waterfalls, cookery and motorbikes

while I would never dream of leaving y’all with just three words to sum up our 3 full days in Pai, if I had to, “waterfalls, cookery and motorbikes” would be a pretty good choice.

Sunday we started the day off with breakfast and coffee and gameplan-ing after we all finally got out of bed. We were anxious to spend a full day outside, after our bus ride the previous day, and knew there were waterfalls around pai – two of which are very popular destinations for visitors. We chose one because we figured, from reading our lonely planet, that round trip it would be about 18km. but we had all day, so we were confident that it would be a good experience.

We started down one road that according to Flynn would lead us to the waterfalls…however after about a mile or two a guy on a motorbike stopped us and asked if were heading to the falls. We responded that yes, we were going to the waterfalls. WELL, he informed us, we were heading in the entirely wrong direction. Apparently we should have taken another road out of town and there would be a sign for us to follow to the said falls…so we hung out heads and headed back into town. This hippie guy had suggested getting motorbikes, or hiring a taxi, but we were determined to get there by walking most of the way. Now, lonely planet also had said you could cut the trip by 5km by taking a bus headed to mae hong son and getting off at the turnoff for the waterfalls. Trying to explain this to the ticketing guy at the bus station was an adventure all in itself, but suffice it to say that we eventually got our point across that we only wanted to ride to the turnoff for the waterfalls.

Or we thought we did. He stopped the bus at a random side road and pointed out. This fully entertained the entire bus, locals who were intently watching our reactions. We crossed our fingers and started walking. About 2 hours later, we finally made it up to the falls, which we found out on our way back to town were 6km up the sideroad. It was all uphill after the first half-mile too. HOWEVER, we were very happy we did finally get to the waterfalls by our own volition and the way we’d wanted to explore a bit of the area. Funny story – the guy who’d told us to turn around passed us again and stopped, asking if we were the ‘5 lovely ladies’ he stopped before. And then he exclaimed, “you’re still walking!” as if we were crazy for thinking our legs could carry us all the way there.
And yesterday we did a little research and had we continued on the road we were on we would have reached the waterfalls. It probably would have just been a little longer…but at least we can read a map. We had gotten a bit nervous about that.

And at least we provided some entertainment for the locals along the way.

On the way back down the mountain, we found a restaurant that served Koa Soi, which had been recommended to Flynn by another friend who’d traveled in the region. It is AMAZING, and has quickly become one of our favorite dishes to look for on menus – more on that later though.

Suffice it to say Sunday night we passed out rather quickly, having walked more than 20km.

Monday was our cooking day. One of the things we’d wanted to do in Thailand was take a cooking class. They’re rather popular and can last 4 hours to all day. We had stopped by the Pai Cookery School on Saturday night to book for Monday, and when I’d asked Gaew how she was (the woman who runs the show, and teaches the class) she answered “hangover”. Mind you, this was at about 6pm. When we responded awkwardly her face broke into a huge smile and she said, “what? You ask me how I am. I am hangover”

touché, gaew, touché.

Needless to say, we were rather excited to see what we had in store with her for the afternoon. We showed up at 2, and she got us right to work, chopping vegetables and peeling garlic. However, the 5 of us (we were all by ourselves in class) are rather inquisitive and ask a lot of questions, and she was having none of it. She, apparently, was a bit ‘hangover’ again.

About 30 minutes into the class though, when we were starting to cook our pad thai (which is ALL over the country, ps, which I wasn’t expecting per the Q&A session prompted by my mom at our favorite local thai restaurant on what ‘authentic’ thai food really was) she all of a sudden launched into explaining everything and giving us orders while we were all at individual stations, resulting in laughs and misunderstandings.

After lunch of pad thai, we were taught how to make sticky rice with mango and we prepped stuff for dinner. When we made the reservations for class, we’d had the choice of three menus to learn, red, green and yellow (the color of the curry dish you’d learn, respectively). We’d decided that with five of us we’d try as many dishes as possible, so we were preparing all three curries.

For everyone that’s been around me the past few months, you’re aware of my aversion to very spicy foods and how I claim, and have been told, that I’m going to die in Bangladesh as a result. For the rest of y’all, well, now you know.
WELL, the girls I’m with all like a good amount of spice with their food and have decided to make it their mission to prepare my palet properly. And I think they get a kick out of making me try spicy foods and watching my reaction as I run for water. I lucked out with the green curry, which is the least spicy, but did eventually try all three.

The best part of the class, in my opinion was the trip to the market. Gaew has been running her school for 7 years, and teaches almost every day, so I’m sure the market stalls/vendors are used to her coming through, trailing white western tourists like little chickadees behind her. She had us try a lot of local dishes, so we feel way more comfortable eating street food now, knowing what more of it is. While we were at the market we ran into some of her alumni students from the previous week who were trying to recreate her class, so we got to see her set up their dinner in addition to ours, which was fabulous.

