A Hippie Pai-ridise

Greetings from Pai, a small town in the northwest of Thailand. As you can guess from the titile, this village has turned into a backpackers mecca, and there are more dredlocks here than (insert hippe reference here)........... well, anywhere else I have been. It is a beautiful spot with a very chilled out vibe, which is right up my alley. I think I may be a closet hippie at heart, I don't dress the part but I do like the places where they tend congregate.

I have been here for about 5 days. The bus trip here from Chang Mai was an adventure in itself. I think we had one of the more rickety buses in the fleet and as it was a local ordinary bus it was packed to the hilt with people, bags of rice , mail etc. The brakes were the loudest screeching I have ever heard, they sent shivers up my spine. Like fingernails down the chalkboard x 100.
The trip started out all right, the seats were actually OK. Once we got about an hour out of Chang Mai the road starts to get a little more treacherous. This part of Thailand is very mountainous and the road had some of the steepest switchbacks I have seen. Some of the turns were very sharp and you almost felt like the wheels on one side of the bus may be lifting of the ground just a bit. About halfway through they picked up the last passenger and as there were no more seats, or make-shif seats on rice bags or whatever, he had to stand. The aisles in Thai buses are very narrow, as the thais all have the small asian hips. This buses aisles were particulary skinny and he choose his spot right next to me, which was really practically on top of me, especially as we rounded the turns. It wasn't too bad though because the views out the windows were amazing, lush green jungle covered mountains. After almost 5 hours we rolled into Pai. There is a mini-bus that does the chang-mai-pai route in abuut 3 1/2 hours for tourists. After getting off that bus I thought I'm definitely taking the mini-bus back, but when I leave tomorrow I think I will go for the local bus again. It is always a bit more interesting riding with the locals that a bunch of westereners like me.

I found a very nice pleasant to stay here, right on the river with a great view of the mountains. It's a large bungalow with my own bathroom and a porch for only 400 baht/night which is about $10. On Fri I went on a 2 day trek into the mountains with a guide. It was me and an english couple. We drove about 30 miles west of Pai further into the mountains to a village and then hiked from there up higher into the mountains and stayed overnight in another very tiny village of Lisu people. In northern Thailand there are about 500,000 people who are members of hill tribes, motsly Karen, Lisu and Lahu, also the long-necked Paduang people whose women wear the brass coils around their necks. In Chaing Mai there are about 200 travel agencies that you can book treks out of to visit the villages, which was a little overwhelming and I had a feeling that it would be a little difficult to get off the well worn tourist track. So I decided to book it out of here, which the good old giude book also recommended, and was glad I did. Our guide was a member of a Lisu tribe himself and had been leading people for 25 years. The village where we stayed overnight is only visited by him and only has 15 people living there in 5 bamboo huts. The night we were there most of them were gone, except for one woman, her husband and child. The rest of her family was visiting reletives over the hills in Burma, where they had escaped from. Many of the hill tribe people in Thailand are refugees from Burma and are not citizens of Thailand. This village was nomadic, but the guide had convinced them to stay for the time being as they can make some money from us tourists and then don't have to rely on growing opium for cash. It took us 3 hours of some serious hiking to get to this village, which is what they have to do as well to get to and from the nearest road. The village in the valley where we started from was made up of Karen people and was a stark contrast to the Lisu. There they have solar panels to supply eletricity, so thay have TV, lots of motorbikes and also a school. The people in that village have become Thai citizens as they have proven to the gonvernment that they are sustainable with their rice crops and raising of water buffalo, they educate the children and take care of the environment. There was a lot of sprucing up of the village being done as well as they are preparing for a visit from the queen. When we stopped there for lunch on the second day women surrounded our table with all their handicrafts to sell, mostly hand woven scarves of all sizes and colors. There were 13 of them and only 3 of us. I thought about buying something, but how do you buy from one and not the other 12 when they are all just staring at you without feeling bad. After lunch we did a bit more trekking through the river valley, including crossing the river about 5 times, wading through knee-thigh high water. The valley was very picturesque, saw a couple of elephants doing some work and lots of grazing water buffalo chilling out in the river.

Overall the trek was very good and I didn't feel like I was too much of an intruder gwaking at the villagers which is a challenge in the tourist market. I have been told that the long-necked tribes are like a human zoo with the women just sitting there posing for photos while they do their crafts and they have moved many of them closer to Chang Mai to be more accessible to the tourists. There is a fine balance with observing someones culture up close and encroaching on it and where that line is I don'tknow.

So tomorrow I am heading back to Chang Mai. I have enjoyed Pai a lot have spent a lot of time jsut sitting on my little deck reading and gazing at the mountains. I got my first full body massage yesterday, much deserved I thought after the trekking. Chang Mai is a nice town as well, has the hustle and bustle of a city, but is 10x better than Bangkok. There is a great night market which I am going to check out again tomorrow night as I saw some nice turquoise beads my first night there. I took a cooking class as well which was a lot of fun. We made spring rolls, (yum yum) a red curry, chicken with ginger stir-fry, some noodle soup and my all time favorite sweet sticky rice with mango. On the 15th I am flying to Ko Samui, an island in the Gulf of Thailand, for some quality beach time. Thank you everyone for the great comments. I love to read them as they make me feel a little closer to home when it sometimes seems so far away.