762 Curves to Get to Pai

Our final destination in Thailand was up to the northern hippie town of Pai. Nestled in the mountains, the landscape of this town takes your breath away and I would say that, for the most part, I loved it, however, the place is crawling with youngsters who were just there to party, which is more annoying than it is charming. That said, it was very nice to get away from the chaos of large cities and enjoy beautiful natural settings. As the title states, the road was fully of winding curves to get there. It was rough for a person who gets motion sick and who was stuck in the back of the van, but I made it through without barfing!

Lod Cave

Lod Cave is a cave system that is over 1500 meters long. A river runs through it and it is home to thousands of bats and massive fish. After a very windy ride to get here, we were guided through three of the largest caves where we saw magnificent stalactites, stalagmites, and ancient teakwood coffins! This was a super cool experience and ranks up at the top as far as best things we’ve done in Thailand. On our way to the cave, we stopped at a scenic lookout, which is what the first three pictures below are from.

Mo Pang Waterfall

We rented a moped for a couple days which really gave us some freedom to zoom around and check out the surrounding areas. One of our stops was to this waterfall which was crowded with those youngsters, but still a pretty cool place. They had built cool bamboo walkways and there was a natural waterslide that was entertaining to watch people slide down.

Bamboo Mini Golf

This place popped up on Google Maps and I am so glad we went! It is owned by a white guy and his Thai wife and is just a cleverly cheap way to get money out of tourists. Essentially you are playing mini golf, but you are using a croquet mallet made out of bamboo and hitting a tennis ball. I was just as terrible at this as I am at regular mini golf, but we had a blast anyway. The people were so nice! The guy gave us lessons before we started and his wife brought us a delicious hibiscus drink called rosella about halfway through.

Pai Canyon

The views from this place were amazing, no pictures will ever do them justice! There are really interesting rock formations that create really narrow ledges for you to walk along, but I am learning about myself that I have a pretty big fear of heights so I stayed well away from the edges.

The bridge in the first photo was taken along the way to the canyon. It is the Pai WW2 Memorial Bridge. During the Second World War, the Japanese forced villagers to build this bridge, so they could cross the Pai river and have easier access into Burma, which was a British colony at the time. It was built using elephants to drag the trees from the forest to the river. After the war, the Japanese destroyed the bridge, but the villagers rebuilt it because they had grown dependent on it for their own transport.

From here, we will head back to Bangkok to celebrate Thanksgiving with Cheryl (we are going to try to scrape together some kind of nice dinner) and stay for a few days before heading on over to Cambodia. Stay tuned!