On Wednesday we woke up for an early pick-up to Pai. Pai is a small little hippie town in the North, known for "762 curves". We didn't know what they meant by this until we were on the road. It is only 120km from Chiang Mai, but it took us 4 hours to get there, because the roads are the curviest I have ever seen. There are literally 762 hairpin turns along the way. It was raining quite heavily on the way which only made it worse. We passed 3 accidents, 1 crane pulling a car up from over the cliff, and one car that had slid into the guard rail. It was a scary drive, but was well worth it! Pai was amazing.
At night the town's main streets become walking streets, where you can buy hand-made hippie wares, and delicious street food. I think we put on a lot of weight in Pai, because the food was just too good!
Our original plan was to do a couple of days in Pai and then head to Chiang Rai. Unfortunately, that didn't work out. When we arrived in Pai, I got the worst headache I have ever had, and ended up spending 2 days in bed. The following day we planned to go and explore the waterfalls, Buddha and temples on the outskirts of town, but we woke up to no water, so we couldn't have a shower and we ended up sitting around all day, reading, catching up with the blog, and waiting for the water to come back on. The following day we decided to finally see the sights, but then Rob was sick and couldn't venture too far from the toilet. Between the two of us, we spent most of our time at our hostel. The owner even asked us if we needed a map. Haha!
The journey back from Pai to Chiang Mai was even worse than the initial trip. It wasn't raining, so the driver was taking the hairpin turns at speed. All 762 of them. We also didn't have a roof rack on the minibus, so all of our bags were with us. I am not a person who suffers from car sickness, but I ended up almost vomiting, and I wasn't able to get out from the back of the minivan due to all of the backpacks in the aisle, so it would have been messy. Luckily I managed to hold it together, but it took me a good few hours to feel normal again.
We got back to Chiang Mai, after a relaxing couple of days in Pai, in time to get some lunch and head to the train station to catch our sleeper train back to Bangkok.
