Diner last night was a bit surreal to be honest. Our room was nice enough, a bit basic but a large comfortable bed, plenty of hot water but no chairs inside. We had a nice balcony overlooking a jungle scene with what looked like comfortable chairs but neither of us were going to risk being bitten by the mosquitos, DEET only works so far. There was no point unpacking as until we reach our beach resort next week we are only staying one night in each location. Its quite a nice setting if you like jungle type places with small streams running through, an outside bar and a barbecue pit, but with no alcohol the bar was a bit pointless and the barbecue was being re-built. I could quite imagine this whole place being a bit of a nightmare in the rainy season with everything being damp as the individual cabins don't look substantial enough to keep out a downpour. But at this time of year its fine, lovely view of the full moon and stars as there is no other light around.
Not many people staying so we had our choice of seating in the open sided restaurant. Plastic covered menus with photos of the food but a good selection of Thai food and cheap but again no alcohol, I might be stressing this too much I know.
I had a soda water and Fiona a virgin gin and tonic, i.e. a tonic water. We started with Tempura vegetables and then garlic fried pork and chicken with vegetables and cashew nuts, food was good but we were finished within 45 minutes.
Breakfast this morning was fruit, eggs and toast with bad coffee.
We checked out at 08.30. I don't think we could recommend this place to anyone, it was OK for one night and apparently there is not much choice of good accomodation in the area.
We had a short drive to a local village, Pang Moo, and visited a lady who has a shop with everything to do with sesame - seeds, oil (which they produce themselves), snacks, crackers, hair products etc. She also runs a homestay which we had a quick look at, a traditional style building about 100 years old with a brand new Toyota parked outside.
We then drove for about an hour on a mountainous but good road to a small village called Ja Bo where about 250 Lahu Na tribespeople live. There is a good coffee shop there with wifi! We spent a couple of hours with a woman and her husband, they showed us how they did traditional weaving and stitching, of course Fiona was very interested in that. He also makes and repairs the flutes the villagers use in their ceremonies and also we had a go at weaving bamboo to make signs to ward off the evil spirits, the people are Animists not Buddhists.
They live in a traditional style house on stilts, storage underneath and open plan on top but they have electricity, wifi, satellite TV, its their son who runs the coffee shop, he graduated from University and his mum wanted him to work in the city but he obviously had other ideas. She cooked us lunch of fried pork, rice, chicken with potatoes and vegetables, I had to help make the chilli paste - very hot!
After lunch we walked through the village and then down the road past the army checkpoint, there was a bit of a discussion as our route took us through the helicopter landing area and they were due a pickup but it seemed to get sorted and we turned off down a track through scrub to another village, this time populated by Shan people. At the bottom we had a quick look at the Burmese style temple, only 20km from the border - the checkpoints are to prevent smuggling. Then it was back in the van and about an hours drive to Pai.
We checked into the very nice Reverrie Siam with enough time to sit in the sunshine before freshening up and taking the free shuttle ride into Pai town, we are about 1 mile out of town so too far to walk in the heat. There is a supposed pedestrian area with stalls but motorbikes and some cars just seemed to ignore the signs, after a quick look around we decided on a drink in a bar called Plan B, not the best of locations on the main road but it was Happy Hour. Our Thai waitress recommened a couple of places to eat which we checked out on Trip Advisor and we ended up at Na's Kitchen, clientele of locals and backpackers but great food and extremely cheap! After that we strolled through the market stalls for an hour or so. Loads of young backpackers around, the odd one sporting bandages on elbows and knees where they have obviously injured themselves coming off scooters or the like, but they must have beenwearing crash helmets otherwise they would be in the head trauma ward. You see them hurtling by without crash helmets, stupid.
We caught the shuttle back to the hotel and ended up in the bar, we'd had an invite for free drinks as our travel agent has told everywhere we are staying it's our wedding anniversary - well April isn't that far off.
2025-02-14