Upon our return to her open-air kitchen, we made a ridiculously large dinner of three dishes per person and attempted to eat as much as we could. Unfortunately we couldn’t eat two of flynn’s because the station she was at had salt instead of sugar in one of the containers…which did explain why gaew kept telling her to add sugar and water to make her dishes less salty and it had only succeeded in making it more so…but we had Gaew fix it and she happily added a few ingredients and about half a bottle of chili powder to get it to the right taste. A little on the spicy side for me…but I’m a bit biased.

We also talked about our adventure the day before finding the waterfalls, and walking there, and as a result learned the word for crazy in thai (as that was her response when we told her…haaa). Crazy is “bah” and a little crazy is “ting-tong”.

We were talking about our class later in the evening and while it was great to learn about the dishes, the most helpful part of the class was the actual cooking skills we picked up throughout the afternoon…such as cooking everything in a wok, just pushing things up the side when you don’t want them to be cooked, but will need them soon. It was also really cool to actually pound our chopped chilis, vegetables and spices into curry paste. Freakin’ fabulous, really.

We spent the night ‘walking the strip’ where all the restaurants and street stalls were. It was really interesting to see how much smaller the crowds were because it was a weeknight, versus when we arrived on the weekend. Someone had mentioned to us that Pai was a popular weekend destination for tourists, but it blows my mind because i very rarely know the date and time, let alone would plan trips based on week versus weekends.

And yesterday, oh yesterday. Flynn, Sarah and I left early to go rent motorbikes. We’ve decided that the equivalent vehicles in the US are probably Vespas because they’re smaller versions of motorcycles, but definitely legit vehicles that can carry up to three people (if one is small) and potentially transport street food stalls or wares to market.

To be honest, when we first arrived in Pai and saw the vast amount of motorbikes on the street, we scoffed and said we’d choose regular bikes over those any day, to get exercise while touring. By the time Tuesday came around, we could see why there was only one place to rent bicycles versus the countless places you could rent motorbikes.

And we decided to give in, especially when heather and I looked at each other one afternoon and said, “that would be really really cool to try out for a day”
We might also have been scarred by our 20km walk to the waterfalls as other tourists were buzzing by us, and usually passed us on their return ride while we were still walking up, on said motorbikes.

One thing we have taken issue with, and I insert this here just because I want to make sure to mention it because it’s a very good example of western culture differences from Thai culture (and many other countries, but at the moment I can only speak of Thailand), is that most locals won’t wear helmets. Fine, lots of bikers in the states won’t wear helmets either, although there are many more that do. However, the real surprise for us is watching parents, or families even, with at least one child on the motorbike with them, without helmets on the little ones. While we haven’t seen any accidents yet, other than our own (ha…read on…), it’s still scary how many young kids we’ve seen on bikes – none of them with helmets.

Off the soapbox. Onto our adventure.

So Flynn, sarah and I left heather and erin at the guesthouse saying we’d be back soon, and went and asked for 3 motorbikes for the day (which were 130baht per person with accident insurance…less than $5USD…love Thailand). They didn’t ask if we had licenses, but did ask if we’d ever driven motorbikes before. We responded with “no” to the chagrin of the girl we were talking with…5 minutes later, having taken our money and deposits for the helmets (optional, mind you)…our little friend motioned to three neon green bikes outside, and had the three of us hop on with three employees of AYA Travel Services. They took us to a backroad and gave us the 411 on the bikes…where the brakes, gas and kickstand were…and sent us down this road. I went off first, and my first attempt to turn the bike took me off-roading into a field; when I finally returned to the road I was about halfway down the road already. According to Flynn and sarah, the AYA employees were laughing hysterically at me, as they rightly should have been. I must have looked ridiculous.
However, Flynn and sarah followed and also had trouble turning at first, so I didn’t feel as bad.

Two runs down this road and they decided we were good enough to let us off on our own so they took us back to town, hopped off and wished us a good day.

Heather and erin were waiting for us when we finally got back, although they’d figured we’d gotten an impromptu lesson, and after a quick breakfast we headed towards the Ta Pai Hot Springs. Due to a rather expensive entrance fee, and our lack of desire to see said hot springs, we just continued driving around the backroads. We went and grabbed lunch to-go from mama falafel (there was a whole strip in Pai of Middle Eastern slash German slash greek slash thai restaurants. They even had schnitzel!) and headed towards another waterfall to picnic at it. We didn’t actually get to the waterfall by the time we needed to go back to drop heather off for an afternoon of deserved pampering (she got a body wrap of natural fruit, an oil massage and fabulous relaxation at a little family run spa-like oasis near the first waterfalls we went to…she came back feeling fabulous and looking refreshed. When I get to the state the rest of us were in by the end of the day, you’ll see how jealous we were). However, from that stop, we started out of town in search of yet another set of waterfalls. This set we found, and there was a sign from there that a few more were 5km further down the road.

