bad was that tim and i were the only english speakers on the trip, and we were all (12 people) crammed into the back of a pickup truck. me, tim and 10 germans. now, i am not normally such a fan of german tourists (call me racist, you already know it's true from the spanish tourist posts), so i was not too thrilled by this new event. tim speaks about 1.5 words of german (i can ask for a beer, which is odd since i don't drink beer) so it was us, sitting in silence while the germans chatted away. it was actually us, 3 swiss kids and 7 germans, to be precise.

we stopped at a market on the way and made a little small talk with a few of them, mostly with martin, this rad swiss kid who just finished uni, speaks perfect english, and is en route to japan for a year-long internship. we stopped for lunch a little further along, and then began to trek to a waterfall. up, up, up and then the waterfall, which was COLD. then, down, down, down, and back to the truck. we finally started the 'trek' at about 3 pm, and i think mr chan, our guide was in a rush, because we virtually sprinted up the side of the mountain and across and down, to get to our first hilltribe village, where we spent the night. finally, at the village, we started to befriend the germans. the two swiss girls, jasmin and claudia, started to talk to us, and two of the german girls, irina and bettina, also made some conversation. mr chan made us some delicious green curry and eventually built a fire, and we all made friends.

let me tell you about our deluxe accomodation for the trek: it was much like our deluxe longhouse accomodation (though this time, no one robbed us). we slept in wooden huts, side by side on the floor on mats that have probably been slept on by every western visitor in the north of thailand since 1950. we got some scabby blankets and no pillows, and the bathrooms were, of course, the fabulous squat toilet with a shower head beside. irina was terrified of the bathrooms, since she is an arachnophobe, and would regularly go to pee and come screaming out of the toilet because she had spotted a spider. it got to the point where the poor thing had to bring bettina in to pee with her.

the next day, we trekked some more, but went a little more slowly this time. the mountains were not far from the burmese border, and the views were spectacular. the pain in my behind from walking uphill for hours on end, not so much. tim and i spent most of the second day trek talking to irina and bettina about bettina's love for british film, and eventually, we reached the elephant camp. at the elephant camp, we decided to swim in the river, which meant that we would walk to the middle and then let the current carry us downstream. only at the end did i notice the giant pile of elephant dung next to the water. mmm, tasty. suddenly, it was elephant riding time! i almost fell off, because you have to step on its HEAD to get on, and i felt badly. but soon, we were both on board, and we were lurching down the river. our elephant had a baby girl who accompanied us on the trek, which meant that she mostly rolled around in the water, kicking up her baby white feet, and flopping around so that we could only see one eye, blinking up at us. let me tell you: riding an elephant in the water is ok, but going downhill is no fun! it requires some serious thigh muscles and no fear of death.

we got to the second hilltribe village after a couple of hours (tim was unimpressed by the elephant ride and swore it off forevermore), at which point i was exhausted (having been unable to sleep on the ancient mattress with the scabby blankets and crusty mosquito net). while we were having dinner, irina and bettina came shrieking into the cabin and ran out to the beds, from which they soon emerged with the news that tim and i had a virtual river of termites climbing up the wall next to our bed. we switched to sleeping next to them. we read our books for a while, and then ate dinner, and then i went into our 'bedroom' to read some more. after a while, i got bored and couldn't sleep, so i went out to the fire with everyone else. tim was chatting it up with our other guide, chai, who spends most of the treks poking people with sticks or yelling, 'SNAKE! SNAKE!' chai was some kind of hilarious, and a very sweet man. he used to be an elephant rider at the camp, where he earned the princely sum of $30 a month. now, he is working on his english and trying to be a proper trekking guide. we loved him. he took my book and tried to read to us, and then taught us some thai, all the while patting tim on the shoulder or the leg, and cracking up laughing. the interesting thing about thai men is that they are very affectionate with each other--more so than with women!

the next day, we woke up and it was time to raft. rafting meant that half of us would stand on one raft, which was composed of several planks of bamboo roped together, and raft down the river. the water was cold, and the currents weren't too bad, but of course, our boat (led by the mischevious chai) hit a big one halfway down and jasmin, tim and i all keeled over (we didn't fall in, but were wet from the waist down, and of course it was the one day that it was about 50 degrees). soon enough, we were back on the road to chiang mai. we stopped briefly at an orchid farm, and then we were back.

we went to dinner (we finally got our falafel and sweet tzaziki of love!), but even with our delicious middle eastern feast, i was depressed. as we were getting ready to go, a man came in with a thai woman. the man was geeky and nerdily dressed, and the thai woman was beautiful, and clearly, an escort. the man was desperately trying to entertain her (he even had a book of thai phrases) and she was totally unimpressed. it was so depressing. the poor man, having to go to thailand and hire a girl to go on a date! usually, i feel badly for the women, and loathe the men, but this time, i wanted to slap that girl silly and tell her to listen to him talk about dungeons and dragons! we had made plans to play snooker with chai at 7.30 (he is a snooker nut), but when we arrived (at a abandoned-looking building full of men smoking and playing snooker, with 5 policemen on the floor in the back playing cards), he wasn't there. tim played for an hour with a man named jee, and then we met the other kids from the trek for drinks. the germans were lovely kids, and i really liked them, but we had to get to bed early because i was making tim go to the elephant conservation center the next day--at 6.30!!

o man, the elephant conservation center was the best thing about chiang mai, and it's not even there! we got the 7.30 bus out of town, and 90 mins later, the bus pulled over to let us off. we got on the elephant bus with a little boy and his sister, who were ecstatic to be seeing the elephants, and it dropped us near the baby cages. there were two babies at the center, and we got to feed them and their mothers. feeding them basically means you hand them a banana, which they either suck with their trunks, or curl around in their trunks and then flip into their mouths. it was great. then we saw the show, in which about 20 elephants demonstrate how they worked in the jungle, and play music, and paint pictures, and raise and lower the flag and all kinds of other human-taught tricks. they even bow to the audience. they all seemed very well cared for, and man, were they smart. I WANT AN ELEPHANT!!