My motto throughout mae hong son was "i feel bad for..."
we had high expectations for this place and during our 3 hour bus ride there from pai (even though we didn't communicate it at that time) neither of us really wanted to leave pai.
it was a combination of these things that made mae hong son seem like a bit of a bust. landon was extremely unhappy with our guesthouse. turns out my sister laura stayed at the exact same guest house a few years ago and told me it was cockroachy. this prompted us to sleep that evening with the lights on. anyways, our first day we both sort of set out and did our own thing. i went and got some pasta and bummed around on the internet, read a little and then met up with landon later on to go to the sunflower cafe for veggie burgers. the next day landon went and found a guesthouse more to her liking. we rented a bike and the guy who ran our guesthouse told us to go swim in the river so we turned back around and got our bathing suits and followed a map to the river. i don't know what it is about maps made by travel guides or bike shops or guesthouses but they are always more confusing than they ought to be. or, landon and i are just retarded because we drove right onto the bridge above the river we were supposed to be swimming in and wondered..... "DUR WHERE IS IT?!"
we didn't really inspect it much. we saw huts lined all along the river below but thought they were ghetto homes. we turned around and went a different way. we did that for a while until we gave up on trying to find a path down to the river. turning around, we went back to that bridge once more and saw 2 thai girls ahead of us bike down a hidden path to the riverside just to the left right before the bridge. wow, was thaT ever a poorly constructed sentence?!!? anyways, we slappped ourselves for being stupid after realizing that those huts we saw earlier were not ghetto homes but little huts you could rent out. you could order beers and everything. beside our hut was a group of like, 10 young thaI kids who couldn't keep their eyes off landon. we were, afterall the only white people there. (mae hong son was tourist defficient, i got alot of looks like, 'what? white people? what are they doing here? not that i mind but what the hell is there to do up here?') after a while we went in the water and almost immediately the 10 kids started bombarding me with sea weed they balled up. at first i was like.... what the fuck! but then i found out it was all good fun and joined the war, which was unfortunately, all against me. like i said, they were kids and i'm bigger, taller, faster. i caught almost everything they threw at me. i had submerged kids trying to pop up behind me for sneak attacks. i had kids up on the divider under the bridge showering projectiles from above. they eventually warded me out into open water which they didn't dare tread. i found out why when the current started to carry me away. i struggled to get a good foothold on the river flooor and suceeded for a moment before i saw more sea weed coming my way. after i time i mastered the current and staged my best attacks from the open water. landon came out to join me and i was so immersed in the battle that i forgot that she would be washed away. sure enough i see landon just kind of whip by me and after warning her, hear her calling for help. i went back and realized that i couldn't help her by grabbing her hand. she was complaining that her shorts were falling off so i told her 'it's you or the shorts' or 'swim like you mean it'. i then realized that where it mattered not to me, as i was still at war, landon could just swim to the side of the river for a good hold on something solid that she could shimmy along back to the hut. we got tired and went back into town to try and book a trek but the guy we were referred to was still not in. we were terribly bored with mae hong son and only had a week left on our visa before laos. we were still pai homesick and i guess that's when we decided to go back the next day. we finished the day off drinking sangria, which we've had no luck finding anywhere else in thailand, and playing jenga at a bar (i won). when we got back to our guesthouse there was this rambling old european man who locked himself out his room who talked our ear off for what seemed like forever until the owner came back and opened his door with a spare key. anyways, i was saying my motto was "i feel bad for..." because i felt bad for mae hong son, felt bad for the guitar player at sunflower cafe when we left because we were the only people there, felt bad for the 1st guest house we were at because we left for a better one and felt bad mostly because we didn't do a trek.
....my foot has suffered some nasty cuts and everything and the shoes i have aren't the greatest for hikes so i've unforunately been avoiding treks. =(
oh well... back to pai
