Sorry for the Group Email

Our Lonely Planet is right most of the time. It has useful maps, good guesthouse recommendations, and it’s been eerily prescient when it comes to predicting scams.

But it makes Pai sound like it’s an unspoiled town fit for adventurous hippies and backpackers, and things couldn’t be further from the truth.

In terms of proportion, there were at least as many tourists in Pai as you’ll get during the busy season on the Costa Del Sol. The menus were in English first and foremost (I’m sure I saw some that didn’t feature Thai at all), and everyone spoke English.

That doesn’t mean it’s a bad place, mind you. Pai is essentially what Glastonbury would be like if it had less live music, better weather, nicer toilets and more beautiful scenery. We stayed, for the princely sum of 120 baht a night (almost exactly £2), in our own bamboo hut. Elevated on stilts, it was about two paces wide by three paces long (i.e. small), but it had its own (non-flushing) toilet and a slightly-heated shower. Getting there was the simple matter of crossing the most improbable bridge I’ve ever seen; centimetre-thin slats across wobbly bamboo poles, all held up by a few shaky supports. We edged our way along it every time; it was only once we saw the locals cheerfully riding their scooters across that we decided it was probably – only probably, mind – safe for us.

We reached Pai by way of a four hour, fan-cooled government run bus. There are air-conditioned mini-buses that ply the same route in half the time, but these, by reputation, are miniature vomit-comets, speeding along the twisting hillside roads as fast as their tyres and brakes will allow.

Our bus cost us 80 baht each (under £2), and had a series of intermittently-working oscillating fans mounted in the ceiling. The doors were open all the time, allowing the bold to pass a cool breeze by their legs at the risk of being snatched out of the door by a sturdy passing weed. At times the pace up the hills was no more than a brisk walk. Every now and then a small minibus would shoot past, braking heavily into the next bend, as we chuntered our way round. Minibuses make the trip to Pai from Chiang Mai in about two hours; we took the better part of four. It was wonderfully relaxing.

Pai itself is situated in an area of incredible natural beauty; the gentle curve of the horizon occasionally punctuated by a sharp mountain peak. The river, which slinks its way past the town, is fed by a series of beautiful waterfalls.

To reach any of them, of course, you need wheels. There are two approaches to this: you can either buy your way onto a tour (about £20 a day), or throw caution literally into the wind and get a scooter.

Renting a scooter in Thailand is not recommended by many official guidebooks. Most scooters are unregistered, which means you’re technically breaking the law if you take them on the road. Hospitals are few and far between, should you do what I guess a handful of tourists do every year and spill yourself off onto the unforgiving tarmac.

Still, we got one anyway. We named her “Scoot”.

Riding a scooter looks pretty easy, I’ll grant you. Lots of very stupid people manage it every year, but our first few hours were punctuated with near-misses and lots of screaming. Getting going is surprisingly easy: Scoot was automatic, so all you had to do was start the engine and twist the throttle. After tentatively dragging our feet the first hundred yards, we were off.

Going straight is easy. We reached our first traffic intersection, tried to turn left and described an improbably large and sweeping left-hand arc that left us on the far, wrong side of the road, facing oncoming traffic and risking the wrath of scooters behind us by spectacularly cutting them up.

It was, in short, staggeringly dangerous, and the fact that we remained onboard has more to do with luck and, possibly, Scoot’s own survival instincts, than anything else.

Not for the first time, Mendy was a trooper. I should explain.

We went to California a few years ago and rented a tandem bike. Our arrangement was simple. I would tolerate looking foolish for a few hours on a bike (I’m not made for it, I tell you), and in return, I’d let Mendy drive for a bit. Being on a tandem is a bit like being on a normal bike that has decided it doesn’t want to be a normal bike any more and has decided to be a stretch limo instead. But it’s still got two wheels. So every turn becomes a long, drawn-out affair requiring plenty of fore-thought and care. Turn in too early and you risk dragging your back-end through the undergrowth. Turn too late and you’ll end up on the other side of the pavement (the Californians take this depressingly seriously), face-to-face with thousand mile-an-hour rollerbladers and dog-joggers.

I was not good on the front.

I was worse on the back. Every time we came to take a turn, I would violently wrench my (non-working) handlebars so violently that I eventually worked them loose, and realised that now I actually could turn the bike, because my handlebars were connected directly to Mendy’s saddle. We collapsed into the undergrowth more than once because of my control-freakery, and so it was that I decided I could never ride on the back of a tandem again.

I guess riding on the back of Scoot would probably be more of the same, but at ten times the speed and, instead of roller-bladers, trucks.

Mendy, very wisely, decided to let me do the driving, and was rewarded for her foresight with hours of helplessly weaving across the road as I tried to get my balance right. She was dealt emergency stops when there was no need, and slow, graceful decelerations when impending calamity demanded far more decisive action.

Still, at least we both wore helmets. Scratched, pock-marked things that slid about our heads like a colander on a four-year old’s; if we fell off we would have to pray that our helmets were, by some fluke, in the right place at the right time.

We improved as we went, though, and soon we were helplessly lost, crashing through the undergrowth on deeply rutted, dirt tracks, while Mendy remained extraordinarily relaxed in the back seat. It was this way that we found our waterfalls, thoughtfully marked on the map by the motorbike company.

There is clearly a long-term attraction in Pai, judging at least by the number of middle-aged American and Englishmen who’ve set up bars, restaurants and internet cafés in the town centre. I suppose it’s what a town on the hippy trail was destined to become: increasingly visited by tourists until the main source of income is foreigners. There are countless good restaurants and places to check email, and the fact that everyone speaks English meant that Pai was an incredibly relaxing place to spend our longest stop since the at-times impossibly-hard Xian.

And if things get dull, you can always ride an elephant.

Dave did ride an elephant. Go back to the home page to find out how we did.

Tags: backpackers, bamboo hut, bamboo poles, beautiful scenery, brisk walk, comets, cool breeze, costa del sol, half the time, hillside, hippies, live music, lonely planet, mini buses, oscillating fans, paces, pai, princely sum, simple matter, stilts, Thailand, thin slats