Travel accounts; SEA 2

I left you guys at the 16th of may so logically I would continue with the 17th, however I forgot what it was that we did that day so yeah.. TIME SKIP

05-18

Today we went on a road trip to Pai, this is a small village in the north of Thailand, roughly 140 km away, 40 of highway and 110 of mountain road. I know the math doesn’t add up BUT THAT’S WHAT THE ROADSIGNS SAY OKAY?

On the way there we got to meet some very interesting new people with some interesting customs. They were dressed in brown suits with big sunglasses and had on a badge that said ‘police’, so they were just like real cops, except these ones pulled us over for being white and good looking. At least that’s what I assume, we both were wearing helmets and we weren’t speeding. After taking off our helmets and getting off the bikes he asked for our licenses, I handed him mine and he repeated the question. This confused me about as much as their inability to consistently say how much further it is to a certain point.
As we obviously didn’t have what he was looking for, he proceeded to ask for another type of document. One with the picture of their king on it, he asked for the sparkly golden brown looking one but unfortunately we didn’t have any of them, go fish.
In the end he settled for two blueish purpleish ones that if you rub together will make one goldenbrown one. No tickets were issued, just a fair but strict warning to us: “You must respect the law in thailand!” the irony of being told something like this by a corrupt policeman made me giggle.

As we were cleverly deprived of our hard earned cash we had to stop at an ATM, we only realized this as we were already 15 minutes into the mountains.
Fun fact: in the mountains there are many villages, none of them have ATMs.
Goody gumdrops we get to do that first bit again but in reverse, and then once more, yay.

So we lost a bit of time here but the rest of the trip was all peaches and cream. All in all it took us 4,5 hours to get to Pai and after a bit of circling round the same spot we found the guesthouse. We had decided to be fancy and stayed at this really nice place with a pool and our own little cottage. Granted it wasn’t as big as Bingie but still, bigger than most ‘standard fan’ rooms.

At night we went into town using their free shuttle service and visited the night markets, ate loads of food, spent like $4, felt like kings. Well maybe not puck, she might’ve felt like a queen.

After we got back we went straight to bed like the good kids we are.

05-19
Our first real day in Pai! I wanted to show puck the sights that Sebastiaan and I had seen when we were there two years ago, so we started with Pai Canyon.
Pai Canyon isn’t all that grand so 5 minutes later we were back on the road, on to the next sight to be seen. It took us about 20 minutes to reach the waterfall that puck had heard so much about, I had already seen this and I have been telling all about it to puck.

Lemme explain something about weather, when it doesn’t rain, its really really dry outside. Especially when its really really hot. You know what isn’t very nice to look at when it’s dry?
You’ve guessed it! Waterfalls. This was more like a black rock pool of tar, death, and dirt. Very disappointed we decided to just go back to our cushy life at the fancy place that had that thing that IS wet. The pool.
That night we took it easy, watched some movies, drank some beers, ate some local food and almost died trying to navigate through roadwork in progress, so nothing big happened.

05-20

Today we rode the bikes all around Pai, we saw the big white Buddha in the mountain and some elephants as well as many other pretty sights. We had dinner at the hotel and decided to take an early night as next morning we’d be heading off back to Chiang Mai.

05-21

The return trip was real smooth, we made it back to Chiang Mai in about 3,5 hours and after lining another cops pockets with 4 pink documents with the kings face on it we started looking for the new hostel.
As guilt over the fancy place sunk in, we decided to stay in a really cheap place, as value of a room drops, so does comfort, and self value. This place was literally as expensive for 5 nights as the Pai place was for 1 night. It was called Cumpun Guesthouse, I think Cumpun must be thai for dump. It was a dump.
They advertised as gym/B&B, let me paint you a word picture… This so called gym was a stack of weights right next to the pool table, which is in the lobby, which is literally an open garage next to a busy street. They charged 100 baht per workout for this luxurious set up and one of the employees there was constantly at it. Shirtless. Next to the pool table, next to the check-in counter. So weird and awkward.

Anyways we took our key and checked out the room, soon after this we left the room and decided to only be here for our dark sleeps. We went back to the old hostel to see the friends we made there and have some beers as well as a bite to eat. We got back at the hostel quite late.

05-22

Today is Sunday, that means around 18:00-19:00 they turn the main streets of Chiang Mai into this big marketplace. For about a dollar you can get small meals, drinks, t-shirts, whatever else you can think of, but as you can imagine all we really cared about was the cheap food. I think we tried about 5 different things before we felt gluttonous and decided it was about time to go home.

05-23

God this guesthouse is awful.
The shirtless workout guy turned out to be from Belgium, didn’t say a word until we’d already thoroughly discussed his aberrant behavior. This guy is so friggin weird… he kind of gives you that creepy guy vibe, this is enhanced by the fact that when you look at him there’s just not really anyone there looking back at you. Don’t think he’s playing with a full deck to be honest.
We dropped off the scooters as we were a little fed up with being pulled over and asked for sums of money, never the same sum by the way. We went to the Myanmar embassy to get our visas sorted for our next trip and we took a trip to Doi Suthep. This is a very pretty temple at the top of a mountain here in Chiang Mai, definitely worth the trip If you ever have the chance.
At night we visited the night bazaar, this is sort of like the Sunday walking markets but way bigger and its there every night. Food was eaten, souvenirs bought.

05-24,25

I kinda don’t really know what we did these two days, except picking up the visas on the 25th. Must’ve been very uneventful days.

05-26

We booked a bus trip to Chiang Rai, this took about 3 hours through winding mountain road. We arrived at Chiang Rai at about 11:30 and walked to our hotel, this was a soothing luxury place we really needed some comfort again after 5 nights of totally slumming it. We still ate real cheap so all in all I think it balances out, sort of.
No it doesn’t.
The place had a breakfast buffet in the mornings and free bikes to borrow, we took two bikes and explored the town.

Oh wait, I’m forgetting something, before we got there we stopped at a cat café. No big deal, just a coffee place, a dozen cats kittens and such walking around, cuddling you as you sip on your latte, you know, just like any other place.

After riding the bikes for about an hour and stopping for lunch we got back to the hotel, took a dip in the pool and had a quiet night.

05-27

We got up at 7, ate a lot of breakfast, and around 8:00 we got picked up for our grand ‘do all the sights in one day’ tour. It was literally just that, there’s about 8 things to do at Chiang Rai spread over about 80km and we saw/did all those things in one day, only cost us 1000 baht (this is cheap).

We saw; White temple, This is basically the only real reason to go to Chiang Rai, so beautiful. So cool.
Black House, sort of a museum thing, shows Lanna culture and buildings and such.
Karen long neck village, had I known about their history and the fact that they’re ‘property’ we wouldn’t have gone here.
Tea plantation of one of the major manufacturers of tea in Thailand.
Monkey cave saw monkeys and a cave.
Mae sot border, this is where Thailand borders with Myanmar.
Golden triangle, at this point two rivers collide and you can see Lao, Myanmar and Thailand in one spot, funny thing is that you can see two buildings, one in Myanmar, one in Lao, both casinos (the Lao one is Chinese owned).
Opium museum, learned about the history of opium
Bunch of Buddhas, basically just a bunch of Buddhas.

At the end of this day we were really tired, had napped a couple of times in the van already but it didn’t take much for us to fall asleep as we got back to the hotel. (after dinner of course)

05-28
Took the same bus back to Chiang Mai, decided to go back to the ‘Royal Guesthouse’ this is where our friends work, it has a pool and is right next to a gym, so worth paying a little more each night for, still pretty cheap.
We had drinks with our friends and pretty much fell into a coma at around 22:00