Chiang Mai & Pai

So this marks week one in Thailand, let's see if I can recollect the past couple of days. The big one would be this:

If anyone has a death wish, I strongly recommend getting on a scooter for the first time and hitting rush hour in a busy foreign city. Two broken fingers, one dislocated shoulder and some MAD road rash and here I am............


Psych OUT!

I did not crash fortunately but was forced to go around the same route about 4 times because I was too nervous to take the exit off of it. The lady asked me if I had ever used a motorbike or scooter, and with a big smile I said 'no way!' She just shook her head and said 'mai ben rai' (no worries) and I was on my way. Now there seems to be a certain method to the madness of thai streets, but I believe its only innately part of you if your thai. There are people weaving, dodging ducking, honking, passing, circumventing, eschewing and whatever else you can think of. My goal for the day was to get this temple on top of the mountain, and I eventually got there but not until about 3 hours of street searching. I believe my internal compass is either broken or non-existent. I'm that guy that needs to turn the map upside down to figure out if it's a left or right hand turn, how's that for not looking like a full on tourist.

Once I got on this road to the temple the only word that kept coming to my head was freedom. That bad-ass little honda topped out at about 60 clicks, but my god was I loving life. You just climbed higher and higher with the sun in your face (more on this in a second), the wind in your hair and the world getting smaller beneath you. I finally got to use the panorama feature on my camera, and I hope you will get to see it when I finally get some pictures up. Anyways, just because you're flying along and quite comfortably cool on the bike, does not mean that your arms aren't getting viciously burned. When I finally came back to the guesthouse and crashed down I had to adjust the AC to accommodate for how much I was heating up the room. Either way, the temple was beautiful but infested with tourists and gift shops the to the nines, so I bailed pretty quickly. I'm not opposed to tourists, obviously being one, but when suddenly the whole point of coming to this beautiful wat on a mountain is to buy a 4 mini buddha statue and smoothie...PEACE.

A little farther down the road there was a tribal village. Again the front was surrounded with toursit shops and the like, but when you got far back enough you came to this wide open space made of thatched little houses and giant swimming...pit I guess you would call it. No electricity or facebook, just little village with a swimming pit and a bunch of fun loving kids. Excellent!

At the bottom of the hill stood the famous Chiang Mai zoo. I was hot and sweaty and completely wiped out but I went in anyways. You've all been to a zoo so let me just list the animals and you can see the snaps later. Hippo, flamingo, panda (Ling Ping!), koala, ostrich, giraffe, elephant, tiger, panther, lion and a myriad of fish and birds. Top animal would have been the white bengal tiger, what a beautiful cat!

That night I went and got ripped off, again, for a pair of shorts, 600 bhat if that means anything to anybody. I met an english guy that said if I got taken one more time, he would personally send me back to Canada. So i must remain vigilant. There was a cool little bar right down the street from the guesthouse where I made friends with a score of different people, but found myself still there at 2am. What I quickly came to realize is that there is tourist nightlife, then thai nightlife. I'm riding shotgun, on the bike, with this lovely thai girl named Fon and we hit a giant club with fantastic music and drinks. There was little to no other white people there and as I was standing in the center with a big dumb grin on my face, this little fellow I met asked 'Jooos, how you doin?' I said 'the best' and I meant it.

I'm now in a little town called Pai in NE Thailand. Everyone seems to love wearing those things that are too long to be shorts and too short to be pants. Might have to pick me up a pair. The bus ride up was...wait for it...SHIT! Didn't see that coming did you? Picture the worst school bus you've ever been on, rip out the AC, turn the floor into wooden planks and make the seats smaller and that was the lap of luxury I was riding in. It's about 110km from Chiang mai to pai and it took us 4 hours 20 minutes to get here. But the keyword is 'here' and this place is fantastic. Bars, internet cafes, guesthouses, motorbikes... it's the stereotypical backpacking haunt. I somehow ended up a few kilometers out of town at lovely place called Mountain View. I'm sleeping in a wonderful bamboo hut with a hammock overlooking the town and a full rack of books, torch lit walkway and super friendly people. I feel like I'm on survivor only I can stay as long as I want.

Wow this was a long one, if you're still with me, thanks for reading, Bye bye!