One of things we’ve come across, especially in the more rural areas we’ve visited in Thailand, is that signs are more of an addition, an extra-special tip in the right direction, rather than a compulsory part of places tourists would be interested in. most seem to have been scrawled by a very nice thai person that had some exposure to English at one point. So we shouldn’t have been surprised when we’d traveled much further than 5km and still had found no entrance to another set of waterfalls. We did, however, “find Thailand”, in the sense we found the Thailand everyone is used to seeing in pictures and books and hearing about. As we were driving along dirt roads we would wind in and out of very small villages and right by rice paddies and agricultural plots that were in the process of being watered or harvested. When I mentioned this to Flynn and heather later they correctly pointed out that this isn’t the season for that and so these fields were probably being over worked which, in the long run, will hurt the land and the agricultural economy, but this is the way that people can make money to feed their families now so many people don’t feel like they have a choice.

These backroads were also where sarah, erin and I each took a spill. There was one particularly large hill, and since erin and I were riding together we’d been having a bit more trouble with large dirt hills than Flynn or sarah, that proved too daunting to make it up (and would eventually cause us to turn around to continue exploring other areas around pai). At one point erin fell while trying to get off the bike as I was trying to rev the engine to make it up a hill. A second attempt to get up left me on the ground under the bike (promise, mom, I walked away with the smallest cut on my finger and a bruise on my upper thigh). I really wish I’d been able to watch as the back of the bike took a course of its own and slid out from under me, causing the bike to slide across this dirt hill. It was just as it goes in movies. Erin ran over asking if I was ok and once she heard me laughing started laughing AT me. Punk. But it was absolutely hysterical.

Sarah fell in a similar fashion as she was heading down this dirt hill, after she and Flynn decided that it wasn’t worth trying to go further up. She, too, got back on the bike with only a few small scratches and a bruise. We will say, however, that those flippin’ bikes are way heavier than you expect when you have to pick them back up.

We headed back out to a place called “the canyon”. When we got there we realized that the key to my motorbike had fallen out at some point. We’d had trouble with it all day not fitting into the keyhole well, but I never imagined that it would be able to fall out without me noticing…hah. I stopped freaking out the minute we realized all the other keys could turn on the bike, and it could obviously run without a key in the ignition. Oh Thailand.

The canyon was a gorgeous spot, a kilometer walk from the road, that you could literally look out over all of Pai and the surrounding land. There were these ridges, much like fingers extending from a hand, that you could walk out on and get gorgeous views of the various valleys. The rest of the afternoon we just bummed around the various roads around Pai. It was totally worth it to see so much of the surrounding area, and I think all 5 of us thought at some point during the day that we wanted similar modes of transportation once we get back home.

For everyone that’s interested, as well, Sarah Robb can pull of the European, “I’ll wear my cute sunglasses and fashionable scarf and make riding this vespa look like the easiest thing ever” look very very well. She even went through the entire day while wearing a skirt!

After fighting with AYA that I shouldn’t have to pay 50baht for the lost key, considering it was their faulty key that fell out on the road somewhere and we’d paid insurance (which, they assured me, would have convered me completely if I’d come back with a key and no bike…sure), we picked up laundry we’d dropped off to be washed…contain yourselves…about $2USD per person and it had been washed, dried and folded…and headed out for dinner.

It had been such a spectacular day of seeing the area that we were all ridiculously excited to just talk about different things we’d all picked up on. And we did it all over the best khao soi in Pai. Thanks to Gaew, we knew where to get the best papaya salad, khao soi, falafels and drinks (her bar, obviously) in town, and she was right on with the khao soi. Flynn,, at this point, is now on the khao soi tour. Everyplace we go to we’ll get khao soi and compare it to everywhere else. We sampled a little bit of everything, as it was our last night in the food-lover’s, hippie-inhabited town of Pai, and by the end of the night I don’t think any of us could have squeezed anything else into our stomachs…and we’re still justifying our meals with our 20km walk the other day. Amazing.

Currently, as I write this, we’re on the bus from pai back to chiang mai, where we have to take a tuktuk to another bus station and catch an hour and a half bus to chiang dao, where we’ll be for the next three days. It’s said to be even more relaxed and off-the-beaten-path than Pai, so we’re excited to see what hikes we can find.