Let's Go Pai!

After Songran, Judith and my lovely friend Kait McCann (who I met in the Phuket TESOL program and who has been teaching just outside Bangkok)

Say hello, Kait!

and I decided to head to Pai, a small backpacking hippy town in the mountains of Mae Hong Son.

It's only about 50 miles north of Chiang Mai, but it takes over three hours to get there because the road through the mountains is absurdly winding- there are t-shirts and signs everywhere that boast that the highway includes 762 curves.

Here's Judith proving it.

Pai has a permanent population of about three thousand (although it's almost constantly overrun with backpackers). For a small town it's going to get several posts on this blog, because the place is wonderful, and we had some great adventures there.

Someone's a math nerd.

Kait and I meant to stay for three days, and ended up there for the better part of a week. Judith is still there. Apparently this happens in Pai.

I loved it. The town is beautiful.

And it's full of charming, quirky details.

Yes, this is a manual ferris wheel. And yes, it does work. 

For context: this was at an organic strawberry farm. 

They take their food seriously- it's almost all fresh and organic and really, really good.

Really, really, really good.

The people are great. I love this picture of these sweet country ladies. When Kait and I pulled up to this temple on motorbike, the dog in the background of this picture started barking at us, and the lady with the hat smacked him on the head with that piece of PVC pipe, then told us we were beautiful. When I reflexively said, "Kuhn doo-eye!" ("You too!"), she looked at me like I was nuts.

And the scenery is some of the most stunning I've seen in Thailand, although my camera refused to do it justice and the mountains were hazy from slash-and-burn.

It was a great place to spend my 28th birthday. Kait and Judith got me a bottle of wine (there isn't a lot of wine here, and I'd been missing it), postcards in lieu of birthday cards, and a braided cord for my Buddha pendant, since the chain it was on had been turning my neck green.

Sweethearts. 

And then I went and got my first tattoo! It's the cover illustration from a 1919 edition of Rudyard Kipling's short stories that I found in Hamer's General Store in Muskoka some years ago. I opted to edit out the swastika that was in the original design (which at the time of publication was an Indian peace symbol, untainted by the Nazis) and put in a Buddha symbol instead.

This photo taken minutes after it was done, hence all the stray ink. 

It was done bamboo style!

You might well wonder how I've managed to stay this pale after 8 months in Southeast Asia. It's a gift.

Because I'm just that much of a badass.

Bamboo style tattoos don't bleed, don't scab, and there's almost no aftercare. You don't wash it with soap for the first three days after and then put Vaseline on it for three days after that. Hooray for traditional methods! It did hurt a fair amount, though.

Here's my tattoo artist, whose name was Zed. He was awesome, although he could have used some dental work.

Here pictured in his spotless, sterile studio. 

Next: more adventures in Pai.